C.S. Lewis, the master of escapist fiction, was prophetic in warning against such noxious paternalism from authors. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” he wrote. “It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.” Let’s hope Barbie director Greta Gerwig, who has been tapped up to direct the next year’s Chronicles of Narnia series, is taking note.

But in the meantime, we have the books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published 75 years ago today. When I read this to my son, it transfixed him in a way that all those morally improving Disney and Pixar movies could not — and in a way that I recognized too from my own childhood. The Narnia books are weird and archaic and they are far from comforting. But they leave unanswerable questions and imaginative territory to roam for a lifetime.

What would compel a child to climb into a claustrophobic wardrobe, full of moth-eaten coats and spiders, as apt a symbol as any for the human psyche? C.S. Lewis knew all too well. There are real and terrible things to escape from. And the land of magic, mystery and hope that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy arrived in would soon reveal that it too was blighted. By facing up to this, conquering its climate of terror, the child would become an adult. If they didn’t pass into the dark and through it, they would remain infantilized.

This partly explains the backlash against Lewis. Two years ago, it was reported that the Government’s counter-terrorism unit, Prevent, had classified his works along with some by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien as potentially leading to “radicalisation”: the kind of wormtongue deception worthy of the villains of Narnia or Middle Earth. It demonstrates that, at its best, fantasy can be the mirror that shows us who we are and what we’ve become. But then, there is a long history of people taking leave of their senses when it comes to Narnia. The books have been banned in the US for being both too Christian and not Christian enough. One critic ranked the books (with delicious venom) as worse than 120 Days of Sodom or Mein Kampf. Being shot by all sides might indicate a writer is on the right track.

For his part, Lewis lambasted “those who do not wish children to be frightened […] Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” He knew of the existence of shadows from early in life. There is a spine-chilling passage in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, in which he recalls waking up one night with toothache when he was ten. He called out his mother’s name and she did not come. She was dying in another room. His father was never the same and sent Lewis off to a boarding school run by a deranged sadist. “With my mother’s death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”

As a result, Lewis developed a fear and mistrust of the adult world in those years — and it was well-placed. Scarcely more than a boy, Lewis was sent to the trenches. He was seriously injured in the Battle of Arras (he would have shrapnel, from a shell that obliterated a colleague, embedded permanently in his body) and, like Tolkien, he watched many of his friends die. “One cannot help wondering why,” he wrote to his father.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with war. The Pevensie children have been dispatched to the countryside, away from the Blitz and the apocalyptic madness of the grown-ups. They stay with a kindly professor in a house “full of unexpected places”. Yet the shadows have not gone. Lucy discovers a portal at the back of a wardrobe leading to another world. (Lewis dreamt this first glimpse of Narnia as a boy: a faun under a gas streetlamp in snowbound woods.) The children discover the land to be an ice-stricken police state, and they are called, reluctantly as in all heroic quests, to confront evil.

As I revisit it with my son, after more than 30 years since last reading it, the tale has an intriguingly archaic feel. A professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature, Lewis incorporated mythic and folkloric characters from various cultures — Greek, Celtic, Germanic — into his stories. At times, it’s akin to a bestiary: a hangover from a childhood spent dreaming of imaginary lands while stuck indoors. “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.” What brings the tale to life are the extremely vivid sketches of the children, their strengths, flaws and group dynamics, as well as clever inversions: the faun, for example, is more startled by the little girl than vice versa. It is also more dystopian than I remembered: the woodland spies, the ransacked homes and forced disappearances, the guilt and responsibility the children feel.

Suggested reading

Thatcher was Sinn Féin's useful demon

By Darran Anderson

The most disturbing scene, though, is when the villain, the White Witch, who has cast an endless winter on the land without hope of Christmas, comes upon a festive group of animals. They claim they’ve been visited by Father Christmas. She demands they recant, but a young squirrel insists it’s true. The White Witch waves her hand — “Oh don’t don’t don’t!” cries Edmund — and turns the merry party into statues. “It seemed so pitiful to think of those little stone figures sitting there all the silent days and all the dark nights, year after year, till the moss grew on them and at last even their faces crumbled away.”

The evil White Witch steals the show, of course. She promises the insecure, egocentric child regal status, but her abusive, narcissistic nature is soon evident. She convinces her victims it is they who bring wrath on themselves. She contaminates the minds of the young and naïve while masquerading as their benefactor. Lewis is clever in introducing her not as some tyrannical psychopath but a seducer that any of us could fall for. She appeals to the best in us — curiosity and desire for instance — and feeds off, warps and stunts these qualities. It is foolhardy to believe we would be immune to her charms.

C.S Lewis’s charms were quite another matter. On a pilgrimage to his haunts in Oxford, I met an older lady who had known him when she was a child. She twinkled at the mention of Narnia and was still clearly enchanted by his books. But when I asked her what Lewis was like. “Well… I thought he was a grumpy old sod.”

I laughed. I would have been disappointed with any other description. We know that Lewis loved a drink, could start an argument in an empty room and enjoyed doing so. He smoked like a train and cursed like a sailor. For a supposed conservative, he had anarchistic tendencies, as did Tolkien. In his wife’s eyes, Lewis was “a tough Ulsterman […] with the sort of views you expect of an Orangeman”. As a Republican kid growing up in Derry, I ought to have felt him to be an enemy. But few people ever gave me a more valuable gift than the maps at the start of the Narnia books. Similarly, I owed a debt to him: not just for the respite of escapism, but because it gave me a way of understanding the fortresses and threats around us.

In another of Lewis’s masterpieces, The Screwtape Letters, a demon counsels his nephew that only amateurs try to seduce people into being directly evil. The sophisticated malefactor makes them first believe they are unquestionably good or, in other words, superior. This is how the frost is born. The White Witch creates a sparkling winter wonderland that is really a bitterly frozen steppe where nothing but fear can flourish. For an eight-year-old, Narnia is a make-believe place. By middle age it’s recognizably real.

But there is something elemental, beyond rational considerations, in the appeal of the Irish cottage. Few were the Irish emigrant homes of a certain era that didn’t have a framed farmstead hanging on the sitting room wall, whitewash sparkling against the Kodacolor green. A symbol of a simpler, harder lifestyle, simultaneously fetishished and spurned, the Irish farmstead, built from rubble from its surrounding fields, conveys deep, ambivalent realms of meaning, quite distinct from and darker than the prettily uncomplicated charms of the chocolate-box English cottage. Empty farmhouses, which in England would each be spick and span with Farrow and Ball, litter Northern Ireland’s countryside like abandoned crime scenes. In Ireland, the rural cottage still lurks in the imagination like a half-remembered, troubling dream.

It is no surprise, then, that houses loom large in Ireland’s cultural production. Indeed, it is only partly an exaggeration to say that Irish literature — at least in English — consists of a collection of domestic metaphors. In an island whose history has been defined by contested land ownership, houses dominate the country’s literary landscape like an Anglo-Irish “Big House” overlooking its demesne.

From the very birth of the Anglo-Irish novel, with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee (1812), the Big House of the landlords was presented as a mouldering, moss-streaked metaphor for the country’s social and political order, a literary premonition of the gloomily decaying wrecks of the 20th-century Anglo-Irish novel, their shrubbery haunted by rebellious tenants and doomed to fiery dissolution. Even Bram Stoker, giving his imagination the freest rein, was compelled to conjure up a landlord, surrounded by superstitious peasants, vacating his crumbling mansion in a box of his native soil, while casting an acquisitive eye on the London property market.

On the other side of Ireland’s great political divide, the idealised peasant cottage of early 20th-century Irish nationalism, successor to the squalid 19th-century tenant cabin, marks the point at which improved economic conditions following the Famine laid the foundations for Ireland’s separation from its negligent neighbouring freeholder. The tidy, homely cottage became the moral and political contrast to the ramshackle and disorderly Big House, just as independent Ireland was to draw from its own native folk resources in establishing itself as a nation once again.

But one man’s bucolic fantasy is another’s nightmare. Ulster Unionist election posters contrasted the tidily prosperous farmsteads of the Protestant statelet with the tumbledown thatched cabins of De Valera’s Republic — relying on cultural tropes that, ironically, only make sense within an Irish context. The dominant stage of post-independence Realist literature — the isolated Midlands farmhouse ruled by a fallible, domineering father — provided a handy metaphor for writers chafing against the stultifying claustrophobia of mid-20th century Ireland. In today’s neurotically globalising Republic, scene of a housing crisis that makes Britain’s Generation Rent look comparatively blessed, the abandoned estates of the Celtic Tiger boom fulfil a similar purpose: they are vacant symbols of a country caught between outward-looking aspirations and the material reality of a marginal country on Europe’s westernmost fringe.

More from this author

Why I am fleeing to the hills

By Aris Roussinos

But here in Northern Ireland, a century after the border uncurled itself across Ulster’s rainy country lanes, this domestic metaphor has its own specific, harder edge. As bookseller-turned-writer Alexander Poots observes in The Stranger’s House, his excellent new book on Northern Irish writing, David Trimble instinctively returned to the trope in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, proclaiming that “‘Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern Nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.” A solid house built on uncertain ground, now Northern Ireland’s knife-edge demographic balance is shifting back in turn, looking to wash the state’s foundations away with it.

The politics and culture of Northern Ireland, Britain’s neglected stepchild over the water, are after all defined by one great building project, 400 years ago. Until the early 17th-century plantation of British Protestant settlers, Ulster was the wildest of Ireland’s four provinces, the last holdout of the old Gaelic order, and the least influenced by English culture. Over the course of a century, reshaped by its new population, it became the most distinctively British corner of the island, farms and sturdy grey market towns, in mainland style, blooming like mushrooms on Ulster’s levelled woodlands. Like a family’s private ways of speech, the shared dialect of its two peoples is still rich with the expressive Germanic vocabulary of the Scots colonists: people still hoke and boke, they gulder and gurn in the linguistic residue of “the Hamely Tongue”. Forced into loveless cohabitation by history, the province’s two nations have explored their predicament, in literature, through the image of the uneasily shared home.

In Reading in the Dark (1996), the Catholic writer Seamus Deane layers two oppressive domestic metaphors on top of each other: the claustrophobic Derry two-up, two-down where family life is weighed down by dark secrets, and the stolen farmhouse just across the border in Donegal, where a life of bucolic freedom and contentment lies unfairly out of reach. In the Monaghan writer Eugene McCabe’s cycle of fiction set across the border in Northern Ireland’s Fermanagh, the uneasy cohabitation of Catholic and Protestant finds expression in a lush and lurid Ulster Gothic: in Siege (1973), IRA gunmen hold an Anglo-Irish gentry family hostage in their Big House, finding uncomfortable intimacy in their unwillingly shared predicament; in Death and Nightingales (1992), the Catholic stepdaughter of a cuckolded Protestant landlord plots his murder, before being betrayed in turn by his devious Fenian tenant. Most explicitly, in Bill Morrison’s A Love Song for Ulster trilogy (1994), the Catholic Kate, abandoned by her mother as the border closed, is trapped in unwilling domesticity with the Protestant John, prisoner in a cold and isolated Northern farmhouse.

As a consequence of this troubled cohabitation, Poots observes, throughout its century-long existence Northern Irish literature “has seen writer after writer grasp for an elusive home. Inevitably they fail, and that failure becomes the subject of their work. They are all inhabitants of the disappearing island, tenants of the Strangers’ House.” Perhaps it is natural, then, that an unstable hold on uncertain ground pervades much of the province’s writing, a persistent sense that there are stranger things lurking beneath Ulster’s stolid surface. In Northern Irish writing, the hamely always threatens to become unheimlich.

Poots opens with a portrait of three Belfast writers — C.S. Lewis, Forrest Reid, and Louis MacNeice — and the comfortable and unhappy red-brick bourgeois homes that shaped their imaginations. Like their homeland, in their infancy “all had nightmares so memorable that they seemed worthy of record decades after their occurrence”, Poots notes, and “all three men described their childhood nightmares in their respective memoirs”. The triad are strangely interchangeable, Poots observes: “All were Protestants, and while some were more comfortable than others, all were vastly better off than the average Irishman. All had black dreams, all became writers. All knew the dark well.” And like Carson, the statelet’s sceptical founder, all three were repelled by the Loyalist culture of their tribe, “the marching bands, the sashes and banners, the great bonfires lit at midnight on the Twelfth of July”. Lewis, who would write that “if I ever get interested in politics, I shall probably be a nationalist”, described his distaste as simply a “natural repulsion to noisy drum‐beating, bullying Orangemen”.

Instead, for Lewis, in the dim afterglow of Yeats’s Celtic Twilight, escape was to be found in fantasy worlds, a hidden realm where time is so distorted that the ordinary human lifespan extends disorientatingly into mythicised, glorious history. Though Poots notes laconically that “not many people would associate Narnia with Ireland”, this parallel is surely inescapable. As Lewis would write in Surprised by Joy, “the country I grew up in had everything to encourage a romantic bent, had indeed done so ever since I first looked at the unattainable Green Hills through the nursery window”.

Explicitly transposing his beloved Oxford on the Mourne Mountains and Donegal, Narnia was a fantasy Ulster for Lewis, a land of “roaring waterfalls and mossy rocks and echoing caverns”, of “heathery mountains” and “windy slopes alight with gorse bushes”. For MacNeice, who “always thought of himself as Irish, a visitor to the English zoo”, escape from middle-class Belfast was sought in fantasies of Gaelic peasant authenticity, and his dubious claim that “my relations are still living in mud‐floored cottages in the West of Ireland”. And Reid in turn, that rare thing, an early 20th-century Ulster Protestant gay writer, found release in a lush, Bohemian fiction which, Poots remarks, fits “none of the stereotypes associated with Ulster Protestantism: they are queer, allusive, beautiful, and fantastical. And yet, despite everything, he was a Northern Irish Protestant novelist, and his books reflect his culture and his class.”

This yearning of the stereotypically matter-of-fact Ulster Protestant for the fantastical is a thread that runs through modern Northern Irish fiction, and Poots could perhaps make more of it than he does. Another recent book, 2021’s The Black Dreams: Strange stories from Northern Ireland, foregrounds the country’s under-analysed literary preoccupation with the weird and eerie, making the implicit explicit. In each of the stories, domestic life becomes unsettled by hidden worlds lying just at the edge of ours, by the intrusion of the old ways and a history that refuses forgetting. Indeed, perhaps the singular distinctive trait of the country’s best current writers, such as Antrim’s Jan Carson, is a magical realist sensibility now largely alien to their southern counterparts.

Suggested reading

Ireland is a Freudian dream

By Terry Eagleton

Across the border, the long shadow of literary Modernism has congealed in Sally Rooney’s affectless, Xanax prose, making her a suitable literary avatar for a country rushing headlong into an increasingly contested postmodern internationalism. In contrast, Carson’s unsettling engagement with Irish folk traditions, her pagan sensibility, rooted in the soil and lurking beneath working-class Protestant community life — the literary equivalent of the Fairy Tree at the heart of Belfast’s Loyalist Sandy Row — would be so unfashionable among Dublin writers, still eager to shake off the shackles of tradition, as to be unwritable. History’s separation of North and South perhaps permits a critical engagement, in Northern writers, with a lost sense of Irishness, the bifurcated insider-outsider perspective of the anthropologist, both at home and not in either culture. In one of the many contradictions typifying Northern Ireland, it is the explicit Irishness of Carson’s writing that separates her from the Republic.

If the singular characteristic of Northern Irish prose is its yearning for the fantastical, its poetic counterpart is perhaps a shrewd and unromantic, even tormented relationship with the land. “Northern Ireland is the result of an argument about land,” Poots notes, “an argument conducted over four long centuries”, and this stubborn rootedness adheres to the best Ulster poetry like wet clay. In the work of farmer-poets like Seamus Heaney and John Montague, both brought up in smallholdings in Northern Ireland’s rural, Catholic west, small farms, hard soil and deep history intertwine to create a distinctive imaginative space. Poots writes compellingly, often in passages of great beauty, of the nature writing tradition in Irish-language poetry, observing that “if a sense of homelessness and dislocation forms one pillar of northern writing, then the natural world forms the other. Indeed fields, trees, and birds have often supplied the language through which writers can express darker truths.”

Yet the land itself may express other, happier resolutions: for the great Belfast Protestant poet John Hewitt, who deserves greater analysis than Poots’s excellent survey of Ulster writing gives him, the same Antrim countryside that inspired Lewis grounded him in a sense that he, too, belonged to this contested soil, where though “once alien here my fathers built their house/claimed, drained and gave the land the shapes of use”, so that “because of all the buried men/in Ulster clay”, he is “as native in my thought as any here”. Poots quotes Tom Paulin’s poetic lament of the Ulster Protestant seaman in London as proof of “the uncertainty at the heart of Ulster Unionism — the terrible suspicion that they are mired between Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain, foreigners everywhere”. But the Roman settler in Hewitt’s more hopeful 1950 poem The Colony instead derives from his perception that “we would be strangers in the Capitol” a belief that time and shared love of the land may change relations “if not to kin, to co-inhabitants, as goat and ox may graze in the same field/and each gain something from proximity”.

Suggested reading

Firewood will save the West

By Paul Kingsnorth

This ameliorating influence of the land pervades Belfast, too, MacNeice’s “city built on mud” where, as Poots notes, “the smell of silage and cow dung still wafts across the city when the wind is right”, and where the street art, unlike the mainland, displays fat bramble hedges and woodland paths as well as the paramilitary murals so beloved of Troubles tourists. From the centre of Belfast, you can see the hedgerows and green fields of hill farms overlooking the postindustrial cityscape; mist-shrouded mountains loom oppressively over the terraced red-brick streets, the grim majesty of the land itself our reminder we are not in Manchester or Liverpool. Like the inner city’s sectarian murals fading into the Alliance Party posters of the prosperous leafy suburbs, Ulster’s countryside softens Belfast’s brick-sharp edges.

In his conclusion, Poots declares that “a tribal writer will never produce great work”. Instead, “the best northern writers have rejected the answers that their respective communities offer up… Perhaps this is the root of the homesick quality that, for me, defines Northern Irish writing” — “where home is revealed to be a delusion.” But perhaps what Poots interprets as loss and homelessness can also be a strange liberation: by belonging to both Britain and Ireland, Northern Ireland ultimately belongs to neither. For writers, condemned by temperament to view their home society from the outside, looking in, such ambiguity can be productive, as the vigorous imaginative possibilities displayed by Ulster’s new writing proves.

As with the shrewd and slightly roguish inhabitants of Northern Ireland’s border villages — my own new home — with their pocketfuls of Euros, at ease in both societies, or the best of both worlds Sunak strains to convince Unionists that the Windsor Agreement offers, the ambiguity detested by Belfast politicians may yet be a profitable wellspring. For all its political uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, Northern Ireland’s cultural output possesses a complex, unaffected sense of place and continuity distinct from, and perhaps increasingly foreign to, both the British mainland and the Republic. A traditional Ulster farmhouse has no foundations, built directly on the heavy soil: but it is no less solid or homely for that, and will sit sturdily on its squat fieldstone haunches long after the political certainties of today have washed away.

A few letters, it was reported, had been found from the Belfast-born author to a US scientist, discussing the tragic early death of the American’s son, and recalling the passing of Lewis’s wife. “You tell a most moving story. I too have lost what I most loved. Indeed unless we die young ourselves, we mostly do”, wrote Lewis. “We must die before them or see them die before us. And when we wish – and how agonizingly we do, o how perpetually! – it is entirely for ourselves, for our sakes not theirs.”

It was nothing that Lewis hadn’t in essence said before, but it showed yet again how in this age when we fetishise the blackening of whited sepulchers, Lewis seems to escape the purge. He was convinced that within five years of his death he would be forgotten, but since 1963 – he died on the same day as President Kennedy and Aldous Huxley – his influence has instead grown exponentially. His books sell in enormous numbers, films are made of them, and there has even been a play and then a movie, Shadowlands, about his late-life romance.

Lewis, author of the Narnia stories, Miracles, Till We have Faces, Surprised by Joy and so many other implicit and direct defences of Christianity has, up to now at least, largely escaped character attack because there’s just not very much ammunition for the usual assassins to exploit. Some of the female characters in his fiction are hardly champions of liberation, and he was a relatively typical product of his era, but little if anything stands out as a cause for concern. Not, of course, that this always matters to those who cancel therefore they are.

More from this author

There's nothing saintly about anti-Semitism

By Michael Coren

I’m not sure if it’s still there, but some years ago there was a poignant if seldom noticed symbol in The Kilns in Oxford, the long time home of Lewis. It was the outline of a mezuzah: the small container attached to the doorposts of Jewish homes, containing parchment on which is written the Shema. It was there because one of Lewis’s two stepsons had asked to adopt the birth faith of his late mother, Joy Davidman. Lewis, the world-renowned champion of Christianity, had asked Jewish friends how he could best accommodate the boy.

It was a gently noble gesture, and that decency, or goodness if you like, is particularly significant at Easter as Christians, inevitably, face the now standard taunts not only from social media atheists but from television cynics who really should have better and braver things to do.

Lewis was most prominent between the mid 1930s and early 60s and as such inhabited a dramatically different age — good Lord, the BBC couldn’t get enough of him! But a snobbish disdain for faith had already emerged, particularly in the universities where he taught. He addressed this in his 1952 book Mere Christianity, based on a series of highly popular radio broadcasts.

“There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of Heaven ridiculous by saying they do not want to spend eternity playing harps. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the Scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a mere symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”

Suggested reading

When Christ conquered Caesar

By Tom Holland

Those who allegedly couldn’t understand “books written for grown-ups” knew exactly who they were. As a consequence they made Lewis’s life at Oxford progressively more difficult, which is one of the reasons why he moved to a more accepting Cambridge in 1954. But even then, his insistence of defending what he saw as Christian truth to a mass audience as well as within his own circle lost him support and allies.

Rather like Tolkien, a friend and another Easter warrior, he was always far more appreciated by his readers than by his peers. If he hadn’t become a Christian and hadn’t written children’s stories he would have been far more respected within the academy, especially for his remarkable lectures, and for his books The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama.

Yet while he may not have been given his proper place in university circles, there is something almost hagiographical in the way he’s regarded in Christian circles, and within the Lewis industry there is, it must be said, a certain dreamy nostalgia. He’s the quintessential caricature of a fantasy don: all tweed and tea and leather armchairs. It’s no accident that he is a virtual cult in the United States, especially and in some ways ironically — he drank and smoked — within the evangelical community. American Protestants may be politically influential but they lack intellectual heroes, and Lewis does very nicely out of fulfilling this role.

Suggested reading

In a bewildering world, Easter brings hope

By Graham Tomlin

There are numerous profound thinkers making the Christian case today, but none of them wrote a children’s story as timeless as The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, or something as deliciously and mischievously clever as The Screwtape Letters – if you’ve never heard John Cleese’s recording of the book about a senior devil writing to his junior, grab hold of it immediately. Or chronicled in a haunting book, A Grief Observed, how it felt to lose a spouse, where he observed that “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.”

He once wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” That’s not always an acceptable sentiment more than 50 years after the man’s death, but Lewis never worried about what was acceptable, only about what he considered to be important. That, at heart, is why old Jack Lewis, father of Aslan and, as he said about his 1929 coming to Christianity, “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England”, simply won’t go away, even for The Guardian.