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In my freshman year at Wheaton College, back in the early seventies, the Wade Collection in Blanchard Hall acquired some new closet space—a wardrobe, to be exact. This wasn't a wardrobe that anyone actually used.
It was just to look at, or perhaps to admire, or maybe even to worship. One student editorial in the campus paper suggested we cut slivers from the back of it and sell them as relics.
For this, of course, was not just any wardrobe, but one that had once belonged to C. S. Lewis, the unofficial patron saint of Wheaton College. And a beautiful piece of dark oak furniture it was—painstakingly handmade and elaborately handcarved by C. S. Lewis's grandfather and brought by Lewis from his boyhood home in Belfast to the Kilns, the house he shared with his brother, Warren, outside Oxford. The college bought it at auction just after Warren died.
Other items of Lewis furniture from the Kilns were purchased by the college as well, including the obvious choice of a desk. But the wardrobe was particularly important because of its role in the first of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The wardrobe in the story is the threshold to fantasy; in the Wade Collection, it became a tangible symbol of Lewis's powers as a writer, a sacrament of the literary imagination. It was the closest thing we had to Narnia.
The problem with literary relics, however, is that some Chaucerian Pardoner will always claim to have better ones. When I began teaching in the late eighties at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, I was surprised to see a somewhat plain but rather old wardrobe in the English Department across from our secretary's desk and not far from an equally old fireplace. On top of it lay a huge stuffed lion, which should have been my clue. This was the wardrobe, I was told. The wardrobe. (Surprising, isn't it, how definite that definite article sometimes becomes?) It had been obtained from the Kilns in 1975.
"But I thought the wardrobe was at Wheaton," I told my new colleagues.
"No way," they told me. "Wheaton's wardrobe is not even close to the one described in the novel."
Then I was duly chaptered and versed by references to the sacred text. What the Pevensie children find in the empty room of the old professor's country house is "one big wardrobe, the sort that has a looking glass in the door." I had to admit that the wardrobe before me was larger than the one I remembered from my undergraduate days, and that its door was indeed covered with a looking glass. Once Lucy is left behind in the room, "she thought it would be worth while trying the door of the wardrobe, even though she felt almost sure that it would be locked." And sure enough, the Westmont wardrobe had a keyhole—unlike the Wheaton wardrobe, my colleagues assured me.
Once inside the unlocked wardrobe, Lucy finds "a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one." This second row of coats is hanging on "hooks" or "pegs," and my colleagues opened the looking-glass door to point these out to me, hidden behind a first row of fur coats on hangers. The Wheaton wardrobe, I was told, was sadly lacking any such hooks (or were they pegs?).
With the door thrown open, I was shown how easily Lucy could have "stepped into the wardrobe"—the threshold was just a foot off the floor. The Wheaton wardrobe, I was reminded, was more like a high-waisted cabinet. Lucy could only have climbed into it at best. Finally, my colleagues reminded me that the wardrobe in question had to be "a perfectly ordinary wardrobe," just like the one in the book. Did our wardrobe have any decorative carving? It did not. Wheaton had an ornate family heirloom, but it did not have the real thing.
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