Sir Gibbie

By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

The acclaimed tale of a mute orphan with an angel’s heart. “The most direct and most beautiful of all George MacDonald’s novels.”—Greville MacDonald, author of George MacDonald and His Wife
 
One of the true high marks in George MacDonald’s literary career was reached with the publication in 1879 of Sir Gibbie. Every MacDonald reader has his or her favorite, but it is safe to say that Sir Gibbie is near the top of the list for lovers of fairy tale, poetry, and novels alike. The character of “wee Sir Gibbie” mysteriously embodies hints from the land of “faerie,” and his soul is poetry personified. MacDonald’s storytelling genius here rises to heights as soaring as the mountain of Glashgar in the Scottish Highlands where Gibbie roams barefoot with the sheep, amid earthquake and flood.
 
It was this book that captured author Elizabeth Yates’ imagination and prompted her 1963 edition of Sir Gibbie, which in turn led to Michael Phillips’s updated editions that inaugurated the MacDonald renaissance of the 1980s. If one could choose but one MacDonald novel to read, many would say it should be Sir Gibbie. Following Elizabeth Yates’ example, Michael Phillips again translates the difficult Doric dialect of MacDonald’s original into more accessible English.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795352102

George MacDonald

George MacDonald (1824 – 1905) was a Scottish-born novelist and poet. He grew up in a religious home influenced by various sects of Christianity. He attended University of Aberdeen, where he graduated with a degree in chemistry and physics. After experiencing a crisis of faith, he began theological training and became minister of Trinity Congregational Church. Later, he gained success as a writer penning fantasy tales such as Lilith, The Light Princess and At the Back of the North Wind. MacDonald became a well-known lecturer and mentor to various creatives including Lewis Carroll who famously wrote, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fame.

Book preview

Sir Gibbie

George MacDonald

Introductory material © 2018 by Michael Phillips

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2018 by RosettaBooks

ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5210-2

www.RosettaBooks.com

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

New editions of George MacDonald’s classic fiction works updated and introduced by Michael Phillips

The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald

1. Phantastes (1858)

2. David Elginbrod (1863)

3. The Portent (1864)

4. Adela Cathcart (1864)

5. Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865)

6. Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867)

7. Robert Falconer (1868)

8. Guild Court (1868)

9. The Seaboard Parish (1868)

10. At the Back of the North Wind (1871)

11. Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871)

12. The Princess and the Goblin (1872)

13. Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872)

14. The Vicar’s Daughter (1872)

15. Gutta Percha Willie (1873)

16. Malcolm (1875)

17. The Wise Woman (1875)

18. St. George and St. Michael (1876)

19. Thomas Wingfold Curate (1876)

20. The Marquis of Lossie (1877)

21. Paul Faber Surgeon (1879)

22. Sir Gibbie (1879)

23. Mary Marston (1881)

24. Castle Warlock (1881)

25. The Princess and Curdie (1882)

26. Weighed and Wanting (1882)

27. Donal Grant (1883)

28. What’s Mine’s Mine (1886)

29. Home Again (1887)

30. The Elect Lady (1888)

31. A Rough Shaking (1890)

32. There and Back (1891)

33. The Flight of the Shadow (1891)

34. Heather and Snow (1893)

35. Lilith (1895)

36. Salted With Fire (1897)

37. Far Above Rubies (1898)

The introductions to the 37 volumes form a continuous picture of George MacDonald’s literary life, viewed through the prism of the development of his written legacy of works. While each book can of course be read on its own, every introduction picks up where that to the previous volume left off, with special attention to the title under consideration. The introductions together, as a biography of MacDonald’s life as a writer, are compiled in Volume 38.

38. George MacDonald A Writer’s Life

CONTENTS

Foreword to The Cullen Collection

Introduction to Sir Gibbie

NOTE: As the introductions to the 37 volumes of The Cullen Collection form a continuous portrait of George MacDonald’s life, and as many of the introductions contain comprehensive and detailed discussion and analysis of the title in question—its plot, themes, and circumstances of writing—some first-time readers may choose to skip ahead to the story itself, saving the introduction for later, so as not to spoil the story.

1.     The City’s Urchin

2.     Turnip and Dulse

3.     Mistress Croale’s Parlour

4.     Gibbie’s Calling

5.     Sir George

6.     The Town Sparrow

7.     Sambo

8.     Up Daurside

9.     The Barn

10.   The Cottage

11.   Glashgar

12.   Through the Ceiling

13.   Donal Grant

14.   Apprenticeship

15.   Secret Service

16.   The Broonie

17.   The Laird

18.   Ambush

19.   Punishment

20.   Refuge

21.   A New Son

22.   Gibbie

23.   The Beast Loon o’ Glashgar

24.   The Gamekeeper

25.   Wisdom of the Wise

26.   The Beast Boy

27.   The Lorrie Meadow

28.   Father and Daughter

29.   Earthquake and Storm

30.   Flood

31.   Glashruach

32.   Angus MacPholp

33.   The Raft

34.   Mr. Sclater

35.   The Muckle Hoose

36.   The City Again

37.   Daur Street

38.   Donal in the City

39.   Service

40.   The Sinner

41.   The Girls

42.   Mr. Worldly Wiseman

43.   Growing

44.   Fergus Duff

45.   The Quarry

46.   Night Watch

47.   Of Age

48.   The Auld Hoose o’ Galbraith

49.   The Laird and the Preacher

50.   A Hiding Place from the Wind

51.   The Confession

52.   Catastrophe

53.   Preparations

54.   The Wedding

55.   The Burn

"Papa seems so quietly happy."

—Louisa MacDonald, May 4, 1872, from Deskford (near Cullen)

"Papa does enjoy this place so much."

—Louisa MacDonald, May 6, 1872 from the Seafield Arms Hotel, Cullen

"Papa oh! so jolly & bright & happy…Papa was taken for Lord Seafield yesterday."

—Louisa MacDonald, Sept. 2, 1873, from Cullen

"Papa is very poorly. He ought to go to Cullen for a week I think."

—Louisa MacDonald, October 5, 1873, from London

FOREWORD

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

The series name for these works of Scotsman George MacDonald (1824-1905) has its origins in the 1830s when the boy MacDonald formed what would be a lifelong affection for the northeast Scottish village of Cullen.

The ocean became young George’s delight. At the age of eleven, writing from Portsoy or Cullen, he announced to his father his intention to go to sea as a sailor—in his words, as soon as possible. The broad white beach of Cullen Bay, the Seatown, the grounds of Cullen House, the temple of Psyche (Temple of the Winds), Cullen Burn, the dwellings along Grant Street, Scarnose, and especially Findlater Castle, all seized the youth’s imagination with a love that never left him. MacDonald continued to visit Huntly and Cullen throughout his life, using his childhood love for his homeland as the backdrop for his richest novels, including what is arguably his greatest work of fiction, Malcolm, published in 1875.

We therefore honor MacDonald’s unique relationship to Cullen with these newly updated editions of his novels. In Cullen, in certain respects more than in any other place, one finds the transcendent spirit of George MacDonald’s life and the ongoing legacy of his work still magically alive after a century and a half. This release of The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald coincides with a memorial bench and plaque established on Cullen’s Castle Hill commemorating MacDonald’s visits to the region.

To those readers familiar with my previous editions of MacDonald’s novels, I should make clear that eighteen of the volumes in this new series (including this one) are updated and expanded titles from the Bethany House series of the 1980s. Limitations of length dictated much about how those previous volumes were produced. To interest a publisher in the project during those years when MacDonald was a virtual unknown in the publishing world, certain sacrifices had to be made. Cuts to length had to be more severe than I would have preferred. Practicality drove the effort.

Added to that was the challenge of working with editors who occasionally changed MacDonald’s wording and removed more than I intended, then also sometimes took liberties to the opposite extreme by inserting words, sentences, even whole paragraphs that originated from neither myself nor MacDonald. Those editions were also subject to sanitizing editorial scrutiny, which occasionally removed aspects of MacDonald’s more controversial perspectives, and added evangelically correct words and phrases to bring the text more in line with accepted orthodoxy. As MacDonald himself knew, there are times an author has little say in details of final text, design, art, or overall quality. Thus, the covers and titles were not mine. And I was often kept in the dark about internal textual changes and was unable to correct them. Yet, too, many of MacDonald’s expansive perspectives were preserved (though what was excised and what was left often seemed random and inconsistent) for which I applaud Bethany’s openness. Their publications of the 1980s helped inaugurate a worldwide renaissance of interest in MacDonald and we owe them our gratitude. Frustrating as the process occasionally was, I thus remain enormously grateful for those editions. They were wonderful door-openers for many thousands into MacDonald’s world.

Hopefully this new and more comprehensive set of MacDonald’s fiction will take up where they left off. Not constrained by the limitations that dictated production of the former volumes, these new editions, though identical at many points, have been expanded—sometimes significantly. In that sense they reflect MacDonald’s originals somewhat more closely, while still preserving the flavor, pace, and readability of their predecessors. Needless to say, the doctrinal scrubbings have been corrected and the deleted passages reinstated. Nineteen additional titles have been added. The thirteen realistic novels among these have been updated according to the same priorities that guided the earlier Bethany House series. That process will be explained in more detail in the introductions to the books of the series. The final six, which would more accurately be termed fantasy, have not been edited in any way. They are faithful reproductions of the originals exactly as they were first published. These six titles—Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, The Princess and Curdie, and Lilith—are so well known and have been published literally in hundreds of editions through the years, that it has seemed best to reproduce them for The Cullen Collection with the same texts by which they are generally known. *

Dedicated followers of all great men and women continually seek hints that reveal their inner being—the true man, the true woman. What were they really like? What made him or her tick? Many biographies and studies attempt to answer such questions. In George MacDonald’s case, however, a panorama of windows exists that reveals far more about his person than the sum-total of everything that has been written about him over the years. Those are the novels that encompass his life’s work. The volumes of this series represent the true spiritual biography of the man, a far more important biography than life’s details can ever tell.

In 1911, six years after his father’s death, George MacDonald’s son Ronald wrote of the man with whom he had spent his life:

"The ideals of his didactic novels were the motive of his own life…a life of literal, and, which is more, imaginative consistency with his doctrine…There has probably never been a writer whose work was a better expression of his personal character. This I am not engaged to prove; but I very positively assert…that in his novels…and allegories…one encounters...the same rich imagination, the same generous lover of God and man, the same consistent practiser of his own preaching, the same tender charity to the sinner with the same uncompromising hostility to the sin, which were known in daily use and by his own people counted upon more surely than sunshine." *

Thirty years after the publication of my one-volume biography George MacDonald Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller, it now gives me great pleasure to present this thirty-seven-volume biography of the man, the Scotsman, the prophetic spiritual voice who is George MacDonald. †

How fitting is the original title in which Ronald MacDonald’s sketch of his father quoted above first appeared, From A Northern Window. For any attempted portrait of the man George MacDonald becomes at once a window into his homeland as well.

Therefore, I invite you to gaze back in time through the northern windows of these volumes. Picture yourself perhaps near the cheerful hearth described in the opening pages of What’s Mine’s Mine, looking out the window to the cold seas and mountains in the distance, where perhaps you get a fleeting glimpse of highlanders Ian and Alister Macruadh.

Or imagine yourself walking up Duke Street in Huntly from MacDonald’s birth home, following in the footsteps of fictional Robert Falconer to the town square.

Or envision yourself on some windswept highland moor with Gibbie or Cosmo Warlock.

Or walk up the circular staircase of Fyvie Castle to Donal Grant’s tiny tower hideaway where he began to unravel the mysteries of that ancient and spooky place.

Or walk up from Cullen’s Seatown in your mind’s eye alongside Malcolm selling the fish in his creel, turning at the Market Cross into Grant Street and continuing past Miss Horn’s house and up the hill to the entrance of the Cullen House grounds.

Or perhaps climb Castle Hill to the George MacDonald memorial bench and gaze across the sweep of Cullen Bay as Malcolm’s story comes to life before your eyes.

From any of these settings, whether real or imaginary, drift back through the years and gaze through the panoramic windows of these stories, and take in with pleasure the drama, relationships, images, characters, settings, and spiritual truths George MacDonald offers us as we are drawn into his world.

Michael Phillips

Cullen, Morayshire

Scotland, 2017

INTRODUCTION

Wee Sir Gibbie—the Waif Angel

Having suffered with diseased lungs all his adult life, and been at the point of death more than once, George MacDonald found his health greatly improved by the warm climate of the Mediterranean. Interestingly, some of his most thoroughly Scottish novels were produced after the family’s move to Italy in the late 1870s. *

During his first full year living abroad, 1878, George MacDonald wrote one of the best-loved of all his novels—the captivating chronicle of the winsome orphan, wee Sir Gibbie. Though envisioned from afar under the warm Italian sun, MacDonald’s abiding affection for his homeland is palpable on every page. Even the death of his daughter Mary in April of that year did not derail his inspiration.

As much as the climate agreed with him, however, MacDonald’s first two years in Italy were not years of huge writing output as in the past. Apparently Sir Gibbie was the only book written in 1878. And he wrote no novels at all in 1879—an astonishing fact in itself. That is not to say he wasn’t busy and didn’t write, which he certainly did. But these were eventful years that necessarily cut into his writing time and focus. One of the chief demands on his time was the purchase of land, and planning for the building of a new permanent home in Bordighera, Italy. This, however, is getting ahead of the story.

Unfortunately, not a great deal of information exists about when MacDonald wrote his books. Indeed, most of the personal information we possess about the lives of George and Louisa MacDonald and their family comes from the prodigious letters they wrote when they were separated. During these years when they were mostly together, the letters are less numerous. In this case, however, a letter in June of 1878 to W.C. Davies tells us when he was writing Sir Gibbie. He must have begun almost immediately after the completion of Paul Faber, as he was then, he says, about halfway done with Gibbie’s story.

I have never known such a time, he writes to Davies. "Friend after friend going…But our hope is in heaven. God comes nearer and nearer. If only we went as fast as he is drawing us…If we would but understand that we are pilgrims and strangers.

"Things look much better for me now, I thank God, in money ways. He will keep me short, I daresay, as will probably always be best for me, but he will enable me to die without debt, I do think. Mr. Russell Gurney has left me £500 which will go far to clear me off, I hope—would almost, if I were not straitened for present cash. ¹ But I do not want this talked about…Paul Faber will be out in 3 volumes in October, and a new story [Sir Gibbie] begun in the Glasgow [Weekly] Mail in September, which is more than half done…" ²

If Malcolm is at the top rank of MacDonald’s novels, Sir Gibbie surely stands beside it as one of his truly magnificent works. For those perhaps coming to the novels of George MacDonald for the first time, or who are unfamiliar with my editorial work of the 1980s, perhaps a historical interlude might be helpful as backdrop for this new edition of Sir Gibbie. This seems an appropriate way to connect the dots from George MacDonald’s work in his lifetime to his impact in our own. Since Sir Gibbie was the first MacDonald novel edited in the twentieth century for a post-Victorian audience, it truly represents the foundation of the MacDonald renaissance of our time. The fact that that new edition, edited and condensed from the original, was carried out by a next generation MacDonald family friend, gives it a stature and credibility that cannot easily be dismissed.

Let us then take a few minutes to jump ahead in time from 1879 and see how MacDonald’s work fared in later years, and how the changing literary climate of the twentieth century eventually necessitated the production of new editions of his works.

George MacDonald’s professional life ran almost exactly concurrently with the great queen’s. He was born five years after Queen Victoria and outlived her by four years. MacDonald epitomized the Victorian novelist. But that era seemed to disappear almost immediately after the death of the queen by whose name it was known. The new 20th century brought rapid upheaval on many fronts—political, industrial, technological: cars, telephones, electricity, a world war, the Roaring Twenties, the depression, and another world war. Within a short time, the Victorian era, and the memory of George MacDonald, was not just a decade or two in the past, it might as well have been two hundred years in the past.

Along with all these rapid changes, the literary climate also changed. After his death in 1905, George MacDonald’s writings fell off dramatically in sales and popular appeal. The fading of his reputation through the first half of the twentieth century can be traced to several factors. Changing literary tastes, along with the powerful spiritual foundation of MacDonald’s writings in an increasingly secular age, certainly took their toll on his popularity, as did the fact that many of his novels were written in heavy Scots dialect which was virtually unreadable to twentieth century readers outside Scotland. The pace of MacDonald’s novels, his long sentences, sermonistic digressions, and use of dialect, all combined to make them difficult reading for the fast pace of the new century.

Bluntly put, MacDonald’s novels quickly became yesterday’s news. His deeply spiritual themes were the greatest impediment of all. The twentieth was the great secular century, at just past the halfway point of which came the announcement: God is dead. In a secular world of communism, humanism, atomic bombs, the Beatles, Viet Nam, Woodstock, Watergate, and, as the century sped toward a new millennium, even more rampant drug use, the excesses of progressivism, the normalization of homosexuality, misogynist rap music, abortion, sex trafficking, gay marriage, and Islamic terrorism, for most modernists the spirituality of a Victorian like MacDonald seemed anachronistic in the extreme.

In reality, the fissures in MacDonald’s reputation—not in the public eye at first but with the literary intelligentsia—began during his lifetime. After a dozen years climbing rapidly to the dizzying heights of literary fame, critics began to complain about his spiritual themes and preachiness, and that he used his books as a personal pulpit. His loyal fan base was so enormous that his books continued to sell on both sides of the Atlantic. But strident notes were sounded by literary critics. Seeds of dissatisfaction with the spirituality of his novels had thus already begun to take root in the closing decades of Victoria’s reign, and the reviews reflected this shift. And after his death, with the rapid changes of the new century, the name of George MacDonald was soon forgotten by ninety percent of the fiction reading public. By 1950 that figure had probably risen to ninety-nine percent. George MacDonald was all but unknown.

But he was not completely forgotten. Voices rose up periodically to remind the Christian world that this great man must not be forgotten. Two of his sons wrote biographies—Ronald’s in 1911 ³ of barely more than fifty pages, Greville’s in 1924 of more than 500, ⁴ in hopes of keeping their father before the public eye.

In the Introduction to Greville’s tome, G.K. Chesterton also weighed in, saying, I can really testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence. Chesterton went on to pen an incisive sketch of MacDonald’s significance, both historically and spiritually, adding, The originality of George MacDonald has also a historical significance…I fancy, that he stands for a rather important turning-point in the history of Christianity, as representing the particular Christian nation of the Scots. ⁵ Chesterton added that MacDonald was a Scot of genius who could write fairy tales that made all experience a fairy tale. ⁶ (The book to which Chesterton was referring was The Princess and the Goblin.)

Despite praise from many quarters, however, such voices became fewer and fewer as the years went by. Their impact was increasingly limited to academic and literary coteries where an interest in MacDonald’s imaginative, visionary, and fairy tale writings predominated. MacDonald gradually became a personality to be studied for his mythical fantasies rather than a novelist and theologian to be esteemed and distinguished for his ground-breaking imagery of God’s Fatherhood, his towering portrayals of practical Christianity, and his cliché-shattering (and Calvinist doctrine-demolishing) perspectives of eternity.

As time continued to pass, with no new editions of his novels being published, MacDonald’s books grew more and more scarce. The last known major publishing effort of his original novels came in 1927 by Cassell of London, but it included a bare six titles. The number of volumes gathering dust in boxes, attics, and used bookstores dwindled precipitously. By the latter half of the 19th century none of his full-length realistic novels, none of his theological writings, and none of his poetry remained in print. Of his approximately fifty-three published books, only a handful were available. What fleeting reminders remaining in academia of MacDonald’s reputation rested almost solely on his two adult fantasies and a handful of children’s tales. By the 1970s, the works for which George MacDonald was most widely known during his lifetime—realistic fiction and theology—were in danger of drifting into permanent obscurity as a footnote of Victorian literary history. The passage of time had effectively buried MacDonald’s novels and sermons in the past.

But MacDonald as a novelist and prophetic spiritual voice was still not entirely forgotten. Gradually a reawakening of interest in these two overlooked but pivotal aspects of his body of work began to stir. Now and then came another, like Ronald and Greville and Chesterton before them, who recognized that MacDonald’s message was too important merely to be studied and dissected in universities. It was not only his fantasies that deserved attention. His theology and novels were also intended to be read—not only by scholars and graduate students…but by men and women and children everywhere. And these new generations of readers could only be introduced to MacDonald’s God-loving heart and moving stories with new editions to replace those from former times, which were rapidly disappearing. The most groundbreaking of these voices recognized, too, that new editions required adaptation to new times in order to overcome the very impediments of length, dialect, and cumbersome linguistic style that had caused the originals to drift into obscurity in the first place.

In 1936, authoress Elizabeth Yates, friend of MacDonald’s daughter Winifred, issued a volume of MacDonald’s poetry, placing the need for a reawakening of MacDonald’s spiritual impact into perspective by saying, The story of George MacDonald is the story of a man’s love for God…but George MacDonald did not write for his time alone. He has a place in this age… ⁷

As a young atheist, C.S. Lewis discovered MacDonald quite by accident late one cold afternoon in October of 1916 at a bookstall in the Leatherhead train station near London. He soon found the entire course of his life altered. He later wrote, A few hours later I knew I had crossed a great frontier. Thirty years later he reflected on the worlds MacDonald had opened for him by saying, …when the process was complete…I found that I was still with MacDonald and that he had accompanied me all the way.

In paying tribute to MacDonald’s life-changing impact on his life, in 1946 Lewis continued what G.K. Chesterton (1924) and Elizabeth Yates (1936) before him had begun, by publishing an anthology of MacDonald quotations. In introducing his work, entitled simply George MacDonald An Anthology, Lewis wrote the now oft-quoted words, I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation. Honesty drives me to emphasise it. ⁸

Despite his mounting fame and the popularity of his books, however, even C.S. Lewis was unable to turn his vast readership in great numbers toward the impact of MacDonald’s spiritual vision—the entire basis for his anthology. Instead, Lewis scholars recast his encounter with MacDonald exclusively in mythical and imaginative terms, overlooking its deeper and longer-lasting import. The turning point of Lewis’s belief set in motion by MacDonald’s Phantastes expanded scholarly interest in that single title, overshadowing—as significant as was its role in the development of his initial acceptance of Christianity—what to Lewis was far more significant over the course of his later life than the mythopoeia of Phantastes.

The more important component of MacDonald’s vision, which woke forces deeper in Lewis’s heart than the imagination, was nothing less than a lifelong hunger for Christlikeness. It was that which drove Lewis to compile his anthology, not primarily myth.

Lewis described it as follows: It is always the voice of conscience that speaks…the demand for obedience…the Divine Sonship…the Spirit of Christ Himself. ⁹

No one reading the final chapters of his Mere Christianity with insight can mistake the utter totality of this shaping of Lewis’s perspective of what Christianity meant at its core. ¹⁰ MacDonald awoke the yearning in the deepest marrow of C.S. Lewis’s soul to be transformed into the image of Christ. The climax of Mere Christianity literally soars with the music of that highest of all symphonies. And though Lewis and MacDonald both communicated the music of that eternal symphony through the genius of their imaginative gifts, none should mistake—though sadly many do—the literary vehicle itself for that great eternal Theme both their life-stories tell.

Christlikeness, not mythopoeia or faerie, is the foundational purpose and energy informing the life and writings of both George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis.

Elizabeth Yates continued to be one of the most persistent of those who recognized the need for new editions of MacDonald’s books for new times. She had been listening to the symphony for years, knowing it almost first hand from her friendship with MacDonald’s daughter Winifred.

And she wanted to share it. Her vision to get MacDonald into the hands of average people, not just academics, was groundbreaking in her recognition of the novels as the foundation of MacDonald’s legacy.

Yates recognized what even Ronald and Greville and Lewis had only vaguely apprehended—that the deepest essence, the true heart of George MacDonald—his spiritual portrayal, in Lewis’s words, of the Divine Sonship…the Spirit of Christ—was embedded in his novels more than in any other genre within his vast corpus. Phantastes had opened a door for Lewis. But that was not where the true gold of MacDonald’s life’s work lay. The deepest vein of gold in MacDonald’s writings (not the only vein, to be sure, for there was gold in the mythopoeia, imagination, and faerie, and of course in the sermons, but the most extensive and richest of those multiple veins) lay buried in his realistic novels.

The reason was simple: It was in the novels that MacDonald brought the principles embodied in his other work (his fantasies and non-fiction) to life by creating characters and role models who lived those principles.

This is where Sir Gibbie comes back into the story more than eighty years after its publication. When authoress Elizabeth Yates came across a dusty old nineteenth-century copy of Gibbie’s story, the future of MacDonald’s fiction was about to change forever.

Still dismayed that none of MacDonald’s novels were in print, urgently persuaded of their importance, and recognizing the need for new editions to get them out of university libraries and into the hands of the public, Elizabeth Yates did what no one in almost a hundred years had dared do. In 1963 she published a heavily edited and abridged edition of MacDonald’s classic. ¹¹ In so doing, she gave birth to the MacDonald renaissance that has now been underway for almost half a century, an awakening that swept me and most of you reading these words up into it.

Whatever complaints the purists and academics may have had about the legitimacy of condensing an original work, the effect of Yates’s work was magical. One of MacDonald’s most memorable characters, wee Sir Gibbie, suddenly came alive for a new generation of readers.

The fact that Yates had edited the sacrosanct words of a MacDonald original indeed brought howls of protest from the academic intelligentsia. Her critics were of the opinion that MacDonald’s works should be protected rather than be made accessible in new editions that publishers would publish and that people could actually understand. In their opinion, the gold should stay buried rather than be excavated with the unacceptable mining implement of the editor’s pen.

Fortunately for us all, Elizabeth Yates took exception to that perspective. As mentioned in the Introduction to The Marquis of Lossie, neither were such critics aware to what extent MacDonald himself endorsed the editorial function, and used it himself in preparing older works for new publication, in the hope of rendering, as MacDonald explained, such a reception and appreciation as the book in itself deserves, yet more probable in this country. ¹² Elizabeth Yates was following MacDonald’s own example, and in a sense taking him at his word.

In the Foreword to her new edition, Yates explained why new editions of MacDonald were not merely legitimate, they were necessary. No twentieth-century publisher would publish the books in their original form, nor would readers in a faster-paced contemporary world have the fortitude to wade through books of 500 pages, or be able to understand them. Editing was required.

To introduce her dramatically innovative work, Yates wrote:

Some years ago a friend asked, ‘Have you read Sir Gibbie?’

‘No,’ I answered, wondering what I had missed.

‘Oh, but you must.’

And I meant to read Sir Gibbie, but the book had long been out of print and there seemed no copy easily available in either bookstore or library.

Then one day, my friend quietly took down Sir Gibbie from her shelf and put it into my hands. It was an old copy, small of print, and worn.

‘You’ll like it,’ she said patiently, "and don’t be put off by the Scotch dialect."

But I was put off by it…the book defied hasty reading but it implored constant reading, and from the moment it caught me up I was conscious of a breadth and depth and height of feeling such as I had not known for a long time. It moved me… I could not put the book down until it was finished, and yet I could not bear to come to its end. Once at its last page, I felt I would have to do what I had often done as a child—turn back to the first page and begin reading all over again. I longed to tell everyone I knew to read it…It would not do to tell them anything about it. This was not only a book, it was an experience.

Sir Gibbie is George MacDonald at his deep-hearted best…But why had Sir Gibbie been lost? Why had it been out of print and well-nigh unobtainable for more than thirty years? Could it be that the same thing that had held me off held others off, too…the…Scotch dialect…awkward-and-incomprehensible? Sir Gibbie, too, was enormously long, and not always with the story. MacDonald, like one of his mountain burns in its spring spate, thought prodigiously and could not resist putting into the book he was writing all that he was thinking, some of which had already found its way into lectures and sermons.

There was need for a new edition of Sir Gibbie, an edition that would make a new appeal…

What seemed important to me was that the book be made available to readers today, not continue to remain on a few bookshelves as a dusty, however charming, relic of another day…

Now and then a book is read as a friend is made and after it life is not the same, nor will ever be the same, for it has become richer, more meaningful, more challenging. Sir Gibbie did this to me. Sir Gibbie holds that within its covers to do something to all who read it. ¹³

Another who recognized the need for new editions to bring MacDonald’s buried veins of gold again into the light was Wheaton College professor Dr. Rolland Hein. Dr. Hein took a similarly groundbreaking approach to MacDonald’s spiritual writings as Yates had to his fiction. He realized that adaptation was needed in order for MacDonald’s lofty ideas to penetrate into hearts and minds in what had become a faster-paced secularized culture and literary climate. His editing had the same intent—to bring MacDonald’s spiritual vision into the light with greater clarity.

Of his second edited edition of MacDonald’s sermons, Hein wrote: The publication of this volume is, in a sense, a protest. It is a protest against all unworthy and inadequate thinking concerning the character and working of God. But the intention is positive, not negative. MacDonald’s vision of the gracious character of God, and of His creative presence within His children for righteousness’ sake, is perhaps unsurpassed in Christian writings.¹⁴

With Elizabeth Yates and Dr. Hein paving the way, the exhumation and rebirthed dissemination of the writings of George MacDonald gained momentum. A twenty-five-year-old Californian, like Yates some years earlier, made the discovery of a dusty old nineteenth-century novel called Malcolm, and it changed his life exactly as The Princess and the Goblin had G.K. Chesterton’s, as Phantastes had C.S. Lewis’s, as Sir Gibbie had Elizabeth Yates’s, and as MacDonald’s sermons had Rolland Hein’s. And with the same result as Yates’s—the passion to share MacDonald by producing new and more accessible editions.

That young man happened to be me.

Yates’s personal sentiments about Sir Gibbie precisely resonated with my own feelings after reading MacDonald’s Cullen doublet. As Yates had been a few years earlier, I was transported into another world. I knew, as she did, that I had to produce a new and updated edition of Malcolm’s story so that the magical world of MacDonald’s fictional Portlossie could be experienced by others. I have shared more about my discovery of Malcolm’s story in the introduction to The Marquis of Lossie.

I find this fact fascinating. All five of us—Chesterton, Lewis, Yates, Hein, and myself—responded in exactly the same way: We had to share the writings of George MacDonald, accompanied by new writings of our own.

G.K. Chesterton did so in his timeless essay setting MacDonald into the context of Scotland’s history in his introduction to Greville MacDonald’s George MacDonald and His Wife (1924).

C.S. Lewis did so in his George MacDonald An Anthology (1946) and its Preface, as well as in his The Great Divorce (1946).

Elizabeth Yates did so in her collection of MacDonald poems Gathered Grace (1936), her condensed edition of Sir Gibbie (1963), and her edition of The Wise Woman (1964).

Rolland Hein did so with his volumes of edited sermons—Life Essential, the Hope of the Gospel (1974), The Creation in Christ (1976), and The Miracles of Our Lord (1980).

Then it was my turn to follow in their footsteps. By the mid-1970s, I was engaged in producing an updated edition of MacDonald’s Malcolm, though I could find no publisher willing to take it on. Even the publisher of Yates’s Sir Gibbie rejected it, as did thirty others. But other authors were having a little more success. MacDonald scholar Glenn Sadler compiled a new collection of MacDonald’s fairy tales and short stories. ¹⁵ And as mentioned, Rolland Hein produced the above-mentioned three volumes of selections from MacDonald’s sermons and one compendium of fiction quotes. ¹⁶

Ultimately I did find a publisher for my new edition of the Malcolm doublet, and my series of redacted titles of MacDonald’s fiction and non-fiction writings began in 1982. They were followed by our Sunrise Centenary series of original collector facsimile reprints of MacDonald’s novels, sermons, and poems. ¹⁷

In 1987, William Raeper and I published biographies of MacDonald on our respective sides of the Atlantic—his concentrating more on the year-by-year details, mine attempting to interpret the spiritual themes of MacDonald’s life, and how those themes are reflected in his writings. ¹⁸ Rolland Hein later followed with his own insightful biographical interpretation of MacDonald’s life. ¹⁹ Glenn Sadler added to this knowledge with a compilation of MacDonald’s letters,²⁰ as did the inauguration of the magazine Wingfold in the 1990s, published by Barbara Amell, with an emphasis on many previously unknown aspects of MacDonald’s life and work, especially adding a wealth of knowledge about MacDonald’s hundreds of lectures throughout his lifetime. ²¹

Since then new editions of MacDonald’s work have escalated exponentially. These include new studies, biographies, magazines, articles, and graduate theses too numerous to mention—all multiplied exponentially by the advent of the digital age—exploding MacDonald’s legacy throughout the Christian world. To cite them all is clearly beyond the scope of this overview. These few references are thus limited to those publications that truly broke new ground rather than, as invaluable as some have been, those that were modeled after them.

Recognizing the principles of Mark 4, that there are different human soils and distinctive means of sowing the seeds of truth, it has been my persistent goal through the years—I hope faithfully following my exampling-mentors C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Yates, and Rolland Hein— to make available to the public a varied offering of MacDonald’s writings both in redacted and original formats. * To these I have added my own original writings to interpret MacDonald’s vision of God, life, and the world into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Some of MacDonald’s writings and ideas are notably obscure. His theology ranges over the full spectrum of Christian thought—from his reaction against Calvinism’s doctrine of election, to God’s character of childlikeness, to the purpose of fire in Scripture, to the potential of repentance after death, to the imperative of daily obedience, to the Fatherhood of God, to an almost chilling interpretation of the parable of the last farthing, to a repudiation of vicarious sacrifice, to animals in heaven. He was a huge and expansive thinker. His perspectives cannot be easily categorized or summarized in twenty-five words or less. Nor will the man George MacDonald ever be revealed by an analysis of the mere events of his life, which can so easily distract the letter-worshipper from more important spirit-themes.

Because of the obscurity and theological expansionism of MacDonald’s thought, it may even be that a new interpretation improves a particularly abstruse original in certain ways. Because we do not all read the New Testament in its original Greek, does that invalidate our reading it in adapted, modified, translated editions? Here and there we may miss a shade of meaning. But the overall spirit of the original still breathes through the pages. The Spirit of the Scriptures is not contained in its words, in Greek or in English. The Spirit emerges from the life and power of the message, and from the Man who is the central Character of the biblical drama. Translators and historians and archaeologists will never be perfect vessels. No doubt every translation of the Bible contains errors. But the life remains.

Of his father, Ronald wrote, George MacDonald was one of the endless chain of interpreters of God to man…never losing sight of his privilege and duty of interpretation, he would, all his life, use the best means in his reach and judgment to achieve each separate stage of his over-ruling purpose. ²²

In the same way, praying to do so both boldly and humbly, I have viewed my own life’s work from a similar vantage point, as I know Elizabeth Yates and Rolland Hein did as well. We have been three among many who have been given the immense privilege of attempting to interpret George MacDonald’s life and ideas to readers of our generation. As Ronald said of his father, we too have made use of the best means in our reach and judgment, at different stages, to achieve that overruling purpose. In my own case, I have tried not only to expand availability of MacDonald’s writings, as important as that has been, but also to shed light on how those writings can most fruitfully be read. In carrying on this multi-faceted work, I have been, as Ronald says, but one in an endless chain of interpreters—honored and humbled to stand on the shoulders of such giants as G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Yates, and especially my own contemporary Rolland Hein, not to mention MacDonald’s two sons, all of whom have been the visionary inspirers of my own efforts. *

The squawking of purists toward the proliferation of new editions has predictably been part of the MacDonald renaissance of our time. Objections will no doubt persist for years to come, as if to tamper with an author’s original is necessarily to make it less than it once was. I follow Elizabeth Yates and Rolland Hein in taking a more practical view.

In two of his edited editions, Dr. Hein wrote: "People of his day…relished a considerably more verbose and florid style. [This book]…is one of the finest devotional volumes I have ever read, but it suffers from a rambling and repetitious style. My undertaking has been, humbly and cautiously, to reduce