Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

Summary

Surprised by Joy is C. S. Lewis's account of his life from early childhood to his acceptance of Christianity in 1931. Lewis says in his preface that the book is not a full autobiography but the story of his conversion, and that it follows one thread: his experience of what he calls Joy, a sudden, piercing longing for something unnamed that is itself more desirable than any ordinary satisfaction. In fifteen chapters he begins in Belfast, with a book-filled house called Little Lea, rainy days, an older brother Warren who became his closest companion, and three early stabs of Joy: a toy garden his brother made in a biscuit-tin lid, Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin with its sense of autumn, and lines from Longfellow announcing the death of Balder. His mother's death from cancer in 1908 ends the security of his childhood, and he is sent to a school in Hertfordshire run by a brutal headmaster he calls Oldie, which he names Belsen. At a preparatory school in Malvern, which he calls Chartres, he loses his childhood faith, partly under the influence of a kindly matron interested in the occult. A glimpse of Arthur Rackham's illustrations to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods awakens a love of what he calls Northernness, which he shares with his Belfast friend Arthur Greeves. He describes Malvern College, called Wyvern, with its system of senior boys, or Bloods, and junior servants, with unusual frankness. Rescued by his father, he studies with the retired headmaster W. T. Kirkpatrick, the Great Knock, at Great Bookham in Surrey, who teaches him to argue rigorously and to read Homer in Greek, while he remains a confident atheist; there he buys George MacDonald's Phantastes at a railway station and later says it baptized his imagination. He goes up to Oxford in 1917, serves in the trenches of France with the Somerset Light Infantry, falls ill with trench fever and is wounded in April 1918. Back at Oxford, friendships with Owen Barfield and others, the reading of Chesterton and the force of his own philosophical reasoning steadily close off his escape routes. In the Trinity Term of 1929, in his rooms at Magdalen, he admits that God is God and prays; about two years later, on a ride to Whipsnade Zoo, he finds that he believes Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Joy, he concludes, was a signpost, not the destination. The book was published in London by Geoffrey Bles in 1955 and in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1956.

Plot or Argument

• Chapter I: The First Years

  Lewis's parents and their families, the house at Belfast, his brother Warren, the first experiences of Joy, and his mother's illness and death in 1908.

• Chapters II-III: Oldie's school and Belfast

  The harsh boarding school in Hertfordshire under the headmaster called Oldie, and a short interlude at Campbell College in Belfast.

• Chapters IV-V: Chartres, lost faith and Northernness

  At a Malvern preparatory school he gives up his faith; then a sudden glimpse of Wagner's Siegfried and Rackham's pictures revives Joy as a love of Norse myth, shared with Arthur Greeves.

• Chapters VI-VIII: Wyvern

  Lewis's unhappy years at Malvern College, the social world of Bloods and fags, his growing atheism and pessimism, and his release when his father removes him.

• Chapters IX-X: The Great Knock

  Tutoring under W. T. Kirkpatrick at Great Bookham, the discipline of logic and languages, the friendship with Arthur deepening, and the discovery of George MacDonald's Phantastes.

• Chapters XI-XII: Check, and war

  Lewis feels the first checks to his worldview, goes to Oxford in 1917, and serves in France, where he reads Chesterton in hospital and is wounded in the spring of 1918.

• Chapter XIII: The New Look

  Back in Oxford he adopts a sober, modern philosophy, argues with Owen Barfield in what he calls the Great War, and comes to doubt the value he had placed on his experiences of Joy.

• Chapter XIV: Checkmate

  Philosophical idealism, friends who believe, and the reading of Chesterton's The Everlasting Man press him until in 1929 he kneels and admits that God is God.

• Chapter XV: The Beginning

  His slow passage from theism to belief in Christ, ending on the ride to Whipsnade Zoo in 1931, and a closing reflection that Joy was a pointer to something beyond itself.

Characters

• C. S. Lewis, author and narrator

  Oxford scholar recalling his path from a lost childhood faith through atheism to Christianity.

• Warren Lewis, brother

  Lewis's elder brother and lifelong companion, maker of the toy garden.

• Albert Lewis, father

  Belfast solicitor, affectionate but hard for his sons to understand.

• Flora Lewis, mother

  Lewis's mother, whose death in 1908 ends his childhood security.

• Oldie, headmaster

  Lewis's name for the cruel headmaster of his first English school.

• Arthur Greeves, friend

  Belfast neighbor who shares Lewis's love of Northernness; his first true friend.

• W. T. Kirkpatrick, tutor

  The Great Knock, a rigorous logician who teaches Lewis to reason and read Greek.

• Owen Barfield, friend

  Oxford friend whose disagreements with Lewis sharpen his thinking.

• J. R. R. Tolkien, colleague

  Oxford philologist and Catholic who becomes Lewis's friend.

Lessons

• Longing as a signpost

  Lewis's Joy is a desire that no earthly object satisfies: the toy garden, Squirrel Nutkin's autumn, the Norse North. He spent years mistaking the feeling itself, or its images, for what it pointed to. His conclusion is that such longing is a signpost toward God, valuable for where it directs us rather than in itself.

  • What are the first three experiences of Joy Lewis describes in Chapter I?
  • Why does Lewis say that Joy is different from both happiness and pleasure?
  • Have you ever wanted something that you could not name? What did you think it was?

• Honest thinking leads somewhere

  Kirkpatrick taught Lewis to test every claim by reason, and Lewis remained an atheist under him. Yet the same habit of honest argument, applied to his own beliefs at Oxford, gradually removed his objections to God. The book shows that faithful reasoning and faith need not be enemies.

  • What did the Great Knock teach Lewis about conversation and argument?
  • Which books and friends checked Lewis's atheism, according to Chapters XI-XIV?
  • Can a person reason his way to faith, or does reason only clear the way?

• Grief and the loss of a child's world

  Lewis writes that with his mother's death all settled happiness disappeared from his life. He describes the brothers drawing closer as their father struggled in grief. The memoir treats early sorrow plainly and shows how it shaped a whole life.

  • How does his mother's death change the household at Little Lea?
  • What did Lewis pray for during her illness, and what did he conclude when the prayer was not answered as he hoped?
  • How can sorrow in childhood shape a person's later beliefs?

• The surrender of the will

  Lewis presents his conversion not as a search that succeeded but as a pursuit in which God closed in on a reluctant man. He describes kneeling in 1929 as giving in, not as triumph. Humility, in his account, comes before understanding.

  • Why does Lewis compare his conversion to the end of a chess game?
  • Why was he so unwilling to admit that God exists?
  • What is the difference between finding God and being found by him?

Context

Lewis's early life spans late-Victorian and Edwardian Ulster, the English public school system, the First World War and the intellectual climate of Oxford in the 1920s, when many educated people regarded Christianity as outgrown. He moved through materialism, a sober realism he calls the New Look, and philosophical idealism before reaching theism in 1929 and Christianity in 1931. Letters to Arthur Greeves from that autumn show that a long night conversation on myth with J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson on Addison's Walk in September 1931 helped him see the Gospel as the true myth; Surprised by Joy itself is reticent about many such details.

Composition

Lewis worked on the book over several years in the early 1950s, and it was published by Geoffrey Bles in London in 1955 and by Harcourt, Brace in New York in 1956. The title comes from the first line of a sonnet by Wordsworth. Lewis deliberately omitted much, including his life with Janie Moore, mother of a fallen army friend, whom he looked after from 1919 until her death in 1951. In 1956, the year after publication, he married Joy Davidman, which gave the title an unplanned second meaning often noted by friends.

Reception

Surprised by Joy has become a classic of Christian autobiography, often compared with Augustine's Confessions. Readers have valued its humor, its candid portraits of schools and teachers, and its analysis of longing, which connects with themes in The Pilgrim's Regress and Narnia. Biographers have noted that some dates are uncertain; Alister McGrath's 2013 biography argued from Lewis's letters that his acceptance of theism should be placed in 1930 rather than 1929, a dating other scholars have debated.

Comparisons

• confessions

  Augustine's Confessions is the great model of a conversion narrative; both men trace a restless longing that finds rest only in God, and both describe a reluctant final surrender.

• grace-abounding

  Bunyan's conversion comes through terror of sin and the promises of Scripture, Lewis's through longing and reasoned argument; together they show two very different roads to faith in the English tradition.

• mere-christianity

  The argument from desire in Mere Christianity, that a longing no earthly thing satisfies suggests we were made for another world, is the conclusion Lewis lived through in Surprised by Joy.

• the-screwtape-letters

  Screwtape's strategies of distraction and of turning the patient's attention from argument to ordinary life mirror the obstacles Lewis describes in his own path to belief.

• apologia-pro-vita-sua

  Newman, another Oxford don, also wrote the history of his religious opinions; his is a defence before the public, Lewis's a story of desire and reasoning.

• testament-of-youth

  Brittain's memoir of the First World War generation describes the same war Lewis served in, but places the loss at the center where Lewis keeps the war at a deliberate distance.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The three early experiences of Joy in Chapter I and the way Lewis distinguishes Joy from pleasure.
• How his mother's death in Chapter I changes the rest of the story.
• The moment in Chapter V when a picture from Wagner's Siegfried brings Joy back as Northernness.
• The arguments and habits Lewis learns from the Great Knock in Chapter IX.
• The chess imagery of the chapter titles Check and Checkmate, and how Lewis uses it to describe God's pursuit.

Key terms and names

Joy

Lewis's name for an intense, unsatisfied longing that is itself more desirable than any satisfaction, the thread of the whole book.

Northernness

The vast, cold, clear beauty Lewis found in Norse myth and Wagner, which became his chief object of Joy in his teens.

The Great Knock

Lewis's name for his tutor W. T. Kirkpatrick, who treated every remark as an argument to be tested.

Bloods

The senior, athletic elite at Wyvern (Malvern College) who ruled the younger boys.

The New Look

The sober, anti-romantic realism Lewis adopted at Oxford after the war, before turning toward idealism.

Phantastes

George MacDonald's fantasy, bought by Lewis at a railway station, which he says baptized his imagination.

Theism

Belief in one God; Lewis became a theist in 1929, some two years before he believed in Christ.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What are the three early experiences of Joy that Lewis describes, and what objects set them off?
2. Comprehension How did Lewis lose the faith of his childhood, according to Chapter IV?
3. Comprehension What happened in the Trinity Term of 1929, and how was it different from what happened on the way to Whipsnade?
4. Interpretation Why does Lewis insist that Joy is not the same as happiness or pleasure?
5. Interpretation How does the Great Knock prepare Lewis for faith even though Kirkpatrick himself was an unbeliever?
6. Interpretation Why might Lewis have chosen chess terms for the titles of Chapters XI and XIV?
7. Interpretation Why does Lewis say so little about the war in Chapter XII?
8. Big Question Does a longing that nothing in this world satisfies suggest that we were made for something beyond it?

Faith Connections

• Ecclesiastes 3:11 (Scripture)

  God has set eternity in the human heart, so that no earthly thing fully satisfies. Lewis's Joy is a lived account of this verse.

• Psalm 139:7-12 (Scripture)

  The psalmist cannot flee from God's presence. Lewis describes God closing in on him in his Magdalen rooms until there was nowhere left to go.

• Luke 15:11-32 (Scripture)

  Lewis contrasts the prodigal son, who walks home on his own feet, with himself, brought in kicking and struggling, and wonders at a love that compels.

• Augustine, Confessions I.1 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine's prayer that our heart is restless until it rests in God states the conclusion toward which Lewis's long pursuit of Joy finally led.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Lewis repeatedly felt a longing that no object, place, book or experience could satisfy. Every attempt to treat the longing as an end in itself failed. Therefore, he concludes, Joy was a pointer to something outside the self and the world, which he finally recognized as God.

Rhetorical device: extended metaphor. Lewis frames his conversion as a chess game in the chapter titles Check (Chapter XI) and Checkmate (Chapter XIV), with God as the player who closes off every escape.

Debate: Resolved: that Lewis's argument from desire gives good reason to believe in something beyond the natural world.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Lewis says his long reasoning brought him to God but that Joy had been pointing there all along. Using scenes from at least three chapters, argue whether reason or longing played the larger part in his conversion.

Comparison with Confessions: Compare the restless longing in Augustine's Confessions with Lewis's Joy. How does each man describe the moment of surrender, and what does each finally rest in?

Medical Lens

The memoir touches medicine at a few points. Lewis describes his mother's illness and death from cancer in 1908, the household's grief, and his own unanswered child's prayer for her recovery. He records trench fever early in 1918, which sent him to hospital at Le Tréport where he read Chesterton, and a shrapnel wound in April 1918 at Mount Bernenchon, which he says was caused by an English shell bursting behind him. He treats the horrors of the front in a few restrained paragraphs and says he has put the war aside in memory; any reading of this as a trauma response is interpretive. His portrait of the headmaster Oldie, whose school closed and who was later judged insane, belongs to the history of how mental illness was recognized in schoolmasters of the period.

• Chapter I

  His mother's cancer, the operation at home, her death, and the change in the family.

  Grief Death Dying
• Chapter XII

  Trench fever and hospital at Le Tréport, and the wound received at Mount Bernenchon in April 1918.

  Fever Infection WAR Wounds
• Chapter XII

  Lewis's brief, deliberately restrained memories of the front and his statement that the war is cut off from the rest of his experience.

  Trauma Shell Shock

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Make a chart of each experience of Joy Lewis describes, with its chapter, its object (a toy garden, a book, a picture), and what Lewis later thought it pointed to.

• Essay

  Lewis says Joy is a desire more desirable than any satisfaction. Explain his meaning and test it against an experience of longing in literature or your own life.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between the young atheist Lewis and the Great Knock about whether anything can be known beyond the senses.

• Poetry

  Read Wordsworth's sonnet that begins Surprised by joy and write a short poem of your own about a moment of sudden longing.

Further Reading

• The Pilgrim's Regress, C. S. Lewis

  Lewis's 1933 allegory of the same journey.

• Phantastes, George MacDonald

• The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton

• C. S. Lewis: A Life, Alister McGrath

• Jack's Life: The Life Story of C. S. Lewis, Douglas Gresham