Chartres (Preparatory School)

Chartres was the small preparatory school C. S. Lewis attended before entering Wyvern College, and it marked both an educational beginning and a religious rupture. He found his feet in Latin and English under a patient headmaster, made his first real friends, and encountered a school environment that differed sharply from his earlier experience. Yet during his years there he ceased to be a Christian, a change he later traced to several interacting influences rather than to a single event.

Setting and Education

In January 1911, just turned thirteen, Lewis set out with his brother for Wyvern: his brother would attend the College, while Lewis went to its preparatory school, which he calls Chartres. The school was a tall white building farther up the hill than the College, with fewer than twenty boarders. Lewis remembered it as the place where his education really began. Its headmaster, known to the boys as Tubbs, was clever and patient; Lewis made rapid progress in Latin and English and became a promising candidate for a scholarship at the College.

The school was well cared for and its food was good, though the boys grumbled about it. Lewis generally got on with his fellow pupils. Their small community nevertheless contained the shifting alliances familiar to school life: lifelong friendships, irreconcilable factions, quarrels, settlements, and revolutions. Chartres therefore appears in the memoir not as a simple idyll but as a compact social world in which Lewis experienced both belonging and conflict.

Friends, Belief, and Unbelief

Chartres gave Lewis his first real friends, while the nearby landscape and Wyvern itself helped end his quarrel with England. The school years also brought a more consequential change: he ceased to be a Christian. Lewis places the beginning of his stay before the loss of faith and says the process was complete very shortly after he left, though he cannot reconstruct its exact chronology. His account distinguishes conscious doubts from less deliberate pressures, and does not present the change as a single sudden decision.

One influence was the Matron, Miss C., whom Lewis describes as exceptionally caring and selfless. The boys loved her, and Lewis, who calls himself an orphan, felt particular affection for her. Miss C. was exploring Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism, and related occult traditions. She did not intend to undermine his faith; Lewis instead explains that her discussions first made him consider whether the visible world might conceal other realms and forms of existence. He had previously treated imagined worlds as inventions, not beliefs. The possibility of real marvels unsettled that distinction and revived older imaginative interests.

His experience of prayer also became a source of strain. He required each prayer to be accompanied by what he called a realization: a vivid imaginative and emotional response that he tried to produce by will. Because he could never be sure whether he had achieved it, the effort became exhausting and made bedtime something to dread. Looking back, Lewis identifies this self-imposed test as an unconscious reason for wanting to leave Christianity, not as a teaching imposed on him by the school.

Classical study supplied a more explicitly intellectual challenge. Reading Virgil, Lewis encountered pagan religious ideas presented by teachers and editors as false, while Christianity was treated as the exceptional true religion. He questioned why Christianity should be exempt from the general dismissal of religion. At the same time, he developed an intellectual pessimism about the universe and entertained what he later called an Argument from Undesign. These doubts and his fascination with occult possibilities did not form a coherent system; he says they operated in different moods but had the shared effect of weakening his Christian faith. He eventually abandoned it with relief.

The School in Retrospect

Lewis’s account connects Chartres to a longer history of belief rather than treating it as an isolated setting. At an earlier school, Belsen, he had become an effective believer after hearing Christian doctrine taught by people who appeared to believe it; he began to pray, read the Bible, and try to obey his conscience. Chartres reversed that course. The contrast makes clear that his religious development involved distinct stages: childhood belief, gradual apostasy, and, much later, a return to belief that first took the form of theism rather than Christianity.

The school’s influence was mixed in Lewis’s retrospective judgment. Miss C.’s affection helped awaken his capacity for attachment, something he considered valuable after earlier experiences had made him wary of emotion. He also acknowledged elements of genuine spirituality in her interests, even as he believed their principal effect on him had been damaging to his faith. When Miss C. and a much-loved under-master left around the middle of his stay, Lewis recalled a decline in the school’s solid good: the benefits of their presence faded, while its harmful effects remained. Chartres thus stands in the memoir as both a place of educational and personal growth and the setting for a formative loss of religious belief.