Leatherhead

Leatherhead, a destination of C. S. Lewis’s weekly walks, became the setting for a formative encounter with George MacDonald’s Phantastes. At its station, a book chosen almost casually opened a new understanding of the imaginative world Lewis had long loved: the story’s distinctive quality was holiness, and its light could reach beyond its woods and cottages into the reader’s own life. The episode marks a change in how he understood Joy, not yet a conversion to Christianity but a recognition that imagination and spiritual reality need not compete.

A Regular Destination

Lewis walked to Leatherhead about once a week. In summer, one attraction was its tiny swimming bath, a modest pleasure for someone who had learned to swim very young and remained passionately fond of being in water until middle age and rheumatism intervened. In winter, he went there to look for books and have his hair cut. The place belonged to ordinary routine before it became the setting of an extraordinary reading experience.

The Station and the Book

On an October evening, Lewis and one porter were alone on Leatherhead’s long, timbered platform. Dusk revealed the engine smoke glowing red from the furnace beneath, while the hills beyond the Dorking Valley appeared almost violet and the frost-green sky and cold air sharpened the scene. With a weekend of reading ahead, Lewis chose a dirty-jacketed Everyman edition of Phantastes, identified at the bookstall as a faerie Romance by George MacDonald. As the train arrived, the porter called the villages on the route—Bookham, Effingham, Horsley—and Lewis began the book that evening.

Reading Across a Threshold

The woodland journeys, ghostly enemies, and good and evil ladies in Phantastes resembled Lewis’s familiar imaginative material. He recognized in it what had already charmed him in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats; yet the resemblance concealed a decisive difference. The new quality he later named as a bright shadow was holiness. The old imaginative attractions remained, but they were no longer merely objects of delight or avenues toward an imagined elsewhere.

The change did not come from mistaking the tale for reality. Lewis stresses that he did not need to leave its woods and cottages in search of a separate, bodiless light, or suppose that reaching the places Anodos visited would bring him nearer to his desire. Instead, the light became inseparable from the story while remaining distinguishable from its fictional scenes. As the reading gathered force, it seemed to shine first on the woods and cottages, then on Lewis’s past, the room where he sat, and his old teacher nodding over a little Tacitus. The fictional landscape thus became a means of seeing the actual world differently.

Significance in Lewis’s Religious Development

The Leatherhead reading altered the terms of Lewis’s search for Joy. He had previously risked confusing Joy with magical or erotic attractions, or with the imagined places and experiences that seemed to promise its fulfillment. Phantastes disarmed those confusions: the tale’s holiness did not suggest that its fictional scenes were real, nor that possessing their reality would satisfy his desire. Yet the light was not detached from the story either. The experience allowed imaginative pleasure and spiritual significance to remain together without being confused.

This recognition belongs to a sequence of religious changes rather than a single conversion. Lewis had earlier become an effective believer at Oldie’s school through hearing Christian doctrines taught by people who believed them; he later became an apostate, relinquishing faith with relief. The Leatherhead episode helped him understand that Joy did not point toward occult or magical experience, but it did not itself make him Christian. In 1929, in Magdalen, he surrendered to God as a theist, explicitly distinguishing that step from belief in Christianity. He subsequently reasoned toward Christianity through the Gospels’ distinctive relation to myth and history, before accepting the Incarnation. Leatherhead’s importance lies in the earlier imaginative recognition that a story could bear holiness into ordinary experience without becoming a substitute for reality.