Where exactly do the Pevensies go when they are evacuated?
A clothes shop in Rye!
“They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office.”
Though many places in Narnia are mentioned in the Chronicles, only two locations in the children’s world are named. (It’s one of the techniques Lewis uses to make Narnia feel so very real.) The first of these places is London, which we hear about in the second sentence of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The other is the city where the awful Scrubb family live: Cambridge. This, of course, is a typically Oxonian joke but it may also be a joke Lewis makes against himself. In the same year that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (in which Cambridge is mentioned) was published, Lewis took up a new job: as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge!
But where exactly are the Pevensie children evacuated to? Lewis doesn’t tell us but he does leave clues, so let’s follow them and see where they lead.
To read the rest of this post, please cross over to Into the Wardrobe and Beyond: the worlds of C. S. Lewis.