Reading George MacDonald

An Introduction

Do you remember the first time as a child that you read a story that fascinated you? A book that caught your imagination and took you out of yourself, out of your chair, into another world? And when at last you reluctantly put the story aside, you could hardly believe any time had passed.

For me, that story was by George MacDonald. He’s not as well known now as he should be, but George MacDonald was a Scot who wrote poems and novels and sermons and some of the finest children’s stories of the 19^th century. The stories I found first were his fairy tales.

When I say ‘fairy tales,’ I don’t mean the usual handsome-prince-saves-helpless-princess tales we usually see these days. I mean fairy tales that strange and haunting and amazing and, to use the Scots, unco.

Stories like ‘The Day Boy and the Night Girl,’ about a witch who wants to create the perfect, masculine boy and the perfect, feminine girl. So she raises a boy who never sees the dark, and a girl who never sees the light. And the story is about what happens when the Night Girl sees the Day Boy sees the dark for the first time, and what happens when they meet each other.

Stories like ‘The Wow ‘o Rivven,’ about an old man with mental illness, and the young woman who becomes his friend—how she learns how to listen to the great bell in the ruined church, and how she begins to realise that the bell is calling to her.

Stories like ‘The Shadows,’ full of strange, shadow-creatures that visit Ralph Rinkelmann—a humorist and poet who also happens to be the King of Fairyland.

Once you’ve read these stories, you never forget them.

MacDonald, in the heart the Victorian era, used these stories and many more like them to explore questions that are nearly taboo in children’s literature today—questions about mortality, and suffering, and sexuality, and death. Unlike many authors, he doesn’t address these subjects as if he, the wise grown-up, could lecture foolish children about What They Need to Know. Rather, he takes his readers on an adventure—parents and children alike—and it’s only after the adventure is over, when the tale all told and the last songs sung, that the questions appear in the imagination, lingering and growing like the finish of a fine wine.

George MacDonald can be read—and has been read—in many ways. Do you want a Victorian novelist? His novel Robert Falconer was Queen Victoria’s favourite, no less. She gave copies to all the grandchildren one year. A Romantic? MacDonald admired Coleridge, Shelly, and Wordsworth, and wrote poems and prose that sound very much like they wrote it. A mystic poet? The Diary of an Old Soul carries on the metaphysical tradition and competes with the best of Blake as the greatest spiritual verse of the 19^th century. A Christian teacher? I direct you to three volumes of Unspoken Sermons. A fantasist? It can be argued that literary fantasy as we know it today began when a young C. S. Lewis discovered the Everyman edition of Phantastes, when a young J. R. R. Tolkien read The Princess and the Goblin.

And that’s not even close to the half of it.

MacDonald was, in fact, all of these things and none of these things. He was that most fragile and chaotic of miracles: an individual. He loved his wife and children deeply, suffered ill-health, nearly lost his faith in God after a harrowing stint as a minister. He wrote and explored many different ways of expression, and genres, and ideas. His thoughts and interests developed and changed.

All the while, he wrote—wrote, wrote, and wrote. His stories and poems emerge from the shadows of struggle; his sermons and essays emerge from the light of conviction. Everything together appeared from the deep hope that characterised MacDonald’s life.

That brings us back to the fairy tales. There are dozens of ways of looking at any author, and any individual. But I want to introduce you to George MacDonald. So I want you to meet him the way I met him—reading his fairy tales. Reading his children’s stories.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be discussing these stories here, teasing out the strange unsettling questions they ask us, and trying to see if we start discovering together why so many people—like Neil Gaiman, C. S. Lewis, possibly J. K. Rowling, and generations of parents and children—have looked to MacDonald as their inspiration, as a teller of tales and weaver of wonders.

Because that, at least, MacDonald certainly was. He wrote in his essay ‘The Fantastic Imagination’ (1893):

If a writer’s aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood, but to escape being misunderstood; where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again. [...]

The best way with music, I imagine, is not to bring the forces of our intellect to bear upon it, but to be still and let it work on that part of us for whose sake it exists. [...]

If any strain of my “broken music” makes a child’s eyes flash, or his mother’s for a moment grow dim, my labour will not have been in vain.

Come with me a for a whole, back to where a small boy sits with his mother as they read together a story about a little girl and a little boy, who found the treasure at the end of the rainbow and wander together to find the country from where the shadows fall…

Come with me, and you will see MacDonald did not labour in vain.

This is nothing if not a conversation—questions, comments, additions, and curiosities always welcome.

Tagged as: Authors, Children's Literature, Fairy Tales, George MacDonald, Writing