Jadis’s Rampage in London

Jadis’s Rampage in London is the episode in which the Queen of Charn’s attempt to dominate the human world turns into a public confrontation. Her magic does not work as it did in Charn, but her extraordinary strength does: she throws Aunt Letty, commandeers a horse, and uses an iron lamp-post bar against the police. The episode exposes the difference between losing a particular power and losing the capacity to threaten others, while Digory’s effort to restrain her carries the conflict out of London and back into another world.

Arrival and Failed Magic

The rampage begins when Jadis appears in Aunt Letty’s doorway, an imposing stranger whose dress, bare arms, and flashing eyes make her presence impossible to mistake. She demands submission from Aunt Letty and threatens to blast her. Aunt Letty answers with a rebuke rather than obedience, treating Jadis’s strange words as inappropriate language. Jadis makes the same gesture and speaks the same terrible words with which she had destroyed the gates of the palace in Charn, but this time nothing happens. Aunt Letty takes the failure for evidence that the visitor is drunk and cannot speak clearly.

The failure is a decisive reversal. In her own world, Jadis’s destructive words had been real magic; in London, they produce no visible effect. She recognizes that the power will not work here, yet does not pause or surrender. Instead, she seizes Aunt Letty and throws her across the room. Her conduct establishes the threat that persists even after her magic fails: Jadis can still impose her will by physical force. She then orders Uncle Andrew to lead her away, and he follows under the pressure of her commanding look. Their departure sets the rampage in motion beyond the house.

Pursuit Through the Street

Jadis’s flight becomes a spectacle when she rides a hansom at speed toward the house, standing on its roof while driving the horse. The vehicle crashes into a lamp-post; she escapes the wreck by leaping onto the horse and continues on its back. The horse, already driven into a frenzy, becomes the means by which she carries the disturbance through the street. This reckless ride draws an expanding audience: a shopkeeper, policemen, cyclists, errand boys, and people on foot gather, while residents watch from windows and doorways.

The shopkeeper identifies Jadis as the woman who has taken goods worth hundreds and thousands of pounds from his shop. He points to the rope of pearls around her neck as his property and says she has given him a black eye. The crowd’s attention mixes accusation with amusement; some cheer and mock her claim to grandeur. That public ridicule marks a further reversal: Jadis expects the authority of a queen to command submission, but Londoners treat her as a spectacle and a criminal suspect. Her response is not to retreat. She changes the knife to her other hand, tears a crossbar from the lamp-post, and brandishes it as a weapon.

Digory’s Intervention

Digory enters the confrontation intending to stop Jadis. He darts between the horse and the railings and tries to reach her heel, but she strikes the chief policeman with the iron bar, knocking him down. As the crowd continues to jeer and a stone passes over Digory, Jadis threatens that she will punish the people once she has conquered their world and leave the city like Charn and the other places she names. Her language makes clear that the London violence is part of a larger ambition: she imagines conquest, not merely escape.

Digory catches her ankle, but Jadis kicks him in the mouth and breaks his hold. He tries again, is shaken off, and makes a third attempt while more men are struck by the bar. The action puts him in direct opposition to Jadis: he risks being hurt in order to interrupt her attack. On the third grab he holds on and calls to Polly to go. The effort does not end with Jadis subdued. Instead, it precipitates the group’s sudden departure from the street.

Return and Consequences

Digory and Polly emerge into the green sunshine of the wood, and their return is not solitary. The horse has come with them, as have Jadis, Uncle Andrew, and the Cabby. Their arrival carries the London conflict into a different world, changing the setting while preserving the consequences of Digory’s intervention: the pursuers and the pursued have all been swept away together.

The transition also changes the condition of the horse. In London it had been frantic under Jadis’s handling; in the wood it shakes its head, whinnies, and becomes quiet, its ears returning to their proper position and the fire going out of its eyes. Jadis, by contrast, turns pale and bends over the horse’s mane, visibly overcome by the change of world. The contrast confirms the episode’s governing pattern: London frustrates her destructive magic but cannot prevent her violence, while the return to the wood weakens her composure and begins a new stage of the story. Digory’s attempt to stop a rampage has not captured Jadis; it has transported the conflict and its participants elsewhere.