Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Ah, but which official order?
C.S. Lewis delayed some or one book in the Narnia series. The publisher originally had them in his order. - The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
- Prince Caspian
- The Dawn Treader
- The Silver Chair
- The Horse and his Boy
- The Magician's Nephew
- The Last Battle
It was a boxed set I had (still have) and that was the order on the back of the box. The individual books were not numbered. The suggested reading order was both C.S. Lewis's order and also the order they were published, but not the order they were written! |
As far as I know including several comments from C. S. Lewis, he did not 'delay' some of the books as he did not have some overarching design for the series.
Going by the publication dates from the original publisher, the order you show above is the order in which they were written/published. From C. S. Lewis' writings as quoted by others, it would appear that he had a bit of a preference for the chronological order for reading.
“
I think I agree with your order for reading the books more than with your mother’s. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn’t think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last. But I found as I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them.”
C. S. Lewis, 4/23/57
“
Although The Magician’s Nephew was written several years after C. S. Lewis first began The Chronicles of Narnia, he wanted it to be read as the first book in the series. HarperCollins is happy to present these books in the order in which Professor Lewis preferred.”
“[HarperCollins]
asked, ‘What order do you think we ought to do them in?’ And I said, ‘Well … I actually asked Jack himself what order he preferred and thought they should be read in. And he said he thought they should be read in the order of Narnian chronology.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t you go with what Jack himself wanted?’ So, it’s my fault basically—the order of Narnian chronology. And I’m not the least bit ashamed of it.”—Douglas Gresham
See
Narnia Reading Order,
There’s only one right order to read the Narnia books (a rather dogmatic view of the reading order) and other sources for more on this tempest in a teapot.