University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a central educational and intellectual setting in the memoir, but Lewis first encounters it not as an assured home of scholarship: in 1916 he arrives for an examination with little luggage, misreads the route from the station, and faces a future he expects may soon be interrupted by military service. Elected to University College despite believing he had performed poorly, he comes into residence in 1917 chiefly to enter officer training. His return after demobilization in 1919 opens a more enduring Oxford life, in which friendship and argument help dismantle assumptions he had carried into the university.

The Scholarship Examination and Admission

In the late winter term of 1916, Lewis travelled to Oxford to sit for a scholarship examination. He knew the stakes: he saw few occupations for which he was suited beyond becoming a don, and he understood that success in a competitive examination could shape his prospects. Yet the prospect of entering the army the following year blunted his anxiety about postwar employment. When he tried to explain this perspective to his father, the conversation failed. His father answered with advice about concentration and the cost of his education, while Lewis was thinking about the possibility that he might not survive the war. The exchange exposed a persistent difficulty between them: his father wanted his confidence but struggled to make room for a view of life different from his own.

The journey itself began with an unguided walk from the railway station. Carrying only what he could hold in one hand, Lewis set out in search of inexpensive lodging, expecting the celebrated Oxford of “dreaming spires” and “last enchantments.” The shops he passed seemed increasingly unlikely to lead to the university town. Only after reaching open country did he realize that he had left the station on the wrong side and walked into Botley. He returned on foot, hired a hansom, and found comfortable rooms for the week. In retrospect, he recognized the detour as an allegory of his life, though at the time it was simply an inconvenient first encounter with the city.

Snow fell as the examination approached. Candidates wrote in the Hall of Oriel wearing greatcoats, mufflers, and at least one glove. Lewis remembered little of the papers and thought he had done badly in the classics, but believed that general knowledge and dialectics may have helped him. An essay based on Johnson’s writing let him place a quotation in its broader context through his reading of Boswell; he did not assume that this knowledge would distinguish him. Hearing another candidate mention Rousseau’s Social Contract unsettled him because he knew Rousseau’s Confessions but not that work. A brief exchange with a Harrovian over whether a name was Sam or Ben likewise showed how readily he offered what he knew without calculating whether it might matter.

Lewis returned home convinced he had probably failed. His father responded with consolation rather than talk of expenses or educational difficulties, an unexpected tenderness that Lewis associated with his father’s ability to understand a child’s disappointment more readily than the prospect of death. Almost on Christmas Eve, word arrived that University College had elected him. The admission confirmed a possible future as a scholar even as war continued to make that future uncertain.

A Wartime University in Residence

Election to University College did not complete Lewis’s entry into the university. He still had to pass Responsions, an elementary mathematics examination, and returned after Christmas for a final term with Kirk. At Easter he failed the mathematics paper. Advice to be more careful did not solve the problem: he found that greater anxiety led to more mistakes, a pattern he compared to the clerical errors he made when carefully copying his writing.

Lewis came into residence in Trinity Term 1917, but his immediate purpose was to join the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps as a route into the army. He studied algebra with Mr. Campbell of Hertford while still facing the mathematics requirement. He never passed Responsions, though he could not remember whether he sat the examination again. After the war, a decree exempting former servicemen made the question irrelevant; without that change, he thought, he might have had to abandon the idea of attending Oxford.

His first Oxford term was brief and unlike ordinary undergraduate life. Less than a term after coming into residence, he enlisted. Half of the College had been converted into a hospital under the Royal Army Medical Corps, leaving a small group of undergraduates in the remaining rooms. Lewis described a community of about eight: two students not yet old enough for military service, two deemed unfit, a Sinn Féin supporter who would not fight for England, and several others whose circumstances he never fully understood. They ate in a small lecture room that later became a passage between the Common Room and Hall. The group included E. V. Gordon, later Professor of English at Manchester, Cambridge philosopher A. C. Ewing, and Theobald Butler, who could turn lurid limericks into Greek verse. Lewis enjoyed the company, but recalled the term as unsettled, excited, and generally unproductive. Military service followed, yet his posting to a Cadet Battalion billeted at Keble kept him in Oxford rather than taking him away from the city.

The School System Lewis Left Behind

The memoir’s account of Oxford is sharpened by a contrast with the school hierarchy Lewis had experienced before entering university. At the Coll, the athletic and social elite known as Bloods were also nearly all prefects. Unlike a system in which an informal aristocracy faced a separate official ruling class, the school united prestige and formal authority in one group. Its members enjoyed special liberties, clothing, priorities, and dignities, while younger boys were too weak to revolt and aspiring older boys hoped to enter the privileged circle themselves. Courting existing Bloods offered a more attractive path than risking a rebellion that might destroy the very status they wanted. Lewis therefore described the school’s constitution as effectively unbreakable.

The same social incentives shaped the school’s compulsory games. Some boys wanted to avoid playing, but clubs were backed by Bloods and most masters, and any lukewarmness toward sport was treated as a serious failing. At cricket matches, junior Bloods watched spectators for insufficient applause. For boys hoping to rise, games were less recreation than an audition for notice and advancement; failure to progress could mean falling behind. Lewis’s comparison between this closed school society and his later university experience is not a claim that Oxford reproduces the school system. Rather, his reflections on both settings show his continuing attention to how authority, ambition, and shared conventions shape an institution’s daily life.

Return to Oxford and Intellectual Change

After demobilization, Lewis returned to Oxford in January 1919. He cautioned that an important personal episode would be left out of his account, saying only that his earlier hostility to emotion had been fully and variously avenged; he also doubted that the omitted story bore closely on the book’s subject. His return therefore marks both a renewed university life and an acknowledged boundary in the memoir’s narrative.

Oxford became a setting for the friendships through which Lewis’s perception and thinking changed. A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, his first lifelong Oxford friend, continued an education in attentive experience that Arthur had begun. Jenkin’s approach was to give himself to the atmosphere of the moment, even when it was ugly or dismal, and to find in a place’s particular character something worth encountering directly. Lewis described this as a way of attending to what a thing was rather than demanding that it be attractive.

His friendship with Owen Barfield brought a different kind of education: sustained disagreement. Barfield’s conversion to Anthroposophy began what Lewis called the Great War between them, an extended disputation by letter and in person that lasted for years without becoming a quarrel. Barfield did not make Lewis an Anthroposophist, but his arguments permanently changed two parts of Lewis’s outlook. First, they challenged chronological snobbery: the assumption that an idea is discredited merely because it belongs to the past. Lewis came to ask whether an old belief had actually been refuted or had simply faded like a fashion, and to recognize that his own age, too, had characteristic assumptions that might be illusions.

Second, Barfield persuaded Lewis that the realism they had shared could not comfortably support the claims they made for thought, morality, and aesthetic judgment. They treated the sensory universe as fundamental reality while also holding that logical thought could reach indisputable truth and that moral and aesthetic judgments possessed value beyond personal feeling. If thought were only a subjective event, Lewis reasoned, those claims would have to be abandoned; a strictly sensory account would point instead toward behaviorist explanations of logic, ethics, and aesthetics, which he found impossible to believe. He therefore gave up realism. Though he had valued the idea of a nature independent of human observation, he concluded that mind could not be merely a late-arriving by-product of matter and that the universe must ultimately be mental, with human logic participating in a cosmic Logos.

Oxford in the Memoir’s Intellectual and Religious Arc

The university’s significance extends beyond classrooms and formal examinations. It is the site where Lewis’s initial practical ambition, to enter an academic profession, gives way to experiences that test the philosophical outlook with which he arrived. His earlier doubts had been fed by classical study, which presented pagan religious ideas as false without explaining how Christianity might fulfill or be anticipated by them. He had also combined an argument from the world’s apparent lack of design with occult interests, although he recognized that these ideas did not form a coherent system; they shared their opposition to Christianity. In time, he left his faith with relief rather than a sense of loss.

Oxford-era reading and conversation reopened questions that this earlier dismissal had closed. Lewis encountered Yeats’s serious belief in magic and then Maeterlinck’s engagement with Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism. These writers did not convert him, but they introduced the unsettling possibility that materialism did not exhaust reality. Barfield’s arguments further made him reconsider how an age inherits and defends its assumptions. The change was not an immediate return to Christianity: Lewis later described himself and Dom Bede Griffiths as believers in God who were willing to learn about Him from pagan or Christian sources, while still asking where religion had reached maturity.

This gradual reconsideration also altered how Lewis understood the relation between pagan religion and Christianity. Instead of treating one religion as simply true among a thousand false ones, he began to ask whether pagan traditions were an incomplete preparation or prophetic anticipation of a fuller revelation. His intellectual account placed Christianity and Hinduism among the possible answers, then judged Hinduism inadequate on grounds that combined its apparent separation of philosophical and popular religious life with Christianity’s historical claim. University life thus belongs to a larger movement in the memoir: from inherited school and intellectual certainties, through argument and uncertainty, toward a transformed account of reality and religious truth. The Oxford chapters matter not as a single conversion scene but as the setting for encounters that changed what Lewis considered possible to know and believe.