06 The Magicians Nephew characters

Appears from the start

A boy of about twelve who has recently been brought to London and is thoroughly miserable there. His father is away in India, his mother is seriously ill and not expected to recover, and he has been taken into a house in a long terrace belonging to his aunt and uncle. He is quick-tempered and easily stung, but honest, stubborn and adventurous, and it is his idea to explore the tunnel that runs behind the attics of the whole row of houses.

Appears from the start

The girl who lives next door to Digory. She has made a private cave for herself in the empty roof space behind her attic, where she keeps her treasures and a story she is writing. Sensible and cautious where Digory is impulsive, she is still willing to go exploring along the rafters, and the tunnel behind her house is what begins the whole adventure.

Appears from the start

Digory's aunt, a brisk and practical woman who keeps the household running, nurses Digory's mother, and has no patience at all with her brother Andrew's idleness or his airs.

Appears from the start

Digory's mother, lying ill in an upstairs room of the house where he now lives, and not expected to live long. Her illness is the grief behind everything Digory does.

First appears in chapter 2

Digory's uncle, a tall thin man who keeps a study at the top of the house that nobody is allowed to enter. Vain, self-important and thoroughly cowardly, he holds that the ordinary rules do not apply to a man of his gifts, and he has spent years on secret experiments he calls magic. He is entirely willing to send children where he will not go himself.

First appears in chapter 2

Uncle Andrew's godmother, dead long before the story begins. She was said to be not entirely human, and was shut away for a time; on her deathbed she left Andrew a sealed box, brought long ago out of a lost country, which he was told to burn unopened. It is the source of everything he calls his magic.

Also known as The Queen of Charn, the Witch

First appears in chapter 5

The last ruler of Charn, a worn-out world under a swollen red sun, woken from an enchanted sleep when the bell in her hall is struck. She is far taller and stronger than anyone of our world, of a line that claims descent from giants, and is magnificent to look at and entirely without pity. She holds that a queen is bound by none of the promises or scruples that bind common people, and she speaks of the destruction of her own city and everyone in it as simply the price of not being beaten.

Also known as the Cabby

First appears in chapter 7

A London hansom-cab driver whose cab and horse are seized in the street by the Queen. Plain-spoken, patient and steady, he keeps his temper in circumstances that terrify everyone around him, is kind to his horse, and sings when he is frightened.

First appears in chapter 7

The horse who pulls Frank's cab: elderly, used to London traffic, and badly startled when the Queen commandeers him and drives him through the streets at a gallop.

First appears in chapter 9

An enormous Lion, found singing in an empty darkness where there is as yet no world at all. His song calls out stars, a sunrise, land, rivers, growing things and finally living creatures. Grave and joyful at once, he is plainly the maker and the authority of the new country; he cannot be commanded or deceived, and the Queen's power fails completely against him.

Also known as Nellie

First appears in chapter 11

Frank's wife, called out of a London kitchen into the new world at Aslan's summons, arriving in her apron with her hands still wet. Sensible and unfrightened, she takes what has happened far more calmly than anyone expects.