Scottish Authors > George MacDonald Novelist, Poet & Preacher 1824-1905

MacDonald was born in Huntly on 10th December 1824, but moved soon after with his family to a nearby farm. He went to university in Aberdeen in 1840 and to Highbury College in 1848 to train as a Congregational minister. He was forced to resign from his first charge at Arundel in 1853 and lived thereafter as a man of letters and on the charity of his friends and disciples.

His first important original publication was a long religious poem, Within and without (1855) but a more important landmark was Phantastes (1858), his first major contribution to the genre of fantasy and a complex attempt to communicate that sense of otherness which is his abiding concern in his writing. Influenced by both English and German Romantic writers, and by religious poets of the Renaissance, Phantastes with its poetry and its visionariness was in turn an important influence on CS Lewis and his circle. Here, its hero starts a new day after a night at the foot of a protective beech:

I must act and wander. With the sun well risen, I rose, and put my arms as far as they would reach around the beech-tree, and kissed it, and said good-bye. A trembling went through the leaves; a few of the last drops of the night's rain fell from off them at my feet; and as I walked slowly away, I seemed to hear in a whisper once more the words: "I may love him, I may love him; for he is a man, and I am only a beech-tree."

MacDonald produced fantasy writing for both children and adults throughout his long career. A large family and no steady income, however, forced him to more saleable works and in 1863 he published David Eiginbrod, the first of around two dozen novels. In it he gave expression to his belief in universal redemption, a theological outlook which was still a minority view in the middle of the century but which became more accepted by the end of MacDonald's life. Half of these novels are set wholly or partly in nineteenth century Scotland and they form one of the most important fictional treatments of the Scottish scene between the generation of Scott and his circle, and the time of Stevenson.

A friend and confidant of "Lewis Carroll" and of John Ruskin, MacDonald survived many years of ill-health, partly by wintering abroad (often in Bordighera) during his later years. He died in Ashtead, Surrey on 18th September 1905. A memorial to him was recently erected in Drumblade Churchyard, Aberdeenshire. There has been a revival of interest in his writings and ideas, both here and abroad, in the last twenty years, though only his classic books for children remain securely in print.

Roland Heir, Grand Rapids, 1982.

William Raeper,George MacDonald,Tring, 1987.

David S Robb, George MacDonald, Edinburgh, 1987.

David S Robb

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