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  • An Unpublished Children's Story by George MacDonald
  • Glenn Edward Sadler (bio)

There is hardly a nineteenth-century writer of fairytales and stories for children and adults who has undergone a greater eclipse of popular reputation than has George MacDonald (1824-1905), praised in 1924 by G. K. Chesterton as being "a Saint Francis of Aberdeen" and by his son Dr. Greville MacDonald as having a "spiritual genius whose art was so rare that, had he confined himself to poetry and purely imaginative story-telling, he could not have been almost forgotten." MacDonald's "fairy-tales and allegorical fantasies were epoch-making," claims his son, "in the lives of multitudes, children and parents alike, and still are widely read."1 For all of this, MacDonald has been neglected but not entirely forgotten. At least half a dozen or so of his stories have gained free entrance into the Palace of Classics: At the Back of the North Wind, 1871 (possibly his most famous); The Princess and the Goblin, 1872, and The Princess and Curdie, 1883, which have assured his fame; The Wise Woman, 1875; and his two adult faerie romances, Phantastes, 1858, and Lilith, 1895, fairytales, parables and fantasies which are currently in print.2 (A first edition copy of his classic collection, Dealings with the Fairies, Illustrated by Arthur Hughes, 1867, commands an extremely high price, even in worn condition.) In the midst of a revived interest in the ancient art of myth-making, and of symbolic literature, particularly folklore and fairy-tales, there is reason to believe that the general reader will be joining again the literary critic—as C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden have done—in pursuing more of MacDonald's "working genius," his canny ability to cross successfully over the hazardous modern age barriers into Faerie and to spin wonder out of a night in the woods. "I do not write for children," insisted George MacDonald, "but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five."3 No dictum about the intention of writing (or enjoying) books for children could be more necessary, demanding or rewarding than MacDonald's.

As a lifelong poet and novelist, MacDonald nearly exhausted his genius. Forced by financial stress and a rapidly growing family (eleven plus two adopted) to become a novelist and critic, MacDonald economically published almost everything he wrote, reissuing his stories and poems in varied forms. Meticulously he revised his lyrics and translations of Novalis, at times to the point of literal rigidity. Fairytales like the English Märchen, "The Fairy Fleet" (renamed in its longer form "The Carasoyn") or, for example, the highland romance of Second Sight, The Portent, he altered, unfortunately without an increase in power or structure.

A study of MacDonald's manuscripts, drafts and revisions reveals the painstaking care which he took with details (one can hardly read the text of Sir Gibbie because of corrections), and we see something of his mode of composition. One [End Page 18] notes at once how MacDonald's visual and musical senses—faculties not uncommon among Scottish writers—4 influenced and often activated him verbally, when he wrote poems as a first expression (frequently when confined to his bed during illness), poetic beginnings which later went into longer pieces or were placed in novels when he felt better. An example of this is his use of juvenile verse. Almost every reader of children's verse had read MacDonald's classic couplet "Baby"—

Where did you come from, baby dear?Out of the everywhere into here—

which he embedded in At the Back of the North Wind as a poetic key to its meaning; thus making the tale of Diamond and Mistress North Wind a fanciful adventure into the spiritual maturation of the child or childlikeness (as he called it), rather than simply an instructional story which ends in death. Critics of MacDonald's stories have yet to fully appreciate the relationship of his poetry to his fiction in spite of their repeated comments on his "mythopoeic" imagination.

MacDonald did not ordinarily leave stories unfinished, as he did poems. His manuscripts, scattered widely throughout Britain and the United States,5 show how frugal he...

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