J. R. R. Tolkien once said of The Hobbit (1937), ‘One writes such a story […] out of the leafmould of the mind.’ Referring to fertile compost made up of decaying leaves, the word mould can also describe a container that gives shape to liquids as they solidify. Unfortunately, all too many readers respond to Tolkien’s work according to the latter definition, picking and choosing passages out of context to fit them into a pre-established thesis. The same has been done to the fiction of Tolkien’s fellow Inklings, an Oxford writers’ group he helped form in the early 1930s. In contrast, this chapter attempts to honour Tolkien’s definition of leaf-mould in order to demonstrate how George MacDonald fertilised the imaginations of multiple Inklings. It focuses particularly on how Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams read MacDonald and how MacDonald’s thought and writing provided a fertile ground in which their own writings could take root.

George MacDonald powerfully influenced modern fantasy fiction, beginning with his contemporaries Lewis Carroll, Jean Ingelow, and Howard Pyle and continuing into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with writers ranging from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis to David Lindsay and Susanna Clarke. Much of that influence has to do with MacDonald’s ability to invest scenes with dreamlike intensity and mystery. In a MacDonald story, objects glimmer with half-sensed significance and undergo startling transformations. His narratives sometimes defy waking logic but always have the inevitability and urgency of dream. W. H. Auden identified MacDonald’s gift as ‘what one might call his dream realism, his exact and profound knowledge of dream causality, dream logic, dream change, dream morality’.

This chapter explores both the Scottish dimension of MacDonald’s biography and the ways Scotland is reflected in his writing. During his lifetime, Scotland itself underwent greater changes than the simple phrase ‘Victorian Scotland’ implies. In addition, MacDonald found himself in the position of feeling both intimately Scottish but also a distanced observer of the Scottish scene. His sense of his native land was compounded with his memories of his own early years there and with his reverence for Scotland’s previous literary achievements, particularly in the works of Burns, Scott, and Hogg. Scotland’s distinctiveness – indeed, its otherness – in the minds of his readers provided him with a means of articulating his own distinctive vision of reality, a vision which sought to relate the mundane world of Victorian Britain with the larger spiritual world of which (in his eyes) it was part. His fiction, therefore, encompassed both realism and fantasy; Scotland helped him bring the two into a fruitful relationship. By surveying the Scottish novels he wrote throughout his career, we can attain a more truthful understanding of his idiosyncratic contribution to nineteenth-century fiction.

Scholars have sometimes questioned whether the gothic is a genre that has any purchase on MacDonald’s writings, since his theology is so optimistic. Yet MacDonald’s fiction is replete with tropes associated with the gothic literary mode: secret chambers and labyrinthine passages, magic mirrors, battling skeletons, ghosts and supernatural voices. These figures and effects recur throughout his work, not only in the romances but also in his realist ‘kailyard’ Scottish novels. MacDonald’s work participates in a wider late Victorian turn toward a ‘realist’ gothic in which the supernatural basis of reality was a given, whether in Oliphan’s man at the library window, whose real presence is attested by several characters, or Stoker’s Dracula, who can be controlled by Catholic sacramentals. MacDonald goes further, crafting a fully gothic mystical theology, a journey into the life of God himself. His Gothic engenders an initiation into an occluded but real supernatural realm, in which, paradoxically, the fear of distance enables a closer mystical union with the divine.

The library offers an apt metaphor for approaching MacDonald’s literary influences. As the narrator of The Portent (1864) remarks of the ‘neglected library’ he is asked to organise, even the outside of a book can serve as ‘a kind of sacrament – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. To read MacDonald is thus to enter the library of books he himself inhabited, for few writers so openly acknowledged their debts to earlier masters and their forms. This chapter traces the works that most shaped MacDonald’s development as a writer of fantasy, particularly the German Romantics and his contemporaries John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll. For MacDonald, the library of past and present writers was not a site of anxiety but a communal space of imaginative fellowship; by tending to it, he helped build a new wing for modern fantasy while extending the spiritual possibilities of the realist novel.

While George MacDonald’s reputation as a fiction writer rests upon fantasy and Christianity more than realism, his realist novels reflect a remarkable generic range. MacDonald wrote twenty-nine realist novels between 1863 and 1897, most of them set in Scotland and England. Together, these novels share many overlapping themes and plot trajectories, and critics have objected to their formulaic characters (noble workmen, saintly women, dying children) and predictably happy endings. These shared features aside, the novels set in England also provide a micro-history of ‘the novel’ in the later Victorian age, incorporating elements of the social-problem novel and a concern for the urban poor; the sensation novel’s detective plot; and the gothic novel’s seeming supernaturalism, ultimately explained by nature. This chapter examines these subgenres as well as MacDonald’s sophisticated use of metafiction. While metafiction has been dominantly explored in modernism, MacDonald is one of many Victorian novelists whose self-conscious formal techniques draw attention to his experimental realism.

There is perhaps no greater anathema to the vocational attitude of George MacDonald than the concept of solitary genius. Implicit in the rural community of his youth, the explicit teaching and practice of such relational theology by key mentors further shaped MacDonald’s own practice. His web of friendships grew notably broad, a compendium of illustrious names from multiple countries, in addition to many obscure figures from a mix of classes and cultures. His keenness to share such friends – be they voices on a page or present in the flesh – is a signature of his craft and scholarship that warrants closer attention. This chapter considers a range of these relationships, from his mentors A. J. Scott and F. D. Maurice to Victorian critics John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and many more. A fundamental aspect of MacDonald’s significance to the Victorian era is that this commitment to relationships impacted not only his own work but the lives and works of many notable Victorians.

George MacDonald’s best-known and most influential works are his two fantasy novels for adults: Phantastes and Lilith. They are also, arguably, his least typical works. It can be difficult for modern-day readers to comprehend these idiosyncratic texts through the distorting glass of the twentieth century, particularly the development of psychoanalysis and genre fantasy. This chapter, then, offers a door into these complex, fascinating texts by reading MacDonald’s fantasy novels on their own terms. It positions each novel within its biographical context, indicating how it relates to other works MacDonald was writing at the time, and re-examines the question of why he turned to this genre at the beginning and ending of his career. It then offers a comparative analysis of the two novels. What emerges is a glimpse into MacDonald’s profound effort to maintain hope and faith in face of his own mortality and devastating personal tragedy.

This chapter discusses how MacDonald’s view of childhood played a significant part in making his view of life and death. MacDonald often writes in his works and in letters to his family that we do not lament the death of anyone whom we love, because death is an entrance to ‘more life’. This view can be attributed to MacDonald’s deep devotion to his Christian faith and his affinity for the German Romantics, but the process of his arriving at this firm belief could also be related to the intimate relationship with his family that he developed in childhood. Drawing from this biographical context, the chapter details two views of children in his works: children whose purity brings them inherently closer to God and children whose innocence manifests as stubbornness and ignorance, but who can mature with the help of others. It particularly considers Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871) and The Princess and Curdie (1883) to show how remembering childhood or inventing happy memories of childhood through storytelling helps the protagonists endure hard times and heal from spiritual disease.

When George MacDonald discusses how the imagination works by first moving our feelings, which then promote thought, he acknowledges that a genuine work of art will strike one person differently from the way it strikes another person. We call this interpretation, and the interpretation of art is expansive, open, full of possibilities. As MacDonald says, a work of art may mean many things. What matters is the creative relationship between the reader and the book.

Although George MacDonald considered poetry his primary literary vocation, his own verse works have received very little critical attention. His works are characterised by a restless experimentalism and a deep erudition. This chapter works to establish a basic understanding of the nature and organisation of MacDonald’s oeuvre. Under consideration are the poems included in his 1893 summative, self-edited anthology Poetical Works. These are approached as a textus receptus to evaluate the intentions and structure of MacDonald’s poetic project. The approach to this chapter, then, is in four parts: the first considers the closely held question of ‘Is MacDonald’s poetry any good?’, the second examines three impediments to the appreciation of MacDonald’s verse, the third offers a section-by-section overview of MacDonald’s Poetical Works (1893) – his self-edited anthology of his poems – and the fourth, a praxis segment, looks at an individual poem to see the various strands of his interests ‘in action’, as it were.

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).

This chapter studies the way in which MacDonald’s twelve Scottish novels relate to some of the dominant genres of Scottish literature in the nineteenth century, such as the national tale and the Kailyard school. It also analyses how MacDonald negotiates the tensions between nationalism and universalism in his works, since his ‘Scotch clannishness [was] a most elastic material & [he thought] of it as only a rudimental form of love to all men’ (letter to J. G. Holland, 27 May 1871). Finally, some attention is devoted to Adela Cathcart. While not usually included in MacDonald’s Scottish novels, Adela Cathcart can actually be read as a variation on the national tale and thus show how MacDonald’s works could exemplify Cairns Craig’s notion of a projective nationalism, whose aim was to make Scotland the spiritual core of the British Empire.

This chapter considers MacDonald’s work as a scholar and lecturer. From his 1859 appointment as professor of English literature and philosophy at Bedford College, to his (often sold-out) lecture tours in Britain, Europe, and North America, to the publication of his annotated Folio-based edition of Hamlet in 1885, MacDonald’s work as a scholar took various forms over the course of his literary career. What remained consistent, however, was his insistence that the critic should take a generous, affective approach, prioritising strengths over weakness and helping readers to experience the works at an emotional level. Drawing on both unpublished lectures and published scholarly works such as A Dish of Orts (1893) and the edition of Hamlet, this chapter explores MacDonald’s emphasis on the multivalence of texts, which anticipates post-critical approaches. However, the chapter also places him in dialogue with nineteenth-century critics Matthew Arnold and F. G. Fleay in order to draw out the distinctiveness of his critical approach within his context.

This critical introduction presents a biographically structured overview of MacDonald’s writings, providing readers with a sense of his cultural and critical contexts. The editors delineate the three phases of MacDonald’s life and works (early, major, late) and identify the main stylistic and thematic emphases of each. The final section engages influential interpretations of MacDonald, by C. S. Lewis and others, arguing that what has sometimes been perceived as failures of MacDonald’s art is better understood as a kind of ‘generative awkwardness’ resulting from his aesthetic of ‘noble unrest’. The chapters that follow are gestured to as doors into MacDonald’s disruptive vision.

This chapter examines George MacDonald’s lifelong, multifaceted engagement with the fairy tale, arguing that he utilised the genre as a uniquely ‘liminal’ form capable of mediating spiritual truth. The chapter first establishes liminality – the ambiguous, transitional state in a rite of passage – as its primary analytical framework. It then explores the surprising, liminal places fairy tales occupied in MacDonald’s life: as medicine for the dying, as unorthodox lectures, and as a preparation for the message of Christ. Situating MacDonald’s work within the Victorian debate between didactic moralists like George Cruikshank and whimsical aesthetes like Lewis Carroll, the chapter argues MacDonald forged a third path, as articulated in his seminal essay ‘The Fantastic Imagination’. This theoretical foundation is then used to analyse MacDonald’s fairy tales (such as ‘The Golden Key’ and ‘The Light Princess’) as intentionally crafted liminal entities. His fairy tales are not vehicles for simple morals but literary rites of passage, designed to strip characters and readers of commonplace certainties and guide them across thresholds into deeper spiritual and psychological awareness.

Articulating George MacDonald’s theology is a complicated project, given his well-known resistance to theological systems and the allusive character of his writing. Explicit theological statements are replete in his sermons and letters, although they usually emerge suggestively, in contrast to particular foils in Victorian Christianity. In his imaginative works, a variety of fictive voices emerges alongside the voice of a pastoral narrator; these voices are sometimes difficult to distinguish. The variety of sources that shaped his theological imagination and the extent to which he adhered to Christian orthodoxy (variously conceived) remain matters for debate. This chapter distils key themes of MacDonald’s theology across his body of work, including: the generative love of God as the deepest reality, the epistemological priority of ‘childlike imagination’ in response, and the soul-shaping journey of suffering leading to glory. It also notes tensions in MacDonald’s theology regarding divine providence, theodicy, and the possibility of universal reconciliation.

Although MacDonald is chiefly known as a literary figure, he saw himself first and foremost as a preacher, preaching thousands of sermons across his career and publishing five volumes explicitly on spirituality. This chapter explores these sermons, both spoken and unspoken, seeing them as metaphysical landscapes providing a space and a medium for theological reflection and spiritual formation. MacDonald’s theological aesthetic is to be found not only in the synthetic biblical hermeneutic he employed but also in the sense of the transcendent which pervades his sermons; his modus operandi in the sermons is the divine sonship, with an emphasis on ‘our real life with Christ concealed’, a distinctive feature of Scottish spirituality. MacDonald was a spiritual explorer, always in search of the inexhaustible ‘treasures of darkness’.

This chapter documents the almost entirely unexplored scientific biography of MacDonald, who found himself, in his Scottish education, at the forefront of Victorian innovation in science and science education. It resituates MacDonald’s writing within the contested debates and paradigm shifts in Victorian science, which attempted to redefine what science was and who got to participate in it – notions that changed drastically throughout MacDonald’s long life. It shows with which voices and views MacDonald aligned himself and into which discussions he actively sought to intervene, including on how Victorians envisioned its application especially in the ‘improvement’ of society. MacDonald’s fiction, and indeed fantastic literature in general, can be read as a foremost medium of engagement with and communication of scientific ideas. The final section of the chapter reads Lilith in this light – as MacDonald’s reflections on the place of science within society and the importance of it being unified with the imagination.