Boxen was the imaginary world C.S. Lewis created with his brother Warren during childhood.
The Lewis brothers began inventing and writing about Boxen when they were children. Their stories combined anthropomorphic animals with political institutions, countries, newspapers, and historical events. The name refers to a fusion of “India” and “Box,” two imaginative settings associated with the brothers’ early play.
Boxen was not the same fictional world as Narnia. Narnia emerged much later and became the setting of Lewis’s seven published children’s novels. However, the Boxen notebooks show an early habit of building detailed imagined societies, a method that would remain important in Lewis’s mature fiction.
Warren Lewis preserved and edited material from the childhood stories. The surviving Boxen writings are valuable because they reveal Lewis’s early interests in narrative, animals, maps, politics, and invented history before he became a professional author.