George MacDonald    1824-1905

Between Charles Dickens's and Oscar Wilde's noted American tours came George MacDonald's.

In the United States, the fantasy writer and philosopher MacDonald was received as the eminent Victorian he was in 1872, meeting with Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. His British literary connections were no less impressive: he numbered among his friends and confidantes John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Lewis Carroll (MacDonald's children were among the first to read the Alice books in manuscript), and his influence can be traced in C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden.

Little read now, MacDonald's fantasies for children and adults were critically and popularly well received when they were published from 1855 until the end of the century. These fantasies include the adult work Phantastes (1855) and MacDonald's stories and poems for children, Dealings with Fairies (1867), At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and The Princess and Curdie (1883). Like Andrew Lang, who would compile collections of fairy tales in the 1890s, MacDonald rejected realism as a viable mode of storytelling. Although realism was the dominant form of writing in the 1870s and '80s (think of the novels of George Eliot and Anthony Trollope), MacDonald rejected it, as well as the increasing Victorian reliance on science and rational experiment. For MacDonald, realism and science constrained and damaged the imagination, placing limitations on the world of the spirit and the inner life.

MacDonald frequently went against the grain of prevailing Victorian belief: His career as a Congregationalist minister ended after only three years, when his sermons were found to be objectionable and lacking in sound dogma. With his insistence on the world of fantasy as the means by which to improve one's understanding of "real life," MacDonald stood as a potent ancestor of imaginative writers of children's literature including Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne.