Uncle Andrew (Andrew Ketterley): The amateur magician who sent children to other worlds because he did not dare go himself

The Magician’s Nephew (C. S. Lewis, 1955) begins in London around 1900. Digory Kirke lives with his aunt and his strange uncle, Andrew Ketterley, who works in a locked attic study. Andrew has inherited from his godmother, a woman with a dubious reputation, a box of dust said to come from another world, and with it he has made magic rings: yellow ones that take you out of this world, green ones that bring you back. He has tested them on guinea pigs, some of which vanished and some of which died. What he needs is a human subject. When Digory’s friend Polly wanders into the study, Andrew offers her a yellow ring as a present; she touches it and disappears. He then explains to Digory that someone must take her the green rings so she can return, and that a gentleman cannot be expected to go himself; Digory, as a boy of honor, must. Digory goes. Their journey awakens Jadis in Charn and brings her to London, where she takes Andrew as her servant. Swept along into the newborn Narnia, Andrew sees in it only business: a lamp-post bar has grown into a tree, so the land must be worth a fortune. The talking animals, puzzled by him, take him for a kind of plant, plant him in the ground and water him. Back in England, he never practises magic again.

// The theoryThe way offenders think

In The Criminal Personality (1976), the psychiatrist Samuel Yochelson and the psychologist Stanton Samenow argued that persistent offenders share not a social background but a way of thinking: a set of “thinking errors” that make crime feel justified. Later researchers refined the idea with measurable instruments. Glenn Walters identified criminal thinking styles such as entitlement (I have special rights), power orientation (the world is divided into the strong and the weak), cutoff (dismissing inconvenient thoughts), super-optimism (it will go well for me) and sentimentality (I am a good person at heart). John Gibbs described self-serving cognitive distortions, such as blaming others and minimizing harm. Cognitive-behavioral programs that teach offenders to recognize and challenge these patterns are among the interventions with the best evidence of reducing reoffending.

// The subjectThe coward who wanted to be a magician

Uncle Andrew is partly comic: vain, greedy, terrified of Jadis and reduced to helpless absurdity in Narnia. But Lewis does not let the comedy hide what he did. He experimented on animals, deceived a child into vanishing, and blackmailed another into following her, all to satisfy his ambition without risk to himself. He is also the man who opens the door to Jadis, out of the same arrogance. His punishment in Narnia is gentle and pointed: he cannot hear the animals speak, because he has decided in advance that they cannot, and so he hears only roars and barks. His way of thinking has made him deaf to the world he wanted to exploit.

// The crackDescription or explanation?

Cognitive criminology has been criticized for a circularity: thinking errors are often inferred from the very behavior they are supposed to explain, and the question of where those patterns come from is left to other theories. Yochelson and Samenow’s original work was also criticized for its small, unrepresentative sample and for presenting criminals as a different kind of person. In Uncle Andrew’s case, the theory describes his justifications precisely but says nothing about how a gentleman from a comfortable family came to think this way, beyond hints of the influence of his godmother.

There is also the matter of scale. Uncle Andrew’s crimes are real but limited, and the novel treats him finally with something like pity: an old man who never tries magic again. Within the fiction, he chose to use children as instruments for his ambition. What the theory adds, and what Lewis saw, is that the thinking of a petty, cowardly man and that of a tyrant can be the same; the difference is how much power each has to act on it.