The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe ever". He stated that "nothing is more fun to write" than the Doctor at Christmas, as he considered it "his kind of day. Everything's bright and shiny, everybody's having a laugh, and nobody minds if you wear a really stupid hat". The story is partly inspired by "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (from "The Chronicles of Narnia") by C. S. Lewis. Moffat said that "Doctor Who" and the Narnia stories "come from the same impulse that children have of escaping to another world." The scene in which the Doctor is showing the Arwells around the house originally included
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as the text". The British edition of the novel had 43 illustrations; American editions generally had fewer. The popular United States paperback edition published by Collier between 1970 and 1994, which sold many millions, had only 17 illustrations, many of them severely cropped from the originals, giving many readers in that country a very different experience when reading the novel. All the illustrations were restored for the 1994 worldwide HarperCollins edition, although these lacked the clarity of early printings. Lewis very much enjoyed writing "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and embarked on the sequel "Prince Caspian" soon after