About These Editions

This library gathers George MacDonald’s books in one place, free to read and download, set for comfortable reading on any screen.

Where the texts come from

Every book here is a transcription made by the volunteers of Project Gutenberg, who have typed or scanned and proofread nearly all of MacDonald’s work over the past thirty years. Each book’s page names the Project Gutenberg ebook it comes from, and the people who produced it.

For this site each transcription was converted and tidied: Project Gutenberg’s header and licence, the printed page numbers and the printed table of contents were taken out, and the headings were regularised so that each book divides into chapters. The words of the text are as Project Gutenberg gives them; mistakes in them are the transcription’s or the printer’s.

Arthur Hughes’s illustrations

Arthur Hughes drew the pictures for several of MacDonald’s books when they first appeared, and they are set back in the text where the books printed them: in At the Back of the North Wind, Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood, The Princess and the Goblin, Gutta-Percha Willie and the fairy tales of Dealings with the Fairies (here in The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories and Cross Purposes and The Shadows) from scans of early editions at the Internet Archive; and in Phantastes from the thirty-three drawings he made for its 1905 edition, scanned by St. Norbert College. Each book’s page says where its pictures come from, and each picture has a short description for readers who use a screen reader. Pictures added by other artists to later editions are left out.

A few of MacDonald’s other books were illustrated in his lifetime by other artists. Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood has the eight plates of its Strahan edition of about 1868, The Princess and Curdie James Allen’s eleven drawings for its first American edition (1883), A Rough Shaking W. Parkinson’s twelve pictures for its first edition (1891), and Guild Court the six of its American edition (1883).

The forms they come in

Online. Every book can be read here a chapter at a time. Use the contents button at the top left to move around the book, the arrow keys to turn pages, and the buttons at the top right to change the size of the text or switch between light and dark. Hovering over a paragraph shows a ¶ link you can copy to point someone to that exact passage. Search looks through the full text of every book at once.

EPUB is the format for e-readers, phones and tablets, and the Markdown text is the plain source from which everything else is made.

Modern English paraphrases

The sermons (Unspoken Sermons, The Hope of the Gospel and The Miracles of Our Lord) and the essays of A Dish of Orts also have a paraphrase in present-day English, restating MacDonald’s text paragraph by paragraph. It follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation, and the poems he quotes are left as he quoted them. The paraphrases were drafted with the help of an AI language model. They are meant as a companion for readers who find Victorian prose slow going: read them alongside the original, switch between the two with the Original / Modern control at the top of the page, and quote from the original.

Privacy

Visits to this site are counted with GoatCounter, which uses no cookies and doesn’t identify or follow you: it records the page viewed, the site that linked to it, and the browser, screen size and country, but not your IP address. Your text size, light or dark setting, and place in a book are kept only in your own browser.

Using these books

MacDonald died in 1905, and his writings are in the public domain. The editions on this site are dedicated to the public domain too, under CC0: you may copy, print, share, adapt and republish the texts and the downloadable files, for any purpose, without asking.

The modern English paraphrases are new writing, and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may reuse them in the same way, provided you make clear that they are paraphrases of MacDonald, not his own words, and say where they came from.

The design of this website and its own writing, such as the book introductions and these pages, are not covered by this dedication. Please don’t copy them to make another site.