His Life

George MacDonald was born on 10 December 1824 at Huntly, in Aberdeenshire, the son of a farmer and mill-owner. His mother died when he was eight. He grew up among the fields and hills, the strict Calvinist preaching and the warm family life that fill his Scottish novels, and studied at King’s College, Aberdeen, graduating in 1845.

The minister

After some years as a tutor in London he trained for the Congregational ministry at Highbury College, and in 1850 became minister of Trinity Congregational Church at Arundel, in Sussex. In 1851 he married Louisa Powell; they had eleven children. At Arundel his preaching soon troubled the deacons: he spoke of a God whose love would not abandon the heathen, and was suspected of German theology. His salary was cut, and in 1853 he resigned. He never held a pastorate again, though he preached and lectured all his life, and in later years worshipped in the Church of England, drawn there in part by F. D. Maurice, whose friend he became.

The writer

Ill health and poverty followed the family for years. MacDonald turned to writing: a dramatic poem, Within and Without (1855), and then Phantastes (1858), a “faerie romance” unlike anything in English. His first novel, David Elginbrod (1863), brought him a wider readership, and for the next thirty-five years novels came almost yearly, many of them set in the Aberdeenshire of his boyhood: Alec Forbes of Howglen, Robert Falconer, Malcolm, Sir Gibbie. Alongside them came the children’s books that are now his best known, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie; volumes of poems, among them A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul; and three series of Unspoken Sermons.

He lectured on English literature in London, and his circle took in John Ruskin, Lady Byron, Octavia Hill and Charles Dodgson, whose manuscript of Alice’s Adventures the MacDonald children heard and loved before it was published. In 1872 and 1873 he made a long lecture tour of the United States. In 1877 he was granted a Civil List pension.

Bordighera

From the early 1880s, for the sake of their health, the family spent most of each year at Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera, where their house became a gathering-place for visitors and for the plays the family performed together. Lilith, his last and strangest romance, appeared in 1895. Louisa died in 1902. MacDonald died on 18 September 1905 at Ashtead, in Surrey, and his ashes were buried beside her at Bordighera.

His readers

His fantasies influenced writers from G. K. Chesterton to Madeleine L’Engle. C. S. Lewis, who found Phantastes on a station bookstall as a young man, said it had “baptised” his imagination; he called MacDonald his master, made him his guide in The Great Divorce, and gathered an anthology of his sayings in 1946.

Further reading

• Greville MacDonald, George MacDonald and His Wife (1924).
• C. S. Lewis (ed.), George MacDonald: An Anthology (1946).