George MacDonald took to preaching early in life. In his boyhood he once “rushed into the kitchen, jumped upon the clean-scrubbed table, and began a learned discourse, indicating Bell Mavor, the maid, as a reprobate past redemption”:

Before long MacDonald would grow uneasy with the Calvinist beliefs from which this childhood frolic takes its bearings. He would later characterise the religion of his youth as one in which “hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell” (Robert Falconer 1: 152). Coming to feel “that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong” (qtd. in Greville MacDonald 155), MacDonald in maturity embraced a broad and undogmatic theology, and – at the urging of F. D. Maurice – eventually joined the Church of England. Yet the impulse to preach never left him. MacDonald is now principally remembered as a writer of fantasy and fairy tales, but his literary career was in one sense a stand-in for the pulpit. He briefly served as a Congregationalist minister in Arundel before being forced out for his unorthodox views on salvation. Unable to secure another appointment, and sustaining “a hand-to-mouth existence” with his family in Manchester, MacDonald came to prose fiction “through economic necessity” (Raeper 103, 125). Even once he had achieved literary fame, MacDonald continued to preach occasionally by invitation. Over the course of his lifetime he would also publish several volumes of sermons never delivered – not simply spiritual reflections, but, as the title of a series of his volumes has it, Unspoken Sermons (1867–Reference MacDonald1889).

Sermons are also prominent in MacDonald's realistic fiction. The good-natured Reverend Walton in MacDonald's The Seaboard Parish (Reference MacDonald1868) opens his narrative by excusing himself: “Dear Friends, – I am beginning a new book like an old sermon; but, as you know, I have been so accustomed to preach all my life, that whatever I say or write will more or less take the shape of a sermon” (1: 1). It is a beginning firmly in the tenor of MacDonald's realistic novels, all of which brim with preachers, sermons, and sermonizing. “People,” MacDonald once wrote, “find this great fault with me – that I turn my stories into sermons. They forget that I have a Master to serve first before I can wait upon the public” (qtd. in Greville MacDonald 375).

MacDonald in his fantasy and children's writing has seemed to his critics to have his priorities differently ordered. Richard H. Reis notices “a certain amount of preachifying” in “The Golden Key” (first published in 1867 in Dealings with the Fairies), but believes it justified by the fairy-tale context, in which one receives “information about that world's workings in the appropriately humble spirit with which one reads Baedeker when visiting Europe for the first time.” He continues: “By contrast, the sermonizing in any of MacDonald's conventional novels is burdensome and officious; the reader of the sermon is neither a child nor an alien” (80). Writing of the fairy tales, Jack Zipes similarly finds that

Zipes is surely right to see that much of the interest of MacDonald's fantasies and fairy tales arises from their blend of the playful and the prescriptive. His imagined worlds bind rules as well as break them. Yet whether this stance is as far removed from MacDonald's “conventional” writings as it suits the purposes of Reis's and Zipes's arguments to think is more doubtful (MacDonald, according to the latter, “shuns Victorian prudery” and “went against the Victorian grain” [Art of Subversion 109]). Reis's preference for the travel guide over the sermon in particular evokes a confidence and self-possession alien to MacDonald. The latter's unorthodoxy was both stranger and sterner than this implies, engaging a commitment to lecturing and labouring in cause of the unknown and unfamiliar that, I want to suggest, actually provides a crucial point of contact between his sermons and his stories. The editors of a recent collection of essays on MacDonald observe that “While MacDonald's role as a literary descendant of the Romantics and an ancestor of modern fantasy writers have been much explored . . . his place in his own time remains virtually untouched” (MacLachlan, Pazdziora, and Stelle v). In redressing that neglect, their book importantly draws attention to the social, political, and theological ideas that tie MacDonald to his age. One further way of setting MacDonald's Romantic inheritance within its Victorian context may be to notice the many echoes that exist between his fantasy works and his preaching. A profound consistency in the manner of MacDonald's thought is in this way made visible across the varied forms taken by his writing.

Coping with the “country of uncertainties” (Complete Fairy Tales 225) presented in a MacDonald fairy tale involves pressing on at all costs with the task one has been given without quite knowing why one is doing it. Alice and Richard find in “Cross Purposes” (1867) that “Any honest plan will do in Fairy-land, if you only stick to it. And no plan will do if you do not stick to it” (Complete Fairy Tales 113). What is required is to act in the manner of the boy-hero Colin in “The Carasoyn” (1871), who “was never at a loss when anything had to be done. Somehow, he always blundered into the straight road to his end, while another would be putting on his shoes to look for it” (Fairy Tales 189). This blundering evidently has to do with cultivating the unconscious, that which (as the curate in MacDonald's 1864 novel Adela Cathcart puts it) has the capacity to give life a “new and strange colouring” (2: 169). Colin, searching for the wise old woman who guides him in his adventures, has difficulty accepting that “the old woman was never found except by the speaker losing himself,” so “that it did not so much matter where he lost himself, provided only he was lost” (Fairy Tales 215). But the distinctive slant given by MacDonald to this familiar symbolism is suggested by Colin's peculiar disposition: “all the time that he was busiest working, he was busiest building castles in the air. I think the two ought always to go together” (189).

Recent theorizations of fairy-tale symbolism have sought to move beyond Freudian and Jungian perspectives, contending that social and historical contexts are as important as individual unconscious desires or collective archetypes in comprehending what Bruno Bettelheim famously called The Uses of Enchantment.Footnote ¹ Attempts to elaborate a social history of the nineteenth-century fairy tale have often touched on the question of work. Zipes himself concludes that “At a time when the human relations constituting the order of work and play were being administered, rationalized, and instrumentalized in preparation for a new mode of industrial production,” the fairy-tale hero is able to “represent the ultimate refusal to become a cog in the wheel of growing state regulation, industrialization and bureaucratization” (Radical Theories 74–75). MacDonald's heroines and heroes share in this refusal, but with an important difference: as well as opposing the reification of work and play, his stories insist that imaginative play requires work – that blundering in fancies, as Colin finds, is an occupation to be laboured at. In MacDonald's less successful tales, this insistence takes on the appearance of heavy moralizing, as when Agnes, the conceited heroine of “The Wise Woman” (1874), discovers that “There is but one true way . . . of getting out of any position we may be in, and that is, to do the work of it so well that we grow fit for a better” (Fairy Tales 276). The twin difficulty for Agnes is that she is both unimaginative and work-shy. She will come to discover that allowing oneself to be enchanted involves explicit and determined toil.

MacDonald's sermons also proclaim the need to be assiduous in unknowing. He advocated “the faith of ignorant but hoping children, who know that they do not know, and believe that thou knowest” (Unspoken Sermons 1: 65). In this too a labour of imagination is required. An unpublished letter from MacDonald to his close friend Georgina Cowper-Temple in 1877 insists that “If we can build castles of air, God can turn them into granite” (National Library of Scotland, MS.9754.11). It is no surprise that the rigid definitions and strict formularies familiar to many shades of Victorian Christianity appeared to MacDonald obstacles rather than aids to belief. The higher and mystical faith, he wrote echoing John 20.29, is that of “those who have not yet seen and yet have believed” (Unspoken Sermons 1: 62–63), as when the human will “not seeing God, not seeming to itself to grasp him at all, . . . yet holds him fast” (Unspoken Sermons 1: 176). The question the Christian ought to ask him or herself is not “Do I believe or feel this thing to be right?” but “Have I left all to follow him?”: “To the man who gives himself to the living Lord, every belief will necessarily come right; the Lord himself will see that his disciple believe aright concerning him” (Unspoken Sermons 2: 242). Rather than worry about whether the right plan is being followed – or consult a travel guide – it is better to set out at once:

F. D. Maurice also had a “system phobia,” as he called it, and his conception of the knowledge of God in Scripture similarly proclaimed that in view of the partiality of all theological schemes, “Revelation is a living word, to be received only by understanding and trusting it to be the guide for life” (Welch 1: 256). MacDonald in his sermons shares Maurice's Coleridgean emphasis on divine immanence in the privileging of intuition and experience as modes of religious knowledge. At the same time, there is something distinct from Maurice in MacDonald's determined insistence on labouring in cause of the mystical and visionary. A Romantic feeling that “we seem to have dim glimpses into regions from which we receive no word to bring away” (Unspoken Sermons 1: 98) is coupled throughout his sermons with the sterner conviction that “It is the noblest exercise to act with uncertainty of the result, when duty is itself certain” (Unspoken Sermons 1: 147).

In this MacDonald is closer to another product of a curious alliance of Scottish Calvinism and German Romanticism: Thomas Carlyle. The famous imperative of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833–34) is to “‘Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,’ which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer” (148). This was also MacDonald's creed, and a Carlyle-like call to obedience issues through his sermons. That the things of God are mostly uncertain is seen as more reason not to pause over God's command: “It is obedience, friends, that is faith,” MacDonald told a London congregation in 1882, “it is doing that thing which you, let me say, even only suppose to be the will of God; for if you are wrong, and do it because you think it is His will, He will set you right” (George MacDonald in the Pulpit 72).

The profound impact of the evangelical pulpit upon Carlyle's habits of thought is well recognised. By contrast, it is Maurice's influence, along with the mysticism of German Romantics such as Boehme and Lessing, which dominates studies of MacDonald's fantasy writing, to the exclusion of his early religion.Footnote ² The latter has most often been seen in the terms outlined by G. K. Chesterton in 1924, as an inspiration only in the sense of being renounced. Chesterton wrote that while “Carlyle never lost the Puritan mood even when he lost the whole of Puritan theology,” MacDonald's transformation was more entire: “If an escape from the bias of environment may be the test of originality, Carlyle never completely escaped, and George MacDonald did. He evolved out of his own mystical meditations a complete alternative theology leading to a completely contrary mood” (“Introduction,” Greville MacDonald 12). Chesterton's truer estimation, delivered elsewhere, was that MacDonald's fantasy writing represented “a sort of optimist Calvinism” (Victorian Age 152). The complexity in MacDonald's mature relationship with the religion of his youth suggested by the latter remark is nowhere more evident than in his fictional renderings of its central act of worship: the sermon. Most of MacDonald's realistic novels are heavily autobiographical, and, in their portrayal of pulpit religion, draw upon MacDonald's early experience of evangelical revivalism at the Missionar Kirk at Huntly, Aberdeenshire, which he attended in his youth. The Missionar Kirk, which had broken with the national Church of Scotland in the First Secession of 1733, was ultra-Sabbatarian, and its Sunday observances, according to Norman J. Girardot, “were meant to be a concentrated manifestation of a Christian life dedicated to God,” to the extent that “members of the Missionar Kirk were notorious throughout the area for the righteous rigor and interminable length of ‘their church-going habits’” (23). MacDonald's fiction reveals the intense anxiety over personal salvation that hellfire sermons could provoke among the faithful. Time and again in his realistic novels, preaching induces the kind of terror experienced by the title character in Robert Falconer (Reference MacDonald1868), who could not put off “feeling that God was ready to pounce upon him if he failed once” (1: 154). Equally, to be released into a more generous view of God's justice, as MacDonald himself eventually was, almost always involves a reaction against the kind of evangelical preaching heard by Hugh Sutherland in David Elginbrod (Reference MacDonald1871): “a strange, grotesque, and somewhat awful medley – not unlike a dance of death, in which the painter has given here a lovely face, and there a beautiful arm or an exquisite foot, to the wild-prancing and exultant skeletons” (294).

Such descriptions would seem to reveal little but antipathy to modes of evangelical preaching. Yet, as David S. Robb comments, “Despite his subsequent rejection of some of his theological inheritance, MacDonald's spirit always had the combativeness, the stiff-neckedness, the absoluteness of the Covenanters whose distant heir he was” (6).Footnote ³ The need for a nuanced understanding of MacDonald's mature attitude to the religion of his youth is suggested by the fact that pulpit religion in MacDonald's realistic novels is not uniquely a horror-show. Listening to a sermon in a Missionar Kirk in Alec Forbes of Howglen (Reference MacDonald1865), Annie Anderson is brought to a terrible realisation, familiar to MacDonald's realistic novels: “A spiritual terror was seated on the throne of the universe, and was called God – and to whom should she pray against it?” (1: 237). Yet even many years later, after she has renounced the Calvinist beliefs espoused by the preacher, Annie retains a feeling of “awful reverence” towards him: “How could this be? Simply because they left unaltered the conviction that this man believed in God, and that the desire of his own heart brought him into some real, however undefinable, relation to him who was yet nearer to him than that desire himself, and whose presence had caused its birth” (1: 234). The complex of feelings evoked by Annie's memory of the preacher shows it possible to be at once admiring of evangelical fervour and critical of the end to which it moves. MacDonald's account of a Missionar Kirk sermon later in the same novel is no less carefully poised:

This is a proclamation of the Gospel which, at the same time as it confines and appals, opens a vein of true emotion and strengthens tired spirits.

Few modern readers nowadays choose to embark on novels which are, as William Raeper observes, for the most part “written as though delivered straight from the pulpit” (195). The inference here is that MacDonald's fantasies and fairy tales are differently inspired, which is in one sense clearly right. Yet the realistic novels are perhaps not as far removed from his more enduring writings as they might at first seem. Several of his best-known fairy tales, including “The Light Princess,” first appeared in a realistic novel, Adela Cathcart (Reference MacDonald1864), as stories told to Adela by her uncle and intended to rouse her from a strange and unexplained illness. It is no coincidence that the novel includes a kindly curate, generally admired for the excellence of his sermons, all of which are in the parabolic mode MacDonald came to favour in his own preaching, and one of which is but another version of “The Child in the Midst,” included in the first volume of MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons. The curate is given to pronouncements indebted to MacDonald's reading in German Romanticism, and he champions storytelling as a potential cure for Adela's condition when others are more sceptical, declaring it the means to “another kind of life” (2: 169).

MacDonald soon published several of the fairy tales from Adela Cathcart as standalone pieces, independent of their original fictional frame. Yet the frequency with which sermons feature in later fairy tales and fantasies also suggests that these bear a closer relation to his preaching than has usually been thought. Emblematic of the dissolute state of Gwyntystorm in The Princess and Curdie (1883) is the falsity of the preaching heard in the city's great temple. From its confines is promoted something like a doctrine of particular election: “The main proof of the verity of their religion . . . was, that things always went well with those who professed it” (315). The temple preacher's comeuppance for pandering to the self-deceptions of his congregation is not long in arriving, materializing in the form of the grotesque “legserpent” to interrupt him mid-flow:

There were surely occasions at the Missionar Kirk at Huntly when the youthful MacDonald, disillusioned with the severities being advanced from the pulpit, had wished for something like the appearance of a legserpent. But if preaching on the one hand swells a conceited self-importance in The Princess and Curdie, it is also the means by which wickedness is exposed. Corrupt courtiers have brought the King's household to near ruin until the young hero Curdie arrives to expel them and restore order. The downfall of the courtiers is assured by their refusal to take note of the “preachments” (315) given by a virtuous chambermaid. Her call to repentance must be heeded for Gwyntystorm to recover its honour. Once the King has, with Curdie's assistance, wreaked his revenge upon the courtiers, nothing is left for the city's inhabitants but to accept their disgrace: “They crept home like chidden hounds” (338).

This is more admonitory than most of the preaching that occurs in MacDonald's fairy tales and fantasies. In one of the fairy tales that first appeared in Adela Cathcart, “The Shadows,” the spread of artificial light is threatening the capacity of the ageless Shadows to go about their habitual task of frightening human beings. Appealing to the King of the fairies for help, they insist their intentions are not malevolent. One Shadow overheard by the King reports that he has recently been engaged in scaring a clergyman who had been used to prepare his sermons in the looking-glass. By comparison, the preaching heard by the Shadows themselves is hardly so vain. The King is taken to listen to a sermon in the Church of the Shadows in which the preacher at first laments their fated inability to remember further back than the previous day. However, he goes on to insist that rather than a cause for sorrow, this presents the Shadows with an imperative to do good: “We ought indeed to love one another, for we alone inherit oblivion; we alone are renewed with eternal birth; we alone have no gathered weight of years” (Fairy Tales 69).

Few connections have been made between preaching and fantasy writing in published scholarship on MacDonald. Robert H. Ellison's pioneering study of Victorian homiletics includes a chapter on MacDonald's sermons, identifying him along with Spurgeon and Newman as among the most important preachers of the period, but says nothing of the fantasies and children's books (Victorian Pulpit 92–113). Conversely, there has been a tendency on the part of literary commentators to measure the success of MacDonald's fairy tales and fantasies by their distance from his sermons, and, more especially, by how far they are able to escape what Chesterton called “the bias of environment” – the influence of MacDonald's early evangelicalism. Yet it is not difficult to think that MacDonald's notion of the hard work of unconsciousness, prevalent in both sermons and fairy tales, owes something to the religion of his youth. One of the keynotes of nineteenth-century evangelicalism, according to its most important recent historian, was “activism” – “the imperative to be up and doing” (Bebbington, Evangelicalism: A History 12). “Brethren,” Charles Spurgeon urged the ministers he was engaged in training, “do something; do something; do something. While committees waste their time over resolutions, do something” (qtd. in Bebbington, “Voluntary Religion” 57). Something like this demand issues through MacDonald's fairy tales, in which it rarely pays to be idle. Irene in The Princess and the Goblin (1872) is given a ring by her grandmother, the inside of which holds a fine thread; if she ever gets into trouble, she need only loosen the thread and follow it to safety. The thread, as Irene's grandmother describes it, appears to symbolize the need to lose oneself in the unconscious: “The thread is too fine for you to see it. You can only feel it. . . . remember, it may seem to you a very round-about way indeed, and you must not doubt the thread” (84). But dreaming, in MacDonald, is never without labour. On one occasion the thread leads Irene down into a mine where – unbeknownst to her – Curdie has been trapped by the goblins underneath a stack of stones. Realizing that the thread disappears into the stack, Irene sets about her task: “She was dismayed at the very idea, but, losing no time, set to work with a will; and with aching back, and bleeding fingers and hands, she worked on, sustained by the pleasure of seeing the heap slowly diminish, and begin to show itself on the opposite side of the fire” (110). Needless to say, the marriage of imaginative credulity and hard toil succeeds in rescuing Curdie from the goblins.

The boy-miner Curdie similarly blends industry and imagination. If Peter Hunt is right to suggest that “children's books are, almost by definition, NOT concerned with work” (175–76) – a notion that Hunt oddly seeks to substantiate with reference to MacDonald – then Curdie presents a singular case. He perfectly combines working and dreaming, being willing to put in additional hours at the mine so that he might at once “buy a very warm red petticoat for his mother” and because “he had just a faint hope of finding out what the goblins were about” in their underground manoeuvrings (Princess and Goblin 37). A dedication to labouring in the mine is as important as imaginative agility in thwarting their evil plans. When, in The Princess and Curdie, Irene's grandmother sends him off to the King's palace with the words, “You have orders enough to start with, and you will find, as you go on, and as you need to know, what you have to do,” we know she is playing to Curdie's best instincts (224).

MacDonald hoped for the same from his readers. “We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed,” MacDonald writes in “The Fantastic Imagination” (Fairy Tales 10), and his refusal to indulge that greed by obvious symbolism is a notable feature of his fantasy writing. At the Back of the North Wind, perhaps the most theological of MacDonald's fantasy works, appears as something of an exception here, straying dangerously near to abstraction, with the North Wind admitting to Diamond that “Sometimes they call me Bad Fortune, sometimes Evil Chance, sometimes Ruin; and they have another name for me which they think the most dreadful of all” (363–64). A figure for death, then; and yet, at the last, MacDonald appears to slip beyond the construct: “They thought [Diamond] was dead,” says MacDonald's narrator at the end of the book, but “I knew that he had gone to the back of the north wind” (378). “There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory” (Fairy Tales 7–8), MacDonald wrote of the fairy tale in “The Fantastic Imagination.” Something similar applies to the end of At the Back of the North Wind: that the narrator's sentiment may not wholly be a euphemism keeps alive the possibility of alternative interpretations of the North Wind's significance. There is again a connection with MacDonald's sermons. He wrote of a Gospel parable that “It is something to tell you how to act, how to do, how to think; and if you put it to any use except a practical one, you will never understand it to all eternity” (George MacDonald in the Pulpit 236). Of his own preaching he asserted, “I care to tell you nothing, except it be to rouse the practical in you” (George MacDonald in the Pulpit 227). In the case of sermon as of fairy tale, truths in MacDonald's view are better discovered than taught.

In her 2009 study Artful Dodgers, Marah Gubar argues that the “Golden Age” of children's literature was neither wholly in thrall to the so-called “cult of the child,” idyllically removed from adulthood, nor to its converse: the notion – as advocated by a number of recent critics – of a colonization of children's literature by adult anxieties and desires. MacDonald's emphasis on the hard graft of imagination provides a vivid illustration of the many-sided negotiation between childhood experience and adult authority that Gubar identifies as characteristic of children's literature in this period. Her argument bears particular importance for reading MacDonald given the tendency on the part of his recent advocates to be defensive about his didacticism. Roderick McGillis, for instance, observes with regret that MacDonald “cannot escape his Victorian environment, and he emphasizes, with patriarchal earnestness, duty, obedience, and work.” McGillis asks us to look beyond this aspect of MacDonald's writing: “when he is at his best, dialectic is his mode of thought, not assertion” (introduction to Princess and Goblin xxii). One need only turn to Colin Manlove's hostile account of MacDonald's oeuvre in Modern Fantasy (1975) to see why McGillis might be anxious to play down his subject's earnestness. Manlove sees a fundamental inconsistency between MacDonald's Romantic mysticism and his desire to find moral imperatives, a desire he associates with MacDonald's Calvinist background and sermonizing tendencies. The result, according to Manlove, is that “Obedience now becomes not only a means to unconscious self-surrender, but of conscious suppression of self” (63).

Faced with this censure of MacDonald, it is worth asking again what exactly he demands obedience to in his sermons – what he is earnest in the cause of. He wrote to his father in 1851 that “Most preaching seems to me greatly beside the mark. That only can I prize which tends to make men better – and most of it ‘does na play bouf upo’ me’ [does not even bark at me]” (qtd. in Greville MacDonald 150). Yet if (as MacDonald believed) what makes men better is to act now rather than to await instruction, there is the possibility that preaching itself will come to appear beside the mark:

This is an interpretation of the Gospel that wants to do away with itself. To talk about religion is in a sense no help at all; it needs instead to be assayed, tried, ventured. “So doing,” MacDonald told a congregation in 1879, “whatever yet there is to learn, you shall learn it” (MacDonald in the Pulpit 50–51). An oddity of recent critical interest in MacDonald is the desire to find him expressive of the vitality of Victorian religious doubt, locating his work in what Philip Davis identifies as “the uncomfortable territory between straightforward belief and outright disbelief” (36). This neglects what Kerry Dearborn, in a recent study of MacDonald's theology, describes as MacDonald's desire to avoid “the common pitfall of cheap grace in which one embraces unconditional grace without the corollary of unconditional obedience” (14). Assurance of purpose cannot but be flawed in MacDonald's estimation, for “The man who is proud of anything he thinks he has reached, has not reached it” (Hope of the Gospel 85). This is true of his stories as of his sermons. It is for this reason that McGillis's distinction (“when he is at his best, dialectic is his mode of thought, not assertion”) mistakes the character of MacDonald's writing, for it neglects the way in which he was assertive in cause of the unknown, neither precisely single- nor double-minded.

“[I]f we are not practical, we are nothing,” MacDonald told a Unitarian congregation in 1879 (MacDonald in the Pulpit 48), a lesson thoroughly absorbed by the heroes and heroines of his fantasy writing. One must always be doing, even – and perhaps especially – without knowing why. Toiling in uncertainty is thus made a necessity in both MacDonald's sermons and his stories. This has important implications for how we understand the nature of his achievement. It suggests that the rift often proposed to exist between the forms taken by his writing has been exaggerated, and may be a misconstruction. The resurgence of interest in MacDonald over recent years is long overdue. A possible way in which we might encounter him afresh is to take more account of the continuities that exist across his work, refusing to isolate the various areas of his activity. MacDonald's insistence that the unconscious requires labour is one such continuity. The curious instruction given by the lady in “The Golden Key” to Mossy and Tangle is typical of more than his fantasy writing: “if you should lose each other as you go through the – the – I never can remember the name of that country, – do not be afraid, but go on and on” (Fairy Tales 131). Here as elsewhere in MacDonald, in sermon as in story, seeking as much as losing is necessary to finding.