A. K. Hamilton Jenkin

A. K. Hamilton Jenkin was C. S. Lewis’s first lifelong friend at Oxford and an important influence on how Lewis learned to attend to the world. Continuing an education in seeing, listening, and smelling that Arthur had begun, Jenkin showed Lewis how to receive not only the familiar and pleasant but also ugliness and discomfort. His distinctive lesson was a total surrender to the atmosphere of the present moment: seek the grim grandeur of a squalid town, the dripping depths of a dismal wood, or the most exposed ridge on a windy day. In Lewis’s account, this practice was neither ironic nor merely aesthetic; it was a serious, even gleeful way of rejoicing in each thing for being what it was.

Identity and Introduction

Lewis introduces Jenkin among the friends he made after returning to Oxford, where he arrived demobilized in January 1919. He identifies him as the first friend of his Oxford years and notes that Jenkin later became known for books on Cornwall. The brief biographical description is subordinate to the role Lewis gives him: Jenkin carried forward an education that had begun in friendship with Arthur, but widened its reach.

A Training in Attention

Arthur had taught Lewis to prefer the Homely; Jenkin, by contrast, seemed able to enjoy everything, ugliness included. The difference was not that Jenkin dismissed distinctions between places or conditions, but that he entered into each one on its own terms. In a squalid town, he would look for the places where squalor became grim and almost grand; on a dismal day, he would seek the most dismal, dripping wood; when the wind blew, he would make for the windiest ridge. His attention did not soften the unpleasant into something conventionally charming. It took the quality of the thing seriously.

Lewis describes this practice as a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was present. Jenkin’s manner joined seriousness to delight: there was no “Betjemannic irony,” only a gleeful determination to meet each scene without evasion and rejoice in its particular being. The examples make his teaching practical rather than abstract. Instead of comparing a place with a more attractive alternative, or waiting for better weather, one should seek the fullest expression of the conditions actually encountered.

Relationship with Lewis and Lasting Influence

Jenkin’s friendship followed Arthur’s in Lewis’s life, but their influence differed. Arthur had been the friend who revealed a shared world of secret delights; Jenkin enlarged Lewis’s way of receiving the world beyond those preferences. The narrative presents Jenkin not as a rival to Arthur’s influence but as its continuation and correction: Homeliness remained a valuable inheritance, while Jenkin demonstrated that attention could encompass even ugliness.

This lesson anticipates Lewis’s later formulation that surrender is the first step toward the fruition of natural beauty. His account of the contrasting landscapes of County Down and Surrey likewise resists the impulse to rank one place against another: each should be received for what is there, not measured against what might have been elsewhere. In this pattern of thought, Jenkin’s influence lies in a change of attention rather than a single dramatic episode. He helped Lewis learn to inhabit the given moment, including its discomforts, and to find its full character without irony or evasion.