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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter turns to the Persianate tazkirah tradition to show how the shared discourse of literary modernization, with its inherent nationalism and Victorian-influenced puritanism, led modernizers to work together to remake their shared Persianate heritage and create chaste, heteronormative, nationally bounded literary histories. These literary histories, produced as they most often were for modernizing educational institutions, likely not only reflected changing conventions but also played a pedagogical role in spreading them. The generations who began to receive a modern education grew up writing poetry differently under such influences. In this way, the modernizing conventions that were first developed or deployed by literary historians impacted other genres of Persianate literature.

The Epilogue reflects on the ways that nineteenth-century texts consistently acknowledge the post-lapsarian state of human existence. The literary works discussed in this book all, to some extent, either recreate the events of Milton’s epic in a world that is fallen or tell the story of what happens after the expulsion. Drawing on Christopher Ricks, the Epilogue identifies a single word – ‘error’ – as emblematic of Milton’s nineteenth-century legacy. ‘Error’ points to its post-lapsarian meanings even when used to describe Eden before the Fall. After opening with the 1790 disinterment of Milton’s corpse, the Epilogue turns to another disturbing anecdote to illustrate the complexity of Milton’s nineteenth-century reception: the history of a Victorian edition of Milton’s poetry, bound in tanned human skin. The skin in question belonged to George Cudmore, executed for murder in the 1830s. This instance of anthropodermic bibliopegy reveals that Milton’s works, while revered and respected by the Victorians – his body parts were treated as relics – were also open to disruption and reinterpretation.

Chapter 4 reads the fiction of Thomas Hardy alongside biblical illustration and iconographic tradition to reveal both Hardy’s Miltonic way of seeing and his literary idiosyncrasy. The chapter begins by analysing Hardy’s use of Miltonic shifts in perspective and scale – described by critics as proto-cinematic – to shape Wessex as a post-lapsarian, sublime landscape. In The Return of the Native and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy’s characters re-enact the Fall, situating themselves within a cyclical Miltonic genealogy. The chapter then turns to Hardy’s allusions to Milton through his focus on hands, in ‘handed moments’ that recall Milton’s haptic imagery to recreate an unstable Eden in Wessex. Finally, the chapter compares biblical and Miltonic illustrations that are brought together in nineteenth-century extra-illustrated Bibles such as the Kitto Bible: this comparison reveals how Milton’s text and its focus on hands reshaped biblical illustration, and supports a reading of Hardy as a writer attuned to the differences between Milton’s Eden and that of Genesis.

The Introduction outlines the intermedial method of this book, which brings together Milton with nineteenth-century writers and artists who engage with each other’s work at the same time as reading Milton directly. It provides an overview of Milton’s place in the visual and material culture of the long nineteenth century. This includes the literary galleries of the late eighteenth century, the development of proto-cinematic technologies and stage spectacles, illustration on canvas and the page, and interventions in books such as extra-illustration and marginalia. The Introduction also addresses the various metaphors drawn from Milton’s writing that scholars have used to explain his influence, comparing him to a ghost, a troll, a father, even God. It then proposes the epic simile as a useful model for the way Milton is understood in this book: just as Milton’s similes describing Satan suggest, a powerful figure can be like many disparate things at the same time.

Traces the readership and use of Matthew Paris’ manuscripts after his death and in subsequent centuries before and after the Reformation dissolution of the monasteries as far as the modern era.

The preface considers why historical context is such a rich and complicated lens through which to approach Michael Field and their work, given the complexity of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lives and collaborative identity as Michael Field, and the startling range of past historical periods with which their work engaged, including Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Renaissance Italy, among other periods. The Preface approaches Michael Field as firmly situated within the cultures of the fin de siècle or 1890s, and discusses how their work develops in the twentieth century or modernist era. Finally, the Preface approaches the more difficult aspects of Michael Field’s identity, addressing issues of gender, sexuality, and the incestual dimension of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s position as ‘Victorian decadents’ in the early twentieth century. It outlines Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s ambivalent response to fin-de-siècle decadence, as seen in their reactions to the likes of Oscar Wilde and The Yellow Book. The chapter then proposes that Michael Field actually became more attached to decadence as the ‘yellow nineties’ waned, focusing on how Bradley and Cooper’s dedication to decadence is expressed most clearly in poems about Whym Chow, their beloved dog whose death in 1906 catalysed their conversion to Catholicism. The chapter finally discusses the decadent tropes found in Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914) and Michael Field’s Catholic poems.