Cambridge

C.S. Lewis becomes a Fellow of Magdalene College when appointed Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University in 1954. For years, his friend J.R.R. Tolkien and others hope that Lewis will become a professor at Oxford. In the autumn of 1954, some of Lewis’s friends and admirers at Cambridge University hear that he is increasingly burdened by difficulties at Magdalen College, Oxford University. The time commitment that his tutorial work involves keeps him from writing. And the nature of the English faculty at Oxford is changing, which includes more modern authors in the reading curriculum.

Despite his important scholarly work, there is little hope that C.S. Lewis will ever gain a professorship at Oxford, perhaps because of disapproval among some of the faculty of his Christian apologetics. They dislike the idea of a professor of English literature gaining fame as an amateur theologian. The University of Cambridge is much less sceptical about Lewis’s religious popularity. As a result, his Cambridge friends at the English faculty there create the professorship of Medieval and Renaissance English in Cambridge especially for him. Lewis is initially reluctant to take the position, due to his attachment to Oxford and his financial inability to sell the Kilns, his Oxford home, in order to move to Cambridge. His Cambridge friends suggest that he will live in Cambridge during the working week and travel back to Oxford at weekends. Lewis agrees to this arrangement and on 29 November 1954, his fifty-sixth birthday, he delivers his inaugural address, entitled “De Descriptione Temporum”, which means: about describing the times.

On 1 January 1955, C.S. Lewis moves to his new quarters above the Parlour and Old Library of Magdalene College. These rooms are in the ‘North Range’ of First Court, the oldest part of the College (where you now enter the College from the street), on the second floor of Staircase 3. Lewis begins his duties as professor, which involves occasional lectures and no tutoring, leaving him much more time to write and read. He usually goes home to The Kilns in Oxford during weekends and holidays. To accommodate him, the regular Inklinks meetings on Tuesday mornings have been moved to Monday.

The Pepys Building, the most important ornament of the College, is named after the great diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) who gave his library to the College. On the evening of 23 February 1961, Lewis gives a lecture on Pepys’s birthday.

C.S. Lewis remains a professor in Cambridge until ill health forces him to resign his chair in August 1963. Shortly before he dies on 22 November 1963, he learns that the fellows of Magdalene College have elected him an Honorary Fellow.

The rooms C.S. Lewis occupied at Magdalene College are not open to the public today, but you can usually visit the small fifteenth-century chapel where Lewis attended services and preached his last sermon ‘A Slip of the Tongue’ at Evensong on 29 January 1956. A small plaque with Lewis’s name hangs at the top right of the chapel entrance.