WHEATON COLLEGE, Illinois, was founded in 1860 out on the Midwestern prairies. Its first president, Jonathan Blanchard, was a Congregational minister and a fiery abolitionist. Blanchard insisted from the very beginning that the college would be open to women as well as men, and to people of all races. Adeline Collins graduated in 1862; and — only a year after the Civil War was over — an African American student, Edward B. Sellers, earned a Wheaton Bachelor’s degree.
Illinois is no longer the prairie state in quite the way it once was, but, to this day, just a mile and a half north-west of the college is the Lincoln Marsh. And on the north-western corner of the campus stands the Wade Center, an archive dedicated to seven British authors: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, G. K. Chesterton, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Its stone building is in the Tudor style — complete with a chimney — and is surrounded by English gardens. On the path to the front door there is a Narnian lamp-post, its flame ever burning.
THE research room — with its fireplace and, typically, a handful of scholars gingerly turning manuscript pages — is the true heart of the Wade Center. En route to it, however, is a one-room museum, stuffed with startling objects: the desk on which Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; Sayers’s address book and stylish, cat-eye glasses; and much more.
Against the south wall stands a wardrobe. It dates from the mid-17th century and was hand-carved in oak. Even its nails and hinges were handmade. The decorative carvings are geometric patterns of flowers and foliage. It stands 81 inches (206cm) tall. Its width, however, might depend on who enters it, and when. . .
For this is not just any piece of antique furniture. This is the very wardrobe that was in C. S. Lewis’s childhood home in Belfast. Those close to Lewis called him Jack. His brother, Warren (known as Warnie), recalled that when they were children the two of them would go “in the wardrobe while Jack told us his tales of adventure”. In 1930, the brothers bought the Kilns, a house in Oxford, where both of them lived for the rest of their lives. The wardrobe came with them.
SO, HOW and why did it end up in the American Midwest? The central figure in that story is Clyde S. Kilby, a professor of literature from Tennessee who joined the Wheaton faculty in 1935. Already, during the Second World War, he had become an enthusiastic admirer of Lewis’s writings. Kilby and Lewis struck up an ongoing, friendly correspondence, and the Wheaton professor even once met Lewis in Oxford.
Lewis found Kilby’s views — not least on literary and religious subjects — to be generally congenial, although he was also occasionally disconcerted by being treated as a “great man”. When Kilby suggested that he would like to edit an anthology of some of Lewis’s works, the Oxford don squashed the idea with the firm retort that it would be “rather ridiculous” to anthologise a “living writer”. Nevertheless, Lewis took note that there was an intense and perceptive appreciation of his writings among these American conservative Protestants.
AS EARLY as June 1962, Warnie stepped in to write to Kilby, explaining that his brother was too ill to reply to “your kind letter”. The last letter that Lewis himself wrote to Kilby was dated 20 November 1962; he died of kidney failure almost exactly one year later, on 22 November 1963. In his will, Lewis made it clear that he envisaged his brother continuing to live at the Kilns, surrounded by all the objects that the two of them had accumulated, including “all my books furniture and manuscripts”, whether in their home or in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College.
In 1965, Kilby determined that Wheaton College would create a dedicated “C. S. Lewis Collection”. As a starting point, he donated the letters that he had received from Lewis. Kilby had a gift for friendship. He struck up relationships with other members of the Inklings as well, and even arranged for Owen Barfield to come to Wheaton to speak.
Kilby’s relationship with Tolkien became so strong that the American professor spent the summer of 1966 with the author of The Lord of the Rings, working with him as a sort of editorial assistant on the manuscript that became The Silmarillion. Given that several of them were fantasy authors, maybe it is pardonably fanciful to think of Kilby as a kind of corresponding member of the Inklings.
WARNIE died on 9 April 1973, and this was the moment when Kilby’s enthusiasm and vision really bore fruit. Warnie had believed in the C. S. Lewis Collection. In his will, he stipulated: “I give to Wheaton College Illinoise [sic] U.S.A. all letters manuscripts etc of the late Professor C. S. Lewis which may be found in my effects.”
That was a sizeable manuscript donation. Kilby also persuaded others who had received letters from Lewis to donate them. Wheaton’s Wade Center (the home of what Kilby originally called the C. S. Lewis Collection) is the archive with by far the most original Lewis letters and manuscripts.
TO COMPLETE this story, yet one more link in this elven-forged chain is still required. Warnie knew, and had freely remarked to others, that the hand-carved, oaken wardrobe from their Belfast childhood which they had brought with them to the Kilns was the very piece of furniture which had helped to inspire his brother to write his fantasy novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).
Still, one suspects that Warnie judged that thinking of objects associated with his brother as museum pieces would likewise be “rather ridiculous”. His will stipulated that the household furniture was to be sold to pay his debts and funeral expenses. It was all auctioned off in the regular way, intended just for ordinary people looking to furnish their homes.
Kilby, however, could see that the wardrobe had a significance beyond merely household furnishings. He learned that Robert Bartel, a Wheaton class-of-1953 graduate, would be in England, and Kilby convinced him to go to the auction and buy the wardrobe on behalf of the college. It was a cash-only event, and a nervous Bartel arrived at his first-ever auction with a wad of British pound notes in his pocket. He successfully made the purchase, and the wardrobe was duly shipped off to the prairie state.
TODAY, a common sight at the Wade Center is for a class of elementary school children to file in, and for each boy and girl to examine the wardrobe in turn, one by one. Visitors are even allowed to open its doors. Inside, they find two vintage cloth coats and seven fur ones.
As it is a well-known fact that one returns to our world at the exact same time as one left, however, there is no easy way to discover how many of them also find a Narnian adventure.
Timothy Larsen teaches at Wheaton College. His most recent book is The Fires of Moloch: Anglican clergymen in the furnace of World War One (Oxford University Press, 2025).
