I'm Dr. Caroline Batten for Oxford Fantasy, and with me today for our podcast is Claire Mulley,
who is a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, Faculty of English.
And today we are going to be talking about George MacDonald. Hi, Claire.
Hello. Great to have you here. Great to be here.
Thank you for having me. So, George MacDonald, I don't know anything about him, really, but I guess we'll sort of start with the basics.
I mean, who was he? What was he about?
I mean, I am going to come across as probably very vague in this whole thing because he is - there is so
much to say about him that it's very difficult to condense it into one small space.
I guess the easiest way to start with is to see him as a kind of grandfather of fantasy fiction.
And he inspired so many of the Oxford writers who are famous today and whose fame has in many ways outlasted his own.
Which is a shame because I think more people need to know about him, hence my choosing him.
He was born in Scotland and he was born into a Calvinistic background, which is always interesting.
But he was one of these people who very much changed his thinking.
He had a very radical change of spirit on religion, and I think it caused him a lot of guilt in some ways,
because when you're born in that kind of strong background, it's not just a simple seasonal change to change your religious persuasions.
It feels like a betrayal, I guess. But when he underwent the transfer, I think he didn't like the general strictures.
I think he didn't like the lack of emphasis on beauty, the fact that naturally pleasurable things should be thought guilty.
And I think one of his sayings, if I'm quoting it correctly, was God, God loves the beautiful.
And he saw beauty as a manifestation of inner goodness
of the spirit and all that was good with the world and the idea that one could grow towards something.
So whereas Calvinism was very much about ignoring the material side, ignoring anything beautiful, seeing it as superficial.
He definitely saw some beauty as superficial, but there was a way of looking at it which could bring you closer to God.
And I think it's just it's some of the things – one of the things I really like about him, actually.
So he started off training to be – he started off not really knowing where he was going.
He trained to be a chemist, couldn't find work, went to London, ended up tutoring three small boys.
And then he eventually went for the ministry and was trained, he started off his training at Highbury.
But then he stopped training and simply went into preaching.
I mean, in those days, some churches, congregational churches,
all that was needed was the vote of the congregation after you've given a few sermons and
he got accepted at Arundel and it was while he was he would eventually move on from there,
too. I mean, but he eventually ended up teaching at University College London.
And he just wrote. He became I suppose he became a working writer.
And the more he wrote, the more he was recognised for that and the more he earned from it.
But his family life was quite hard due to illness and he had a lot of children and they got ill too, quite a bit.
I mean, tuberculosis became the kind of family companions. So I don't know.
They had an incredibly rich and varied life. But I guess they were always edging on the side of poverty.
And they did have to have some help from some of their grander friends at various points. There's just so much to say about him.
As you can tell, you know. It already sounds like he led a fascinating life.
So what kind of time period are we talking here? Victorian.
OK, so he he was friends with a lot of people who we would call household names.
Now, like Ruskin, one of the people he met most famously was Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson.
And it was actually down to MacDonald that partly, I'd say for the most part, to MacDonald and his children that Lewis Carroll published Alice at all.
He was one of the ones that he sent it to. One of his friends said, oh, you should publish this.
And he said, ooh, I'm not sure. And then he sent it to MacDonald because he got to know a couple of the children,
Greville and Mary were two of his favourites, and said, What do you think of this?
MacDonald loved it and the children loved it. So he said, OK, I'll publish it, So it's thanks to George MacDonald that we have Alice in Wonderland?
Yeah, it's thanks to George MacDonald and actually Carroll, or Dodgson, whatever you prefer to call him,
He took a lot of inspiration, I think, from certain fairy tales of MacDonald's, certain dream narratives.
There's a dream narrative called – I can't remember whether you pronounce it FAN-tas-tees or FON-tahst, like the French.
But it's it's a whole dream narrative in which there is a spiritual journey going on.
But you don't have any particular one meaning you take from it. And certain figures like a white rabbit do appear.
A lot of people think – I mean, a lot of people have tried to guess where Carroll's white rabbit came from,
and I'd say it's a fair assumption to say that a trigger could have been MacDonald, because a white rabbit
comes across the protagonist in the forest and seems to lead him on for a while and run away from him.
And the sort of spirit guide into the dream world, the type of type of role.
It only comes up once, I mean, the white rabbit is a far more consistent thread in Wonderland, but it's one of I mean, the story – Fantastes,
I mean, that's my that's my way of pronouncing it, although I may be completely wrong.
It really excels. And that it has several very visual, richly visual figures which crop up again and again.
And while you might lose the thread, you remember the figures and one of MacDonald's children actually did crop up in Through the Looking Glass.
I think it was the white – Lily crops up as the white pawn figure.
And Mary's kitten, I think it was Snowdrop. If I'm right, I think she came in as well so there were lots of links to be had.
And the mirror the idea of going through a mirror also came from one of MacDonald's nobles, Lilith, I think.
Yeah, so let's kind of dig into his life and work a little more.
So how did – tell me a little bit about sort of how his Calvinist upbringing and childhood, how did that how did that affect him throughout his life?
What did that do to his work? I think what it did to his work...
Calvinism meant that he always had a religious outlook.
I mean, I suppose the Victorian era was always with an eye on the spiritual.
I mean, it was very it was very rare to find a book for children which didn't have some kind of moral.
But I think he – many of his novels, in a way, went against the Calvinist.
I think it was more when he moved away from than what he grew up with.
So a lot of his novels are to do with some kind of spiritual journey in which the bad things that happen to you are part of the good. He saw,
he had very interesting views on the devil, in that he was allowed to wreak havoc on Earth.
But it was in the end his idea that was that the devil would eventually be redeemed,
that he had his role and everybody could be saved. This viewpoint that everyone and every
person of any persuasion could be saved with something that got him a lot of unpopularity.
Unsurprisingly, a few congregations refused to have him because of it, but because of it,
a lot of his characters, they come to – a lot of it involves some sort of journey towards the good.
And it's not just goodness for the sake of being good, because that is what you should do.
It's the idea that they will grow.
I think spiritual growth is probably the big through-line. Truth in certain types of beauty and also the fact that he didn't believe that,
you know, he didn't use, say, the figures of princes and princesses and fairies in an allegorical sense,
I think he believed everybody had the potential to be a prince or princess or a fairy.
But for him, those qualities were to do with how you treated people and how you sought the higher good rather than just some fantasy figure.
He found the imagination to be a way of speaking the truth. He found that to be a higher truth in a way,
in the sense that all of his portrayals of corruption are portrayals of people thinking in a real world way.
So people there's a very interesting passage in Fantastes where he meets his the protagonist meets a shadowy figure.
And through the influence of the shadow figure, everything takes on a real hue in fairyland.
So he meets a fairy child and in the shadow, the child becomes a normal workaday human child.
So it's not a disappointment as such.
It's just showing that real everyday thinking, which is so much looked up to realism in itself, is not necessarily the be all and end all.
And you have to have to some extent, a mind in the fairy realm in order to reach that higher place.
So fairy tales in that sense are not trivialised. They are shown to be the ultimate truth and everybody has their own thing to take out of them.
I think that made C.S. Lewis like him so much and Tolkien as well.
This reminds me a little bit of Tolkien's idea of sub-creation,
the idea that by creating, the artist is kind of doing tribute to God, right? And to God's act of creation.
Yeah, I think I think that is very much a maxim that MacDonald would have taught him.
I mean, if you look at Tolkien, a lot of the the boggles or the bad elements of Middle Earth are to do with machinery, are to do with realism.
Yeah. And actually that's MacDonald all over for you.
I mean, you get badness in inverted commas is not really so much to do with someone doing awful things.
It's more to do with someone trying to bring everything down to their mundane level for the sake of realism.
You get a lot of – even the goblins. His most famous book is probably The Princess and the Goblin.
And I love that book.
I think it's definitely one I would, if I had children, I would read it to them. And the goblins are these underground creatures who can't stand poetry.
It hurts them. You know, they are so rational and stony and they want to make everybody in the big human world like them,
whereas the way to beat them is to be creative, just to make poems up on the spot and to rhyme and to sing.
They hate that. So in a way, it is the higher mind defeating the mundane for the sake of modernity.
And I think that's why I like it so much. It would be very easy to just have these horrible little things that just are menacing.
But actually what you're doing is defeating the lower mind.
So tell me a little bit more about The Princess and the Goblin, then. Does she defeat them through poetry and so on?
She, well, she is Irene, named after one of MacDonald's daughters.
Princess Irene is the protagonist. Again, he's actually a very strong feminist.
He knew quite a lot of strong feminist figures in his day and so was quite forward in that sense.
And there's two people in the story to contend with as the boy Curdie, who is a mining character, and there's the girl, Irene,
and they both come from quite different sectors of society, but they both have stuff to teach each other, which is nice.
So Curdie is very much the rational boy. He's down the mines all the time where the goblins are a threat.
And he has learnt to rhyme on the spot. And he teaches Irene how to do it when she gets menaced in the forest, lost.
It's really cute like he says, oh, they're all right.
You just have to watch. You have to watch out for them.
But if you just sing at them or if you just do a little poem and they're mainly in the form of nursery rhymes. And he sends them away.
And Irene is also amazing because she's just, she's what you call a princess, one of his princesses of the mind.
She's a very nice kid. She's just genuinely straightforward. And she likes to play like all children.
And in her house, she has a magical, great-great-grandmother who sort of represents – she's sort of the anima,
which is typical of many of MacDonald's works,
a strong female, almost like a goddess figure representing sort of the opposite side of the usual view of God,
very feminine, very strong, very world wise. And she could be seen by frightened people as a crone, probably, but by the right people.
She would seem beautiful and perfect. So, again, a lot chimes in with Lewis here, I think.
And it's a quest. Curdie can help Irene get rid of the goblins who plan to kidnap her and ultimately they
want to drag her underground and make her their princess and so defeat the human world.
But Irene is the one who, through her own intuition, gets to know this
great-great-grandmother faery figure who teaches her a higher way of thinking,
and that way of thinking is also necessary for defeating goblins. And Curdie, as a very rational being,
doesn't quite have the trust of the higher level of understanding needed to meet this.
She tries to introduce them, but he can't see the figure when they get to the tower room where she's meant to be.
You know, Irene can see her, but Curdie can't see her.
But eventually when she helps him, after he gets wounded, he does get to meet the grandmother.
And then he sees that Irene wasn't just making up childish stories. And together they defeat the goblins and restore the kingdom.
So it's sort of – it's your typical fairy story, but it's not boy saves girl.
It's sort of boy saves girl and girl saves boy. And the main God figure is female.
It's rather wonderful. I think Tolkien said that death was the main inspiration for MacDonald.
And I think in a way he was right. But death seen as the great change, the gateway to something that could be really beautiful,
really pure, really wonderful, and that we should anticipate rather than fear.
I think that's a fair assumption, actually.
And one that we see very much in Lewis and Tolkien, both as well, right? At the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, right?
Death is a victory. It's a triumph. It's a happy ending.
Yes. And they don't even know it's happened. That's what's curious. And there are certainly elements where that's very MacDonald.
Some of his characters end up in a dream world where they're not quite sure whether they're alive or dead.
And the reader's not entirely sure either.
So everything is working towards this great, wonderful change, which people fear only if they have dropped out of the higher meaning,
if they have gone away from God or whatever one might view as the equivalent of God.
What is the higher mind, according to McDonald? What is this sort of state of spiritual purity that we need to get back to?
What does that consist of?
I think, you see it's very difficult to pin this down because a lot of his symbolism, as I say, it is possible to read one of several ways.
But a common thread seems to be creativity, seems to be a lack of selfishness.
Seems to be disinterested love,
the idea that you can grow together and the interest in behaving to everyone
as though they mattered and, I think, seeing beyond seeing beyond the moment.
Perhaps one good example is part of Fantastes.
There's a scene in the – oh, no, sorry.
It's called The Golden Key. The fairytales bleed into each other.
A character called Mossy runs across one of his other anima figures, who is a fairy woman living in the forest.
And she has this in one's tank of multicoloured rainbow fish, flying fish, and they eat one.
And she says, she's horrified because the fish seem to serve the woman.
But she says, oh, well. In fairyland, the creatures seek to be eaten because that is their higher purpose,
but that's because something else happens to them and if you look into the pot in a minute, you'll see more than the dead fish comes out.
So they eat the fish. But then a sort of colourful spirit or ghost comes out of the pot.
And the idea is it's been released. It's like this whole thing.
So it's a sort of sacrifice image, I suppose.
But it's more than that. The idea that there is more than you can see in the here and now,
that there is always a passage somewhere else and that there's always something to grow towards.
I think the higher mind is always seeking to grow. It's more what it isn't.
And it's not looking just in the moment, not looking just for your own gain,
not assuming something is important just because everybody else believes it is important or society believes it is.
I would always recommend someone goes first for The Princess and the Goblin.
A definite story, a definite ending. And it's very satisfying and highly feminist in many ways.
It's definitely one that is good for – I'd say it's still very good for kids.
You know, it's never died in that sense. Surprising for a Victorian children's work.
I know. I think he was very much in love with his wife and she was very much a proper helpmeet and she had a lot to contend with.
So I think he had very definitely inspiration from their partnership.
And as I say, he was well abreast of feminist politics in the day in a way that some other people weren't.
And he met several of the figures.
And it was yeah, I think his son, I think, had particular trouble at school because compared to many of his classmates,
he was brought up in a relatively bohemian household and with all these new ideas and he had quite long pre-Raphaelite hair, which his parents had to bother to cut.
And he got dreadfully bullied. Poor kid.
He was sort of ahead of his time, I think. I identify strongly with long pre-Raphaelite hair as a look.
Yeah, I know, all about it.
Yes. That poor old Greville had had a difficult childhood in that –
well, no, I think he had a nice childhood in the sense that the family were highly interesting.
And MacDonald was a very good father in many ways. But he was also quite a strict disciplinarian.
And I suspect that it was a very definite sort of upbringing.
I suspect he would have had trouble breaking out of it,
and it would have contrasted very strongly with what a lot of his classmates were receiving at home.
And when you're, you know, 10 or 11, it's incredibly difficult to reconcile the two together, I think.
Yeah, I'm sure it is. So tell me a little bit more about this about this family and their family life.
It seems like MacDonald sort of lived his values in the way that he conducted his family life.
He really did live his values. He met Louisa,
his wife, she was the daughter of a family he became friends with in London.
And they were quite in their own way, quite artistic, but more conservative, perhaps, than he.
And he met them through his cousin Helen, with whom he had had a sort of romantic attachment,
although I don't think it ever got to the point where they got engaged. He just sent her lots of poems, as they used to.
And through that family, he met his wife, Louisa, and she was famously said to be quite plain.
But he he fell in love with her for her character and he fell in love with her for the way they could talk and the way they got on.
I think it was a proper friendship romance, which is always lovely to hear about.
I mean, to the extent that he even – perhaps unflatteringly, but I sort of like it about him.
He wrote a letter to a friend in which he exhorted him to find a plain wife because he said,
well, you're not going to get distracted by ephemeral beauty,
and what doesn't matter. You find someone who can think like you and you're not going to be,
you're not going to be looking at her for the wrong reasons. On today's feminist terms,
that's pretty appalling. But there's also something kind of wonderful about it in the context of the day.
I think I get what he was saying. You get his drift.
If he'd phrased it differently and just said, look for your soul mate rather than the face, it probably would have been more acceptable.
Perhaps. So, yeah, they went on. They had, as far as I remember now, this is where my knowledge is more hazy because I'm new to it.
I think he had 11 children and four of them died.
I mean, it was a hard time. And, you know, tuberculosis generally was the cause.
And throughout his life, he went through periods of being an invalid and spitting blood and his wife had to nurse him.
There were times when they had to leave the children with family or with friends and travel for his health.
So I think poor Louisa had quite a lot to put up with. Death was very much on the doorstep.
I guess his thinking helped him because every time – it would have had to, every time they lost a child,
he could think, well, we have to think of it as the great crossing, the great change, the beautiful thing.
We mustn't be too sorry they've gone. And I guess that's the only way to survive losing a kid, really, in many ways.
So and with the rest of his children, he, yeah.
I think they were very much encouraged in the arts, a lot of them learned music,
the fact was the whole family used to put on plays together when they were low on income at a time when again, it was very much frowned upon,
the family would put on spiritual plays like The Pilgrim's Progress and the fairy tale
plays like Cinderella and at one point the go to the public in to pay because she said,
well, we do this anyway. We might as well get people to come and see us.
So I think they lost a few friends through it, but the people who mattered stayed with them and realised what they were doing.
And he, MacDonald, would take part in the plays. He would be like the elderly squire or an older figure or a spiritual godlike figure.
And the children would play the roles.
And one of the daughters at one point wanted to be an actress or she very seriously considered it.
But she got engaged and lost her fiancé through her inability to give it up
because he his mother disapproved of him marrying a woman who did family theatricals,
although they were very tame theatricals and said, well, it was basically a question of, well, either the acting goes or I do.
And she didn't – as far as I remember, she decided she couldn't marry him on that basis.
She wants to be accepted for it. It would have been a dishonest match.
And so they called off the engagement and it was very sad. But, yeah. I hadn't realised that family theatricals were something to be disapproved of.
Well, you wouldn't think so.
I mean, I can't think of much tamer than putting on Cinderella or The Pilgrim's Progress, but it was considered common, I guess.
But it's ridiculous what some people find undignified, isn't it?
Or would have found something to disapprove of? But as far as I can tell,
it was just it was something that brought them together as a family and they did beautifully.
And Dodgson, or Carroll, did watch some of that theatricals and really enjoyed them, I think. He fitted in with the
family much as he did with Alice and her sisters because he was comfortable with children.
I mean, I know there's been a lot of studies into Dodgson for this reason.
And my reading of it is that he was just nervous around adults. So he just couldn't – I don't think he could hack it.
And I can see why. He was just much more at his ease in a world where he could play characters and muck about and be unselfconscious.
And that was when his stammer disappeared.
So watching the children integrate so readily with the adults and put on plays and in a family where it was very child-centric,
I think he felt very much at ease. And with the father being a writer and telling the children stories, it was something he could join in with.
Yeah, that sounds about right to me, I can see why. I definitely think it's – it's by chance they met,
but it was a friendship that would last a long time. And while he dropped off a bit when the children got older, as is true to Dodgson,
I think he felt less he felt less comfortable frequenting all the time because the children had their own agendas.
And I think there was one of the daughters.
I think it was Mary, although my memory may be wrong, when she got engaged, he sent her a letter which some might even view as creepy.
But I think I see the sense of it. It was saying to the extent of, I know some people don't want old childhood companions when they get married.
And I wouldn't want to be tedious to you, but I hope we can still be friends.
He didn't – he was aware that she might have grown out of him for want of a better expression.
I think he saw himself as a kid in a way. But, yeah, it's in a way it's sad.
But you can sort of understand it, I think. Yeah.
So as a parent and as a writer, sort of both sides of his life, how did MacDonald kind of fit in to his cultural moment?
Was he different than other writers,
was he – were there people that he sort of was on a level with, people who shared ideas with, was his parenting style unique?
How did he live his life in his cultural moment? I would say, as far as I can tell, he was somewhat outside the mainstream.
I think he very much fitted into the pre-Raphaelite type of thinking.
So the kind that would form a small coterie based around certain ideals,
which didn't necessarily go entirely with the mainstream or the ideal of realism, shall we say, which was starting to grow.
I mean, that was another big thing that was coming around the time. And you can see why. I think he did know a couple of the pre-Raphaelites.
He definitely hung out with them. And I think he wasn't particularly in the public eye in that sense for much of his life.
I think he did very – his first novel was published in Scotland.
And this was only because a friend of his had sort of almost forced her publisher to accept it because she believed it was worthy.
And from that moment on, he didn't have any trouble, but he didn't earn as much as Dickens,
I don't think. I don't think he was ever truly, you know, up there, but he was in his time, he was more famous than he is now,
and there's certain people like G.K. Chesterton who would forever go on to exhort him as the master.
And I think he was known to people who shared his ideals. Very much
someone who was beloved by people who enjoyed fairy tales and people who enjoyed that kind of gentler, more spiritual literature.
Maybe his reception today or maybe the lack of knowledge around him is partly
based on the fact that he wasn't ever as mainstream as someone like Dickens.
He was always sort of floating around the outskirts. And where he was known,
he was very well loved, but I don't think he ever got to the stage where he was –
I think it was the fairy tales that would have been more of a household name. If he was known,
it was probably more for that.
And children's literature has always been a gateway for people who perhaps don't fit the adult dynamic as well as they'd like to.
Yeah, I think that's true, even in fantasy today, really,
some of our most innovative stuff happens in children's literature and kind of flies
under the radar because we're so focussed on sort of putting aside childish things, right?
We don't have a lot of respect for children and things that children enjoy. Speaking, though, of writers who really understood children.
Yeah. Let's come back to this thread that's been popping up throughout our whole conversation, which is MacDonald's influence on other fantasy writers.
And let's start with Lewis Carroll. So, as you said, they were friends.
He was the one who told him to publish Alice; Dodgson was coming to their family theatricals.
So tell me about that relationship, how'd they meet? What was their friendship like?
How did it work? The friendship was, again, by chance. As far as I remember,
They met through a medical sideline. So Dodgson was recommended –
Now, this is going to be shameful because I won't remember the name of the person,
but he was recommended the same doctor or therapist as MacDonald, and I think they met through that tagline.
They met on that basis and just started to chat. And Dodgson ran into two of his children as well at a sculptor's.
There was there was a Scottish sculptor working at the time.
And he was interested. I think MacDonald had met him through the artistic channels.
And both Mary and Greville were just down in the studio just to do a quick sketch.
And Greville was being sculpted for this, for a boy with a dolphin statue.
I think he decided to use him.
And Dodgson got into this whole philosophical conversation with the children about whether he should have a marble head or not.
You know, he basically, he started this very academic conversation, say, well, do you know why you should exchange your head for a marble one?
And because you don't have to comb it. And Greville got convinced and said, look, Mary, I didn't have to comb my hair, because remember he had very long hair.
And so they got into this hilarious discussion just purely based on that,
And eventually Dodgson would sketch Greville with the marble head in memory of that conversation.
So they called him Uncle Dodgson. He used to come round.
And I think it was much like the Liddell family. He would come round, he would socialise with the parents as well.
But he would ultimately he would make up stories especially for the children.
He would talk to them like they were adults. And he took a couple of the children out for treats.
He'd take them to shows, he'd take them for buns, and just, he acted like an honorary uncle and and where the children were, there MacDonald was.
And they could have a chat. And both of them were spiritually similar, I think, in that they had their own personal crises of faith.
Dodgson was forever undercut by this feeling of not being good enough in some way.
And he was also anxious and he had a stammer.
So many things barred him from becoming what he would have wished to have been in the church, or he saw his way as unclear.
And similarly, MacDonald had gone through his own crisis of faith where he'd been brought up in one very strict religion and essentially abandoned
it in many ways and become a preacher and then had been rejected by a congregation for having unfashionable views.
So both of them found a great deal to talk about in common spiritually. And I think they could both exercise their ideals.
And in the end, I think Dodgson ended up ascribing to a lot of similar viewpoints to MacDonald and he was looking for – in terms of beauty,
in terms of change, in terms of looking for a way to grow. I think they shared a lot.
And I think he got a lot of, just in terms of his later stories, listening to MacDonald and reading his work,
just, I think it triggered off a lot of his ability to see in a dream dimension.
I think things like mirrors, things like games of chess, things like, as I said,
the rabbit, the idea of metamorphoses and not knowing exactly where you were.
And Alice perhaps coming into her sense of self, always looking for this ideal,
but always finding chaos. That very much is due to MacDonald's influence.
But unlike MacDonald, there is much more of the dream narrative as opposed to the spiritual narrative.
I think he made it more of just a straight romp.
And I think that does to some extent explain its popularity compared to MacDonald.
Even with the beauty of MacDonald, we're always aware that there's a religious element somewhere.
And I think that makes a lot of people suspicious, whereas Alice is very much, it's over,
And then I woke up from the stupid land and and it was all a dream.
And you can just have it's basically playtime without the lesson,
in a way. I do wonder, Alice is fun. Right.
And it's meant to be funny and it's meant to be a romp.
But I wonder if it is such a classic because there's a little bit of MacDonald-like depth to it, a little bit.
There's this sort of sense in Wonderland that we're having fun, but also that we're sort of grappling with something existential.
Yeah. And it's, and at the time, it's not fun for Alice,
is it? No, she's not having a great time for much of it. People love Wonderland, but for Alice it isn't fun at all.
She's this quite rational child and she just sees things that don't make sense and they irritate her.
She has to work our way through this. Yeah, I think you're right,
to some extent. Because MacDonald lent this readable symbolism,
all this very flexible symbolism, I think to some extent that has lived on in Dodgson.
And that's what has made Alice so popular,
because there's so many ways you could read Alice's story or impose meaning on it in a way that worked for you.
And there's always a character which people like, you know. Do you, I mean,
do you have a favourite Wonderland character that speaks to you in some way?
Oh, that's a good question. I feel like so many of them speak to me because I'm a profoundly nerdy person.
I've always liked the Dodo, which I know Dobson based on himself because – Yes, I was going to say, I like the Dodo.
Yeah, I feel a kinship with the poor awkward Dodo.
I think the Dodo is who I am and the Cheshire Cat is who I'd like to be.
I think to some extent a lot of us would like to be like the Cheshire Cat.
We'd all like to just be that slight, sardonic, grinning presence that just conveniently disappears.
And we've all had – I've definitely had a Red Queen day when I know there's nothing rational,
but I just feel angry and I just sort of want to yell at people. And you know that if you gave in to this desire, you would be a horrible person.
But we all like her to some extent because she just flies off the handle and it's fun.
The Red Queen is the Id of Wonderland. She is the Id, isn't she?
Really. But that's that's, I mean,
I think MacDonald has that ability to read our own personalities or problems onto certain characters and had Dodgson just made it,
had it just been a weird dream narrative
where we don't get to meet anyone or the characters don't get much chance to speak or they just, or it's mainly about the protagonist,
then it might not be so much fun. Well, the sense of play also is something that it sounds like MacDonald would have greatly approved of,
because that's the creativity and a willingness to see beyond realism, beyond the mundane, that seems to fit his idea of the higher mind
very well. Definitely. And the children loved it.
I mean, Greville said, his quotation was, he said, I rather actually said I wish there were sixty thousand volumes of it so I could read them all.
And it is, you know, typical hype, hyperbole coming from a child who loves something.
I want eleventy billion copies, but, you know, you can see why they would have eaten it up.
So we see MacDonald's imprint in it, on Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland.
What about later fantasy writers? What about C.S. Lewis and what about Tolkien? How do they relate to MacDonald?
Well, I think the important one is definitely Lewis.
And he first read Fantastes, however you pronounce it.
And he realised, he actually called MacDonald his master, which I think a lot of people, again, don't know.
It's just something. And even Lewis himself expressed astonishment that people didn't realise to whom he owed his inspiration.
He talked about MacDonald and people wouldn't necessarily know him that well,
but he essentially gave him the importance that Dante gave Virgil, literally.
I mean, in The Great Divorce, he – when he gets to heaven in the bus, George MacDonald is sent to meet him.
And he addressed him as my master. And MacDonald is the person who conducts him towards heaven and teaches him along the way.
It's just a sign of how much he loved him and how much he saw him as a teacher.
Wow, that's incredibly – that's sort of a very intense artistic debt that I didn't really know about at all.
So what did Lewis take from MacDonald?
What did he see in MacDonald that that shows up in his work? I mean, so much.
I guess you you would need a couple of hours probably to pick up threads.
But it was Lewis's claim that he pretty much quoted MacDonald in nearly everything he wrote.
I mean, the higher – certainly one of the big things for me that seemed to have been taken away was this
emphasis on seeing beyond the mundane for the mundane's sake or the realist for the realism's sake.
I mean, famously in The Screwtape Letters, a lot of the hellish thinking is based on common bureaucracy,
the idea that everything has a cost, everything must be made capital out of.
There's no such thing as disinterest.
And I mean, having hell as a bureaucracy I think is a stroke of genius. I mean, I think Hell undoubtedly is a bureaucracy.
I would see it that way. I mean, obviously not common theological practise.
And most of Lewis's writing could be seen more as, it's good for spirituality
rather than necessarily what most people would term strict theological works.
But it does contain that important element of, you know,
not following the crowd for the sake of following, or trying to lose your self-consciousness in trying to grow,
trying to grow, because, you know, it's the right thing to do.
And also seeking out the beauty of disinterested love, seeking out people who think like you and trying to see what is beyond the everyday.
Even if you don't believe, seeing how you can grow as a person and not just thinking of... and trying not to drag everything down.
And this is something Lewis is all about. You know, not dragging things down.
I mean, most of the things that will get you said to Hell are the small selfishnesses in his world,
like, things like focussing on what people are wearing or how smart you sound or how much you like dinner at somebody else's expense,
when what you could be doing is just trying to be a bit nicer to people.
And it's all about slogging through that day when you're really tired,
but still finding time to say a few kind words or trying not to snap at somebody
when you're tired and make them feel stupid, stuff that really we all should try to do.
Mm, because Screwtape says to Wormwood, doesn't he, that the road to Hell is very gentle and very gradual. The daisy path.
Yes, it is.
So yeah, to come back from a rambling sideways path, I think for Lewis I think this seeking of a higher mindset was a big thing.
In terms of theme though, just quite apart from the way of thinking,
the theme of talking beasts, a particular land where time had a different time to ours.
That's something that crops up in MacDonald again and again with the dream narratives, like with Lilith,
with Fantastes, where you have someone entering another realm and they might come out of it.
And it's just the next morning or maybe a couple of months have passed, whereas 50 or 100 years have passed in that realm.
And that's very much MacDonald. The idea of metamorphosis, the idea of the forest, I mean, it's again, it's partly fairytale based, isn't it,
with the fact that things happen in a forest, but a lot of Narnia,
a lot of the major events I think are in nature and a lot of them are to do.
MacDonald was, again, very much about those scenes where a character sits in a bath or an underground spring in The Golden Key and is transformed.
And that very much harks again forward to Eustace the Dragon getting in a bath and having his scales taken off as part of his selfishness cleansing.
It's yeah, there's a lot of that element, that cleansing, that metamorphosis, the travelling, the talking animals, the realm of fairy,
which is not necessarily about the little pixies, but about things, I think, things that aren't just what Tolkien would call a beast narrative.
So whereas Beatrix Potter is just a world where animals talk, nothing magic happens in that sense,
they just happen to speak, Lewis is very much part of Fairy, as was MacDonald.
And you could run into anything, but it would all – you'd come out of it changed, was the idea, and there would be challenges along the way,
which would appear very tempting, much like the Grail Quest.
You would come across corrupt elements that look really nice or a character who might lead you astray.
But ultimately, that was all for your own good because you're held back momentarily.
But you learn a lesson you'll never forget. It's a very comforting way of seeing, if it can be called that, the bad,
because it means there's no experience which doesn't bring you something, I think.
And that's what I think modern therapy or psychology would also in terms of
wmotional, spiritual well-being, I think it's what people are taught a lot, it's it's something I would personally very much ascribe to.
Everything teaches you something and whether you're strong enough to recover right away or it takes you awhile to recover,
it's still part of a journey.
So it sounds a little bit like sort of the Lewis' kind of insistence on his Faery as kind of parallel to the real world,
as something that you move in and out of, as opposed to something like Tolkien's Middle-earth.
Right. Which exists sort of within its own kind of self-contained universe.
No one hops from Middle-earth to 1940s London.
It sounds like some of that comes from MacDonald, from MacDonald's insistence on using fairy tales and dream narratives as a way to find truth.
Yeah, I mean, Tolkien had a lot of courage in that sense.
I mean, in a way, one might argue that Lewis took the easier path by having his world parallel to the
human world and so people can experience things in the context of modern day London,
whereas the context of Middle-earth exists all by itself, although I guess in a way that one could see it as, you could still read into it.
I think the Shire is very much, as Tolkien would have said, based on the Midlands.
And it does have that very English atmosphere about it.
It just claims no existing England within the context of the narrative.
It lives in itself. It's a sort of parallel universe, unofficially.
And I think another thing that he got from MacDonald, on another note, was, I mean, I think it was partly to do with Catholicism, to be fair.
But the presence of the female anima, the godlike female figure,
a lot of his major, what one might turn spiritual figures or goddess figures, are female.
So you have Galadriel, you have Arwen. And, you know, they are in a way different to men.
They sort of sit apart, but they have their own terrific power. And particularly Galadriel's light.
The essence of her appears in dark places and guides the wanderer, like Frodo.
And that's very much like MacDonald's fairy women, someone who could, by the evil side of life,
be seen as a hag or a terror, someone of terrible power, someone who has the ability to frighten,
but only because she ultimately is symptomatic of a higher good,
which perhaps someone hasn't reached yet, and therefore meeting that is highly intimidating.
But yeah, it's that kind of figure is very important to Tolkien.
I mean, one could also argue that the Virgin Mary comes in there. And I mean,
also we have Eowyn who is very much a shield maiden and symptomatic of Old Norse.
And I guess all of that mixes in. But I would say MacDonald has a large part to do with it.
I think imagistically Tolkien got a bit from MacDonald, but in terms of his philosophies, he was far more his own person.
I think Lewis very much saw MacDonald as his leader, his guru.
And it was a much more symbiotic relationship in that – well, I can't say symbiotic because they weren't around the same time.
But he was more, his style was more integrated into what had come before, shall we say.
Yeah, I think often of the way that Faramir describes Galadriel as perilously fair and Sam Gamgee in his infinite wisdom says, I don't know about perilous.
And he says that you could dash yourself to pieces against or you could drown yourself in her like a hobbit in a river.
But neither rock nor river would be to blame, it's only because she's so strong in herself.
The thing only a hobbit could say, really. Gimli is converted, he goes from seeing her as a potential threat and then realises,
oh, God, she is actually, she is genuinely that pure and wonderful and I want to worship this.
It's that that moment of Gimli's spiritual awakening. And again, that's quite a MacDonald element.
That's one of perhaps the strongest MacDonald threads, where, one might argue, an earthly creature who is very concerned with with wealth.
I mean, admittedly, as a craftsman, he sort of gets out of jail that way.
The dwarves are, they could go either way, couldn't they? They are very corruptible in that they love gold.
But if they love gold for the sake of making, and the sake of its beauty as opposed to what it can buy them, then that in itself is a level of spirituality.
And this is a side of the good kind of that spirituality meeting the higher plane and realising and humbling itself,
travelling to a higher realm and changing, realising there's more to the world than what's underground.
And I want to seek out the beauty in the world outside as well.
And I will put, I will put my pride aside and recognise the power of this
She, this anima, and give it due reverence. Yeah.
Yeah. So maybe to finish up, let's talk a little bit about these about these spiritual women in MacDonald,
because this seems like an important thread in his work. So tell me about his women.
What are they like? His women. So they range from the goddess figure to the little girl.
I mean, those are the two main types that one encounters, particularly in the fairy tales.
And they are refreshingly, even the goddess figures are refreshingly normal, if such a word can be used.
So, for example, Irene, the princess, who's one of my favourite characters, is just, she's just a playful little girl who likes to run around.
She gets bored like other little girls. She's not always the best behaved, but she's a kind child at heart.
And the grandmother is a figure, is, the anima figure is often a caring one.
Interestingly enough, she bathes hurts. Irene gets a scratch from one of the goblins, the grandmother bathes
her, there's a lot of baptismal imagery, which is definitely the religious side.
So there's, a lot of the time there's the image of the bath, getting a wash. You get spiritual cleansing, that's feeding.
And I think this also comes from the fact that MacDonald lost his mother at quite a young age and he always kept one of her letters,
which she sent to her mother in law about weaning him, which she was very upset about.
So there is perhaps a Freudian element going on here, in that she, you know,
she talks about how upset she was at hearing the baby crying, but not being able to feed him and and then she dies.
And MacDonald is grief struck, I think. I think a lot of his anima figures were based on this feeling of a lack of a mother.
It also fits in with MacDonald's thinking on sexuality.
He genuinely believed that one could find God or become closer to God through sexual desire and sexual love,
unlike Calvinism, because it was all part of the beauty of, it was all part of the beauty of disinterested love.
And if done in the right way, it would show you, you know, it was one of the keys to creation and it would make you a better person and purify you.
So, yeah, some sexy women, mainly a sort of I would say mother goddess is is the clearest way to describe most of the women,
mother goddess and the nice girl, but not nice girl in the sense of twee little princess or little saint.
Very much a child who wants to be good, is playful, and is open to growing and open to suspending disbelief.
But if you haven't read The Princess and the Goblin, do. You know, especially at a time when one is ill, get it out.
Goodness me. Give yourself a treat. Read it in bed. It's brilliant. I mean, well, in that case, I know what I'm doing with my Sunday morning.
That sounds wonderful. Right, well, I think that might be as good a place as any to wrap up our introduction to George MacDonald,
who is so much more exciting than I would possibly have guessed.
Thank you so much. You're welcome. And for any gaps in knowledge anyone has noticed you can find, I'm going to recommend a good book for you to read.
So the major biography of George MacDonald by William Raeper,
R-A-E-P-E-R, will contain most of the names and dates that I have missed out and will fill you in on more of the clear information.
And even his son, Greville MacDonald, wrote quite a good biography of his father as well.
So that's that's when you can check out. I would highly recommend doing so.
Brilliant. Thank you. You're welcome.