Children's Literature and the History of Ideas

In The Renaissance of Wonder in Children's Literature (1977) Marion Lochhead attempts to identify the rebirth of an elusive magical quality, the essence of which she calls "holiness," tracing this visionary strain of fantasy from its origins in the fantasies of George MacDonald and Hans Christian Andersen, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, considering Victorian domestic fantasy, the Irish writers Patricia Lynch and James Stephens, Tolkien's Middle Earth and Lewis's Narnia, and concluding with several contemporary British fantasists. Although the study does not pretend to be comprehensive, Lochhead's definitions of "wonder" remain obscure and her process of selection puzzling. Whereas the attempt to establish the existence of such a tradition is undeniably admirable, Lochhead's judgments are hopelessly distorted by an insistently Christian (or, more specifically, Catholic) bias. Throughout her book she dwells on "holiness" and chides modern fantasies which lack this trait.

The book is not, strictly speaking, a study of MacDonald's fantasy, but the author does devote five of her sixteen chapters to a discussion of his life, intellectual background, and the literary influences upon his work. Her emphasis upon his Celtic heritage is pleasantly informative, though cursory and sometimes misleading. In tracing the influences upon MacDonald's fantasies, for example, she stresses traditional Celtic stories such as "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer," as well as the fairy tales of Andersen, but she fails to mention MacDonald's acknowledged debt to German Romantic fairy tales or the potent influence of Perrault's "Sleeping Beauty," which MacDonald used as the model for "The Light Princess" and "Little Daylight." MacDonald's powerful affinities with the whole Romantic movement are, in fact, ignored: his Words-worthian vision of childhood, his use of the quest romance form, or his studies in the writings of mystic Jacob Boehme. Even the obvious Calvinism which surfaces in the unpleasant fairy tale, The Wise Woman (1875), is not mentioned. Lochhead stresses parallels between Dante's Beatrice and the white goddesses in MacDonald's works, while omitting any reference to similar powerful female figures in Celtic lore, in the Cabala, in German Romantic stories, or even the stern white female authority figures in Charles Kingsley's Water Babies. Her entire discussion of MacDonald's background and his place in nineteenth-century literature is, in fact, weakened because she has not consulted the most recent research on the subject. Although disparagingly citing Robert Lee Wolff's heavily Freudian study of MacDonald, The Golden Key (1961), she seems unaware of Richard Reis's much more balanced and objective George MacDonald (1972). Lochhead does not note that MacDonald was totally enmeshed in the literary world of his time, enjoying friendships with John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, and other eminent Victorians, or that he had thoroughly assimilated conventions of fairy tale and fantasy from France, Germany, and the native tradition in England, as well as from Denmark and Scotland. She omits any discussion of Ruskin's King of the Golden River (1851), an important work in any historical treatment of English fantasy, and refers to Carroll and the Alice books only briefly. She also leaves out works that appear to be much more specifically indebted to MacDonald than many that are included—Dinah Mulock's The Little Lame Prince (1874), for example.

In general, commentators on MacDonald's fantasies run to extremes: those who adopt an excessively reverential tone in dealing with the theological implications of his work and those who essentially cannot believe in the wholeness of his religious views and who look for signs of psychological and spiritual anguish. Lochhead is definitely a member of the former school. Her religious bias appears in excessively theological interpretations of MacDonald's fantasies. For example, after describing the invisible thread attached to the Princess Irene's ring in The Princess and the Goblin, Lochhead queries, "Is this, symbolically, the thread of...