George MacDonald’s Fairy Tales

Abstract

What we shall see with MacDonald and Kingsley is something quite new in the development of Christian fantasy. We shall find both trying by literary means to show, to make us feel, that God is present in nature and this world. In earlier literature God’s existence could be assumed, but now it is necessary to prove it. And, in order to do this convincingly, one must start from the apparently empirical facts of existence, not from any biblical or quasi-biblical narrative involving a priori assumptions. Thus each presents us with an image of the baffling character of experience, through which God or the miraculous must be apprehended. This holds good even though the reality that MacDonald presents is that of the inner world of the mind, and Kingsley’s that of the physical world. The tangle of mental imagery and potential error in MacDonald’s fantastic worlds is no different in terms of mundane reality from the confusing nature of the physical world in Kingsley’s. Between them the two could be said to cover the whole area of mundane experience, inner and outer, in order to trace God’s immanence. It is remarkable that the only Christian-fantasy writers of note in the nineteenth century should form this diptych.