Campbell College

Campbell College was the Belfast boarding school C. S. Lewis attended after Oldie’s school closed in the summer of 1910. His stay lasted only part of a term, but the school became important in retrospect for the literary education he received there: reading Sohrab and Rustum first gave him a lasting experience of Matthew Arnold’s poetry and later shaped his approach to Homer and the connections between works of literature.

Establishment and Arrival

When Oldie’s school closed, Lewis’s father arranged a new education for him at Campbell College, about a mile from the New House. Founded to provide Ulster boys with the advantages of an English public-school education without requiring them to cross the Irish Sea, the school appeared to the young Lewis an exciting alternative. A clever cousin, the son of Uncle Joe, was already doing well there; Lewis was to board, with permission to come home each Sunday. He believed that an Irish school could not be as bad as the English schools he had known, and went to Campbell delighted by the prospect.

Lewis was careful not to offer a full assessment of the school because he attended it for such a short time. He nevertheless remembered it as markedly unlike an English public school. Prefects existed but wielded little importance, while the nominal houses were largely legal fictions outside games, which were not compulsory. The boys came from a more socially mixed population than Lewis associated with English schools, including farmers’ sons. The boy he came closest to befriending was a tradesman’s son who had recently worked on his father’s delivery rounds, keeping the books for an illiterate driver. Lewis envied this former work; the boy, by contrast, remembered the rounds and the tea and sausages waiting at home as a golden age.

A School Without a Settled Home

Lewis later thought Campbell resembled the great English schools before Arnold. It had real fights, sometimes with seconds, betting, and a hundred or more spectators, as well as bullying. But he encountered no rigid school hierarchy: a boy’s position depended on what he could win through his fists and mother wit. The bullying, in his account, was direct rather than authorized through a prefectorial system. Gangs of eight or ten boys searched the long corridors for victims, and two boys he knew were captured and flogged by attackers who did not even know them personally.

The school’s more pervasive discomfort was that most boys had no place of their own. Only a few senior pupils had studies; outside meals and evening preparation in the large preparation room, the rest belonged nowhere. Lewis remembered the boys’ movement through the school as a shifting crowd, gathering and dispersing like a tide. Bare brick passages carried the constant tramp of feet, catcalls, scrimmages, and laughter. Pupils were always moving on or hanging about—in lavatories, storerooms, or the great hall—so that life there felt like permanent residence in a large railway station.

The Literary Education

The most important event of Lewis’s time at Campbell was not its social life but a lesson in which he read Sohrab and Rustum in form under a master known as Octie. He loved the poem immediately and continued to love it. Its fog rising from the Oxus, its distance and calm, and its grave melancholy mattered to him before he understood the central tragedy. He was drawn instead to particular images and scenes: the artist in Pekin, the cypress in the queen’s garden, Rustum’s youth recalled in a backward glance, the pedlars from Khabul, and the silent Chorasmian waste. Arnold’s poem taught him a mode of passionate attention directed toward things far away.

That first encounter also reversed the usual account of how classical influence works. Lewis had not read Homer when he met Arnold’s poem; years later, he enjoyed the Iliad partly because it recalled Sohrab and Rustum. The connection thus ran from Arnold to Homer in his experience, rather than from Homer to Arnold through the recognition of classical echoes. For Lewis, a reader did not need to enter European poetry at a prescribed starting point: attentiveness to one work could eventually lead to another. Campbell’s literary significance lies in this remembered sequence of reading, not in a formal curriculum alone.

Departure and Retrospective Significance

About halfway through his first and only term, Lewis fell ill and was taken home. His father had also become dissatisfied with Campbell and was attracted by a preparatory school in Wyvern, where Lewis and his brother could continue travelling together. Lewis spent six weeks at home before the Christmas holidays and the next move. Campbell was therefore a brief stop between schools, but one whose literary consequence outlasted its short duration.

In his later reflection, Lewis distinguished the enduring importance of reading Sohrab and Rustum from the experience of Joy that returned to him years afterward through Wagner and an illustration in a schoolroom periodical. Campbell’s Arnold did not restore that lost longing; its importance was instead to disclose how one literary encounter could prepare the way for another. The school’s remembered meaning rests in that distinction: a short, socially unsettled boarding-school term became a durable point of entry into the interconnected world of poetry.