George MacDonald: A Writer's Life

Michael Phillips

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780795352737
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The leading MacDonald scholar and biographer presents the most comprehensive work to date on the 19th century author's life and work. Best known for his fiction and fairy tales, such as the immortal classics Robert Falconer and At the Back of the North Wind, the Victorian author and theologian George MacDonald inspired some of the greatest writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Most notably, C.S. Lewis credits MacDonald's books with inspiring his works of fantasy fiction as well as putting him on the path to Christianity. In this major biographical work, MacDonald scholar Michael Phillips examines how the events of the author's life contributed to his work and legacy. Referring to this volume as a "bibliographic biography, " Phillips brings his expertise to bear on the complete corpus of MacDonald'sfiction, pointing out each book's essential themes, and offering insights into how each title can be most perceptively be read.

1858

An Inauspicious Beginning

Welcome to The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald.^*

We will approach the books of this series as a whole, made up of thirty-seven individual parts. We recognize that not all readers will read every book in the set. Even fewer will be likely to read them in chronological order. We will nevertheless present the volumes in the progression of their writing as they contribute to a uniform corpus of written works. In this way they will tell not only their individual stories, but also, taken together, will weave a tapestry of the complete life story of their author. It is this singular life that comprises the whole.

This progressive account of George MacDonald’s “writing life” will be told, each stage building upon those that came before, in the introductions to the thirty-seven volumes of the series. These introductions trace MacDonald’s literary life through the particular prism of the development of his written works.

This somewhat unusual approach obviously has advantages and drawbacks. Reading the introductions of the various books in random order may not for some readers produce an altogether cohesive picture of MacDonald’s life. Yet together the volumes weave a complete portrayal of that life.

For readers who may choose to read only selected titles, yet want to gain an appreciation for the entire flow of MacDonald’s written corpus of works, the complete set of introductions are gathered together in Volume 38 of the series, George MacDonald A Writer’s Life. That progressive biography examines MacDonald’s life through a particular lens—that being the development of his published fiction works. It will have the added benefit of reviewing the backgrounds and high points of each book. Hopefully this will give readers perspective and insight into those titles they haven’t read, and help them decide which they want to read. This new “writer’s life” is a companion to my more comprehensive biography, George MacDonald Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller, first published in 1987 and still readily available in several formats.

Though the introductions to the titles of The Cullen Collection are progressive, the books themselves may in some cases most fruitfully be read out of the designated order. This volume before us, for instance, though Volume 1 of the set, is actually a poor first choice as an introductory read for one coming to MacDonald for the first time. As MacDonald’s first published work of fiction (and more particularly “fantasy”), it necessarily represents the initial volume of a progressive series. But in most cases it is best read after one has been steeped in other more “user friendly” titles. MacDonald wrote Phantastes at the outset of his writing career when he was, in a sense, groping for an authorial style and method and approach. It is not typical of the enormous corpus of work that followed. In my own case, after forty years of writing, my first published title does not represent my life’s work nearly so well as do my later books. The same is true of MacDonald.

Writers grow and mature and develop in their outlook, in their writing abilities, and in their spiritual perspectives. We have to read MacDonald’s works in that light. His later fiction is far more representative of the “true George MacDonald” than is this early title.

For one coming to MacDonald for the first time, I might recommend that you put Phantastes aside for now and read a few other titles first.

Titles that would be better suited to introduce new readers to MacDonald’s realistic fiction would be Malcolm, Sir Gibbie, Thomas Wingfold Curate, Donal Grant, Alec Forbes of Howglen, and Robert Falconer.

Titles that will best introduce MacDonald’s fairy tale fiction would be The Princess and the Goblin and The Wise Woman.

For titles to introduce new readers to MacDonald’s young readers fiction I would recommend At the Back of the North Wind and Gutta Percha Willie.

And as noted, you might enjoy George MacDonald A Writer’s Life as an overview and to help you decide what to read and in what order.

And now, as we embark on George MacDonald’s writer’s life and the volumes of The Cullen Collection, let us take a brief bird’s eye view of the events of MacDonald’s biography that led to the writing of Phantastes.

GEORGE MACDONALD’S BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

From a long line of the distinguished MacDonald clan, tracing its lineage through the Glencoe massacre of 1692, and the battle of Culloden of 1746, George MacDonald’s Highland roots and Celtic ancestry never left him. All his life, the rich soil of his heritage influenced his world outlook, artistic temperament, imagination, and the spiritual fountainhead of his writings and personhood.

George was born, the second of six sons, on December 10, 1824, to George MacDonald, Sr. and Helen MacKay MacDonald in the northeast Scottish market town of Huntly. One brother died in infancy, his mother died when he was eight, and a second brother died a year later. George Jr. lost two more brothers when he was in his twenties and thirties. Death came close early in life, and was thus a pivotal theme throughout his later writings. Indeed, his own “earliest definable memory,” as he recalled it, was of a funeral. ¹ He explored death’s complexities and eternal implications with insight, tenderness, and pathos in many of his writings, always with a hopeful confidence in the Infinite Goodness that lay beyond it.

Young George’s childhood provided a rich milieu that wove into the tapestry of the future man hues as varied and subtle as the heather that adorned the hills surrounding Huntly. Boyhood escapades intermingled freely with a reflective melancholy that brooded on the nature of God and the meaning of the universe. The autobiographical glimpses into these years from his later writings give us the outgoing, gregarious, mischievous, fun-loving Alec Forbes and Ranald Bannerman, along with Cosmo Warlock’s reflections on the cycle of water giving life to the earth and Robert Falconer’s inquiry into the nature of salvation and the repentance of devils. These and many other fictional images of boyhood from his works combine to characterize the temperament of their author and reveal a multi-faceted picture of his early life in Huntly.

MacDonald’s distant cousin and son-in-law Edward Troup (husband of his daughter Winifred) wrote in 1924: “The essential truth of George MacDonald’s boyhood will be found in Ranald Bannerman and in Alec Forbes of Howglen—not that, save in a few instances, actual incidents are related: but if you will regard Ranald and Alec as George MacDonald in boyhood, you will know what atmosphere he lived in, what were the conditions and outward circumstances of his life, and what were the influences that formed his character.” ²

MacDonald’s formative years seem to have been shaped by three overspreading (and certainly many lesser) influences. The first was his relationship with his father as a lifelong role model of goodness, and a human-image (obviously flawed but nonetheless real) of the character of God. The second was his relationship with his fiercely rigid and doctrinally unyielding Calvinist grandmother, who, along with aunts and other relatives, helped with daily mothering duties after the death of his mother. His grandmother is a woman vividly portrayed in Robert Falconer.

These two towering personalities of boyhood—the one of light, the other of darkness—set up the conflict that would largely define George MacDonald’s quest to discover and know the true nature and character of God: Was he a good and loving Father to all mankind and indeed all his creation, or was he an eternally wrathful Judge who would allow the elect into heaven but punish everyone else forever in hell? ³

C.S. Lewis places these two personalities into perspective, giving an insight that sets us on a path to understanding much in MacDonald’s later writings:

“An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central…

“His father appears to have been a remarkable man—a man hard and tender and humorous all at once, in the old fashion of Scotch Christianity…his son reports that he never, as a boy or man, asked him for anything without getting what he asked. Doubtless this tells us as much about the son’s character as the father’s…

“George Macdonald’s [sic] family (though hardly his father) were of course Calvinists. On the intellectual side his history is largely a history of escape from the theology in which he had been brought up. Stories of such emancipation are common in the Nineteenth Century; but…in most such stories the emancipated person, not content with repudiating the doctrines, comes also to hate…his forebears, and even the whole culture and way of life with which they are associated…Of such personal resentment I find no trace in Macdonald [sic]…

“His own grandmother, a truly terrible old woman who had burnt his uncle’s fiddle as a Satanic snare, might well have appeared to him as…a…sadist. Yet when something very like her is delineated in Robert Falconer and again in What’s Mine’s Mine, we are compelled to look deeper—to see, inside the repellent crust something that we can wholeheartedly pity and even, with reservations, respect.” ⁴

A third influence, not a spiritual one, was the simple boyish delight of freedom—of escape, to use Lewis’s word, from the darkness of his grandmother’s watchful eye and stern theology, escape from the rigid confines of the Sabbath and a cruel schoolmaster and Sunday’s boring sermons, escape into the joy of frolic and play and swimming and fun and laughter. Robert Falconer’s kite and violin are fit symbols of this merriment of boyhood, types of the freedom of the human spirit that yearns to soar both inwardly (the violin) and outwardly (the kite). The escape out of darkness into the light is further epitomized by Alec Forbes’s whooping delight to be let out of school, by the heaven of Robert’s and Shargar’s visits to Mr. Lammie’s farm, and by young George’s real-life holidays to the seashore and frequent visits with aunts, uncles, and cousins in Portsoy and Banff north of Huntly.

With family and relatives he often visited the village of Cullen five miles west of Portsoy along the North Sea coast. MacDonald’s son-in-law wrote, “For their holidays the family went sometimes to the Cabrach, often to one of the coast towns—usually Cullen.” ⁵ The ocean became young George’s delight. At the age of eleven, in a letter home to the Farm in Huntly, probably from Cullen, ⁶ he announced to his father his intention to go to sea as a sailor—in his words, “as soon as possible.”

He writes:

My dear Father,

It is now time for me to be thinking what I should betake myself to, and tho’ I would be sorry to displease you in any way, yet I must tell you that the sea is my delight and that I wish to go to it as soon as possible, and I hope that you will not use your parental authority to prevent me, as you undoubtedly can. I feel I would be continually wishing and longing to be at sea. Though a dangerous, it is undoubtedly an honest and lawful employment, or I would scorn to be engaged in it. Whatever other things I may have intended were in my childhood days [so] that you can hardly blame me for being flighty in this respect. O let me, dear father, for I could not be happy at anything else. And I am not altogether ignorant of sea affairs, tho’ I have yet a great deal to learn, for I have been studying them for some time back…

Your affectionate son.

George. ⁷

The village of Cullen and its environs, especially the mysterious and eerie ruins of Findlater Castle, seized the youth’s imagination with a love that remained with him, later powerfully portrayed in what is arguably his greatest work of fiction, Malcolm.

By the time George MacDonald, Sr. remarried—to Margaret McColl in 1839—his thoughtful son was nearly out from under his grandmother’s Calvinist shadow. George Jr. left for King’s College in Aberdeen the following year, embarking at fifteen on studies in chemistry and physics—or as it was then called, “Natural Philosophy.” Though already of a poetic bent, his initial career objective was in chemistry, for which he envisioned further studies in Germany.

STRUGGLES OF FAITH

Now in a sense on his own, maturing in the intellectually stimulating environment of one of Scotland’s major universities, George MacDonald was soon engaged in the internal quest to know who God is, to know himself, and to know where he and God stood together. Would his grandmother’s Calvinism turn him against a supposed wrathful and unforgiving God into unbelief? Or would the shining example of his father turn him toward a God of goodness and a relationship of intimacy with him? He would spend his university years between 1840 and 1845 trying to answer those questions.

These were years of spiritual doubt, conflict, and question as he struggled either to find faith or reject it. If the former, he must discover a faith that he could make his own. He must find the true nature of God such that, if indeed he was God, he could believe in him with all his heart. Letters from these years are few. They reveal little about MacDonald’s inner spiritual quest. ⁸ His personal writings between 1845 and 1848, however, looking retrospectively back on ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Progression of a Legacy—The written corpus of George MacDonald’s lifetime writings
• 1. PHANTASTES—An inauspicious beginning
• 2. DAVID ELGINBROD—“Mr. MacDonald, if you would but write novels”
• 3. THE PORTENT—A spooky first novel
• 4. ADELA CATHCART—Tales of a Christmas holiday
• 5. ALEC FORBES OF HOWGLEN—A little grey town in Aberdeenshire
• 6. ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBOURHOOD—A noble calling
• 7. ROBERT FALCONER—The great Bob
• 8. GUILD COURT—A slice of London life
• 9. THE SEABOARD PARISH—Portrait of a family
• 10. AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND—Mystical tale for the ages
• 11. RANALD BANNERMAN’S BOYHOOD—Memories of happy boyhood
• 12. THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN—Forerunner to Narnia
• 13. WILFRID CUMBERMEDE—Excursion into the shadows
• 14. THE VICAR’S DAUGHTER—Portrait of a lady
• 15. GUTTA PERCHA WILLIE—Finding one’s place in the general business
• 16. MALCOLM—Glorying in the fountain of existence
• 17. THE WISE WOMAN—A double story of the lost princess
• 18. ST. GEORGE AND ST. MICHAEL—A turbulent history
• 19. THOMAS WINGFOLD CURATE—A triumphant quest for truth
• 20. THE MARQUIS OF LOSSIE—True brotherhood
• 21. PAUL FABER SURGEON—The curate and the atheist
• 22. SIR GIBBIE—Wee Sir Gibbie—the waif angel
• 23. MARY MARSTON—An ideal of God’s daughterhood
• 24. CASTLE WARLOCK—An ideal of God’s sonship
• 25. THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE—Choices that set the course of character
• 26. WEIGHED AND WANTING—A heart of ministry
• 27. DONAL GRANT—A Gothic thriller of selfless love
• 28. WHAT’S MINE’S MINE—A man of honor
• 29. HOME AGAIN—Reminder of a parable
• 30. THE ELECT LADY—The true Church—hearts knit in unity
• 31. A ROUGH SHAKING—Quest for the unknown fatherhood
• 32. THERE AND BACK—Everything depends on the God you believe in
• 33. THE FLIGHT OF THE SHADOW—A double tale
• 34. HEATHER AND SNOW—A touching Highland tale
• 35. LILITH—Masterpiece or confused anticlimax
• 36. SALTED WITH FIRE—The Scots peasant-bard returns
• 37. FAR ABOVE RUBIES—A final self-portrait
• Appendix 1—Publication and Edition Notes
• Appendix 2—Selections from A Bibliography of George MacDonald
• Appendix 3—The Evolution of George MacDonald’s Faith, Theology, Writing Style, and Fiction Craft