George MacDonald’s major novels for children can be read as demonstrating shifts in the development of English children’s literature from the perspectives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in relation to the approaches to moral education, the genre of fantasy, and awareness of social realities. Unlike his predecessors’ creations, MacDonald’s protagonists acquire agency; they engage with emotional and practical problems emanating from the immediacy of their social circumstances. The sophistication of the construction of his child characters and their interaction with their worlds, whether real or imagined, created the literary pathways for children’s writers to come, such as E. Nesbit (1858–1924), C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), and contemporary writers of fiction for children. The discussion focuses on signifying how his work relates to the history of English fiction for children through consideration of At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), Gutta-Percha Willie (1873), and The Princess and Curdie (1883).