It's Bigger on the Inside

G.K. Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was a prolific English, Roman Catholic writer and Christian apologist.  Chesterton's 1925 The Everlasting Man was a sort of rebuttal to a sort of rebuttal to H.G. Wells’ 1920 Outline of History. The The Everlasting Man contributed to C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. In a letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950) Lewis calls the book "the best popular apologetic I know",  and to Rhonda Bodle he wrote (31 December 1947)  "the [very] best popular defence of the full Christian position I know is GK Chesterton's The Everlasting Man". The book was also cited in a list of 10 books that "most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life". It also influenced Lewis to write apologetically, as in Mere Christianity. In fact, many of Lewis' motifs are derived from English authors who had just preceded him, such as the spacecraft in his 1938 Out Of The Silent Planet being losely modeled on the one in H.G. Wells' 1901, The First Men In The Moon.

In 1927, five years after his conversion, Chesterton wrote The Catholic Church and Conversion. Lewis could relate to this having been a convert himself. In this book, he states that a convert, upon discovering that the Catholic Church “finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside.” It logically follows that C.S. Lewis could have taken this for inspiration in his later book. Lewis completed the last ‘Narnia’ story, The Last Battle, in 1953, in which we see the end of the world of Narnia. At one point in the story the children find themselves in a stable. Seen from the outside it looked small and dingy, but when they go through the door they find themselves in a beautiful country that seems to stretch on forever. Someone comments that the stable is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. The reply in the book is, “Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”

Lewis’ stable is also connected with a kind of time travel, as it brought characters from the Narnia’s ancient past (indeed Digory watched its first dawn) into its last days. It is conceivable that Lewis' time traveling stable that is bigger on the inside could have been the inspiration for the time traveling Police box in Doctor Who known as the TARDIS. The Last Battle was a recent book when the TARDIS was first shown in Doctor Who in 1963. Lewis died the day before the first episode was shown, so he never got to comment.