Donal Grant

By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

A gothic thriller of good versus evil played out in the heart of a mysterious castle—the sequel to Sir Gibbie by the 19th-century Scottish author.
 
As well as being MacDonald’s longest book, the magnificent Donal Grant is a novel with everything—a Gothic castle with hidden rooms and passageways, good guys and bad guys, mysteries and inheritances, and poignant yet bittersweet love. Little does Gibbie’s friend Donal realize what he is in for when he takes a tutoring job at mysterious Castle Graham.
 
Woven throughout, of course, are many signature tunes of MacDonald’s wisdom and spiritual insight, including one of C.S. Lewis’s favorite MacDonald lines, that God is “easy to please but hard to satisfy.” Along with Malcolm, Donal Grant presents one of MacDonald’s most intricate and riveting plots, led by another of his stellar characters of virtue and truth. Its massive length, however (786 pages in the original), difficult Scots dialect, and numerous digressive tangents, illustrate better than any MacDonald title the need for condensed contemporary editions. Donal Grant is unique in the MacDonald corpus as being originally released in two different editions in Great Britain and America. This updated edition by Michael Phillips, which Phillips ranks as one of his favorite MacDonald titles, epitomizes the value and significance of The Cullen Collection in bringing the fiction of George MacDonald alive for new generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795352164

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

Donal Grant

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): 978-0-7953-5216-4

www.RosettaBooks.com

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 (2018)

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

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

CONTENTS

Foreword to The Cullen Collection

Introduction to Donal Grant

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.     Foot Faring

2.     A Meeting

3.     In Lodgings

4.     The Sabbath

5.     First Days in Auchars

6.     In the Castle

7.     A Mystery

8.     Becoming Acquainted

9.     Horse and Man

10.   Prejudiced by Opinion

11.   Lessons

12.   Two Plots

13.   An Altercation

14.   Kate and Hector Graeme

15.   Visitor to the Tower

16.   Dinner with the Earl

17.   Bewilderment

18.   Lady Arctura

19.   Intervention

20.   The Earl’s Bedchamber

21.   Andrew Comin

22.   Gradual Changes

23.   The Ghost Music

24.   What Is Faith?

25.   Discovery of the Harp

26.   Kennedy and Forgue

27.   Donal and Miss Carmichael

28.   Poignant Request

29.   The House in Town

30.   A Wrathful Admission

31.   Passing of a Saint

32.   One Mystery Solved

33.   The Dream

34.   The Weight and the Cord

35.   A Clue

36.   Arctura’s Room

37.   The Lost Room

38.   A Confidential Talk

39.   An Unsought Interview

40.   Lord Morven

41.   A Strange Burial

42.   About Death

43.   The Bureau

44.   The Crypt

45.   The Closet

46.   Explaining the Lost Room

47.   Lord Forgue Again

48.   Larkie’s Fall

49.   A Plot

50.   Davie at Glashgar

51.   Sinister Design

52.   Moral Depravity

53.   The Porch of Hades

54.   Deliverance

55.   Donal and the Earl

56.   Restoration

57.   The Earl’s Return

58.   The Earl and the Doctor

59.   Eternal Confrontation

60.   Confessions

61.   The Ceremony

62.   The Will

63.   The Passing

64.   Morven House

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 (18241905) 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

A Gothic Thriller of Selfless Love

When Judy and I discovered the writings of George MacDonald, the first of his novels we read was Sir Gibbie. It was largely responsible for beginning our MacDonald odyssey and we immediately began searching for more of the Scotsman’s books. Naturally, high on the list of titles we were eager to read was the story of Gibbie’s friend Donal. *

But in those days of the 1970s, when no MacDonald books were in print, we discovered Donal Grant to be one of the rarest and most difficult titles to locate. Long after we had found Malcolm and Robert Falconer and many other of MacDonald’s novels through antiquarian sources, Donal Grant continued to be an elusive treasure buried in a field. It took ten years before we laid eyes on a copy. Whether or not it was that long wait, or because of the intrinsic uniqueness of the book, Donal Grant has ever since been one of my favorites. Decades after my first reading in 1981, I still consider it, with two or three others, at the top rank within the MacDonald corpus.

Not all critics agree. They would consider Donal too dreamy, poetic, long-winded, and idealistic to be a real character. They would no doubt dismiss the book’s lengthy spiritual discussions, and MacDonald’s rambling discursive asides, as detrimental to the artistry of the novelist’s craft. In other words, for precisely the same reasons that I consider this book among MacDonald’s most profound works, and its title character a significant influence in my life. Everything, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how people respond to the writings of George MacDonald.

For my part, Malcolm and Donal are my two supreme fictional role models who have been with me, Malcolm for more than forty-five, Donal more than thirty-five years. Both young men—and as such I describe them because they are real to me—have influenced my walk with God in more ways than I can possibly enumerate. They are who I want to be when I grow up. Behind every lead character I create in my fiction lurks the influence of Malcolm and Donal, living on invisibly through my own novels.

But Donal Grant is unique for other reasons. It is far and away MacDonald’s longest book. Nothing else even comes a close second. And perhaps because of this, two completely different editions were produced in 1883, the year of original publication, by three publishers.

We have encountered this before. Those who have read Robert Falconer and Castle Warlock are well-familiar with the confusion, controversy, and ambiguity resulting from multiple editions. (Which came first…which is the true first edition…why did MacDonald make the changes he did…which is the most reliable edition, etc.?) Yet the length difference in the two editions of Castle Warlock was minor and did not materially affect the narrative in significant ways.

In the case of Donal Grant, however, the difference between the two editions is a staggering 50,000 words! Some of MacDonald’s entire short novels are not much longer than that. And in the case of Castle Warlock we were able to speculate somewhat knowledgeably (though far from conclusively!) on the sequence of the two editions, knowing that one was published a year before the other.

We are not so fortunate with Donal Grant—the three publishers produced the two editions, one 50,000 words longer than the other, all in the same year—probably within a month or two of each other! With the two editions coming out almost simultaneously, they were obviously in production if not side-by-side, close to it. How is it possible, to unravel the sequence of events leading to the writing, then the publication, of the two editions?

It isn’t possible. All we can do is make calculated and intelligently speculative guesses.

We literally possess no information on why there were two editions, or which came first, or how the changes (whether a shortening or a lengthening) took place from one edition to the other. This has led to the persistent conjecture through the years that the shorter version (which occasionally has also been postulated for Warlock) was produced by some unknown editor (possibly in the employ of one of the publishing houses), who drastically edited MacDonald’s final draft simply because it was too long. (The longer of the two editions rolled off the presses at 786 pages.)

It is obvious that besides a great read—intriguing and mysterious—the publishing history of Donal Grant is fraught with as many mysteries as the story. We will try to disentangle some of these as we go along.

THEMES AND DIFFICULTIES IN DONAL GRANT

The publication of Donal Grant in 1883 (in both its editions and by all three of its publishers) culminated an incredibly busy and productive several years since MacDonald’s relocation to Italy in the late 1870s. As was the case with Sir Gibbie and Castle Warlock, living in Italy neither dampened MacDonald’s affection for his homeland, nor diminished his artistry in crafting another uniquely Scottish tale.

MacDonald’s work between 1875 and 1886 represents a summit of creative inspiration, containing the deep and far-reaching spirituality which characterizes his best novels. Every one is not only memorable for plot, characterization, and spiritual depth, they are of epic length. By today’s publishing standards, most would run over 600 pages. Donal Grant, as noted, is the longest of all.

MacDonald’s only other publication of 1883 was the collection of poems, A Threefold Cord, printed privately and subtitled, Poems by Three Friends. In it MacDonald intermingled his own poems with those of his deceased brother John Hill MacDonald and his friend Greville Matheson, who had died the previous year. It was MacDonald’s tribute to both his now departed friends. The book was dedicated to MacDonald’s son Greville Matheson, whose middle name was given in honor of his father’s friend. Some of the poems are reproduced from previous publications, otherwise the authorship of the individual poems in the collection is not identified and difficult to determine.

That most of the Threefold’s content came from reprints, that nothing else was published that year, and that both editions of Donal Grant were released in the fall, gives ground for supposing that most of MacDonald’s writing time, possibly beginning in late 1882 but certainly throughout the first six or eight months of 1883, was assiduously devoted to this massive project, which resulted, by the end of the year, in two completely distinct final versions.

In Donal Grant, once again we find ourselves immersed in a thoroughly Scottish milieu, evocative and redolent of MacDonald’s distinctive literary individuality, a book which puts a fitting stamp on this season of MacDonald’s literary career with a genuine Gothic spine-tingler.

There have been critics through the years—sadly, C.S. Lewis among them—who posit the view that George MacDonald was not a novelist of the highest caliber. Certainly much in his writing defies hasty reading. His novels are long. Decoding the dialect can be troublesome. Sentences of 100 and 150 words are common, sometimes running in excess of 200.

These objections weigh little in the balance for me, because I cannot segregate my appreciation of the novelist from the man. What does this man, the sum total of everything he was, have to teach me? How can he cause me not only to enjoy life through his books, but how can he widen my horizons, broaden my perspective? How can he help me grow?

At this point George MacDonald becomes a writer of the very highest order because he was a man of wisdom and honor—a man whose personal virtues were impeccable, whose integrity was unquestioned, and who was loved, admired, and revered by all who knew him.

What made the man so unusual, so respected, and his books so loved—both in his lifetime and more than a hundred years after their publication?

It can be reduced, I think, to the simple prescription which guided the course of MacDonald’s life: Love of truth.

It was the search for wisdom—clear-headed, compassionate, biblically based, and intellectually sound—which inspired and unified every word MacDonald wrote. His books thus contain power on a more profound level than can be appreciated by intellectual analysis alone.

It is against the backdrop of MacDonald’s life that we find most clearly illuminated his relentless pursuit of reality and his compulsion to share the truths that resulted from that quest. The circumstances of his life were among the most important factors which shaped his thought and work. Had he not recoiled from the stringent Calvinism of his upbringing and been removed from a position of ministry, he might never have been forced to pose questions others were afraid to consider.

His stories are compelling in themselves. But, clearly, much more than plot is contained within their pages. This is not to say he wrote with specific symbolism or allegory always in mind. He loved creating enjoyable stories to delight his readers. Yet his attitude toward truth and the resultant wisdom were so deeply ingrained that his spiritual perspectives simply overflowed onto the printed page.

In some ways, Donal Grant might be considered MacDonald’s most pastoral book, in the sense that he used it to reflect even more than usual on spiritual matters not necessarily germane to the story. I read George MacDonald himself in the character of Donal Grant—the teacher, the thinker, the poet, combining gentleness with boldness to speak the truth.

At the same time, almost contradictorily, it is also one of his most spooky, where character-good confronts unvarnished character-evil. People often ask me what makes MacDonald’s novels so unique. I tell them, Primarily the spiritual themes, but the books are equally character-driven, action-packed stories with all the ingredients that go into a good novel—romance, intrigue, mystery, murder, castles and secret passageways and lost rooms and dungeons and hidden treasures, dead bodies, long-lost inheritances, good guys and bad guys…it’s all there!

Nearly all these ingredients are found in Donal Grant. Legends of old castles with ghosts and Green Ladies abound in Scotland. There are green lady stories connected to Cullen House. Most individuals you meet over the age of fifty have some story to tell, and Castle Graham is the perfect fictionalized type of them all. MacDonald here revives the story of the card playing rascals from CastleWarlock, and reminds us yet again how far ahead of his time he was—in this case in his insight into drug addiction and the only way it can be cured.

While I try not to read too much symbolism into MacDonald’s stories, the following by Dr. Rolland Hein, though I take such labyrinthine analysis cautiously, will I’m sure interest many readers.

"The labyrinthine character of the castle (through whose mazes Donal deftly finds his way) is likened to the heroine’s confused psychological state. The metaphor works not only to suggest the complex nature of the inner being, but also to suggest how a change is possible. People inherit their natures from their ancestors as they do their houses…

"As the plot unfolds Donal and Arctura discover deep within the bowels of the old castle a hidden chapel that had been walled up and forgotten for generations, and the elaborate metaphor is complete. The chapel at the heart of the castle is like the divine self forming the essence of each person; it must be brought back to life by discovery and conversion…

"The focus at the end of the novel is on the repentance of the thoroughly evil Lord Morven, a satanic figure who had been wielding power in the castle. When Lord Morven is finally broken, MacDonald explains: ‘He who will not let us out until we have paid the uttermost farthing, rejoices over the offer of the first golden grain in payment. Easy to please is he—hard indeed to satisfy.’ ¹ The final sentence is in microcosm MacDonald’s view of God in his relation to people’s spiritual growth.

"The subject of conversion, of course, often recurs in MacDonald’s novels—for example, the marquis in Malcolm and Redmain in Mary Marston. But Lord Morven is the most villainous of those who repent. As MacDonald’s thinking focused more on the spiritual categories of the righteous and the wicked, his novels became yet more concerned with repentance, conversion, and spiritual becoming." ²

The following excerpt from a letter from Italy to MacDonald’s cousin Helen is fascinating. MacDonald set Donal Grant in Fyvie Castle north of Aberdeen a few miles from Scotland’s east coast, and used the name Cosmo for the two Warlocks.

"The widow of the late owner of Fyvie Castle is a good deal here. She comes often to our house, drawn chiefly by the likeness she sees in me to her late husband, Colonel Cosmo Gordon. By the way the main staircase in that castle, of which staircase she gave me a photograph, is one of the finest things I know in that kind, & I have a passion for stairs of all sorts, especially spiral ones. I thought of it in my last story, Donal Grant." ³

MACDONALD THE EDITOR AND REVISER

After Judy and I finally did locate a copy of Donal Grant in 1981, it became the fourth in my edited series of MacDonald novels, published in 1983 as The Shepherd’s Castle.

As has been well-documented, my editorial work of the 1980s was met with greatly varied reactions—from praise to denunciation. The latter notwithstanding, Donal Grant illustrates the need for updated editions perhaps more than most of MacDonald’s titles. The book opens with a long chapter of over thirty pages, much of it containing Donal’s thoughts, reflections, and digressions—including an abstruse discussion of the poet Shelley along with a page of poetry—little action or furthering of story or plot, then a digressive spiritual discussion, with a large portion of the slow narrative in dialect such as:

I see the thing as plain’s thing can be: the cure o’ a’ ill ‘s jist mair life! That’s it! Life abune an’ ayont the life that took the stroke! An’ gien throu’ this hert-brak I come by mair life, it’ll be jist ane o’ the throes o’ my h’avenly birth—I’ the whilk the bairn has as mony o’ the pains as the mither: that’s maybe a differ thatween the twa—the earthly an’ the h’avenly…

Sae noo I hae to begin fresh, an’ lat the thing that’s past an’ gane slip efter ither dreams. Eh, but it’s a bonny dream yet! It lies close ‘ahin’ me, no to be forgotten, no to be luikit at—like ane o’ thae dreams o’ watter an’ munelicht that has nae wark I’ them: a body wadna lie a’ nicht an’ a’ day tu in a dream o’ the sowl’s gloamin’! Na, Lord; mak o’ me a strong man, an’ syne gie me as muckle o’ the bonny as may please thee. Wha am I to lippen til, gien no to thee, my ain father an’ mither an’ gran’father an’ a’ body in ane, for thoo giedst me them a’.

I have spoken of Warlock’s brilliant opening. I would have to say that Donal Grant is one of MacDonald’s most tedious openings.

Trying to interest a reader unfamiliar with MacDonald in such a first chapter, where the story moves at a snail’s pace and the dialect is visually intimidating, is a difficult chore, especially for one who may have just finished Gibbie’s delightful story. It isn’t that a reasonably intelligent individual isn’t capable of figuring out what is being said. But when page after page, chapter after chapter, of a book requires such effort, most readers today (including those who are not well-versed in their Shelley, Wordsworth, Scott, or Shakespeare) are unlikely to stick with it. They want to get on with the story.

It is clearly prudent to exercise caution toward a new edition of any literary work. Scrutiny is certainly appropriate to ascertain whether indeed a need exists for an updated edition, and, if so, whether or not the author and his work are fairly and accurately represented. Some academic purists, however, condemn all new editions out of hand—insisting that only original editions can legitimately represent the work of a renowned author.

The editorial function, however, has been a recognized and important aspect of publishing for hundreds of years. Times, customs, and language change. What are translations of the Bible but new editions to meet new needs of new times? Without edited, redacted, and updated translations that reflect constantly shifting linguistic trends, we would not be reading the Bible with clear meaning today. The more salient question is whether new editions might actually enhance the reading experience for many readers who might never read the original texts.

When I encounter discussions of tangentially unimportant aspects of MacDonald’s work, condemning this or that edition, I am reminded of his own piercing (and sadly prophetic) words from his sermon, Heirs of Heaven and Earth:

Of all the destroyers of the truth which any man has preached, none have done so effectually or so grievously as his own followers. So many of them have received but the forms, and know nothing of the truth which gave him those forms! They lay hold but of the non-essential, the specially perishing in those forms. These outer aspects of truth, doubly false and misleading in their crumbling disjunction, they proceed to force upon the attention and reception of others, calling that the truth which is at best but the draggled and useless fringe of its earth-made garment. ⁴

Which is the real possessor of a book—the man who has its original and every following edition, and shows, to many an admiring and envying visitor, now this, now that, in binding characteristic, with possessor-pride; yea, from secret shrine is able to draw forth and display the author’s manuscript, with the very shapes in which his thoughts came forth to the light of day,—or the man who cherishes one little, hollow-backed, coverless, untitled, bethumbed copy, which he takes with him in his solitary walks and broods over in his silent chamber, always finding in it some beauty or excellence or aid he had not found before—which is to him in truth as a live companion?

For what makes the thing a book? Is it not that it has a soul—the mind in it of him who wrote the book? Therefore only can the book be possessed, for life alone can be the possession of life. The dead possess their dead only to bury them.

Does not he then, who loves and understands his book, possess it with such possession as is impossible to the other? ⁵

I would emphasize again the importance of reading George MacDonald for the gold represented by his heart—for the true soul of his books. I encourage all lovers of MacDonald not to be sidetracked by the non-essential and what is perishing in those forms, and to seek the truth which gave MacDonald those forms rather than the fringe of their earth-made garments. If one individual becomes acquainted with MacDonald’s truth-loving heart through an edited edition, and another discovers it in an original edition, one on Kindle, one in a beat-up hardback, another from a newly published paperback, and yet another from a photocopy borrowed from a friend, none of those differently packaged editions matter. Let all rejoice for the others, and for the common treasure they have discovered in unique and individual ways.

The most fascinating aspect of the case, which many MacDonald enthusiasts are unaware of, is that MacDonald himself not only endorsed the editorial function, he actually engaged in it.

MacDonald himself edited old texts for new times.

He recognized that sometimes original writings did not convey to the readership of later generations and other cultures exactly the meaning intended by the author, and that emendation and redaction (i.e., editing and updating) were occasionally beneficial. We know this because he produced edited editions of some of his own favorite authors.

MacDonald was well known to love the editing, polishing, pruning process of his own writings as well. He was an inveterate reviser and redactor of his work, even after publication. He was constantly changing what he had formerly written. We saw this vividly in the case of Robert Falconer.

In his essay From a Northern Window, MacDonald’s son Ronald comments, He did the work he had set himself, one might say, twice over…in divers forms and with varying skill, that he who had not the leisure or the learning to read the higher tongue might catch the word…fresh in the plain tale of a daily life which he could understand…I say again: he did his work twice, and twice it was done well. ⁶

Ronald’s words were particularly directed toward his father’s poetry, though we can draw the broader inference about his writing in general. Ronald’s words, in fact, will help us with the two-edition mystery of Donal Grant that has perplexed MacDonald scholars for a century. Both editions were published and reprinted by various publishers, both have been readily available and widely read in recent years, as both were in MacDonald’s lifetime.

The two widely differing textual editions indeed confirm yet again MacDonald not only as an author, but as an editor who was constantly modifying his work. Whatever were the reasons, and in whatever order the two editions were produced, a thoroughgoing edit took place—which can in some cases be almost as time-consuming as an original draft. It is little wonder that no other novel of MacDonald’s was published in 1883. He was too busy producing Donal Grant’s two versions to have time for anything else.

THE TWO VERSIONS OF DONAL GRANT

The two versions are most easily distinguished simply by calling the one the long edition (of approximately 225,000-227,000 words) and the other the short edition (of approximately 176,000 words). The long was published in the United States and formed the basis of most American editions. The short was published in Great Britain and likewise was followed by most subsequent British editions.

The case is almost identical to Castle Warlock. The U.S. edition is the longer of the two. However, the difference in length is far more dramatic. The difference between the two editions of Warlock is a mere 2,000 words. In Donal Grant it is the equivalent of another short entire book!

Just as for Warlock, both Lothrop and Harper published the long version in the U.S. The U.K. publisher had now changed, however, to Kegan Paul, which had negotiated with Sampson Low to produce the one-volume edition of Castle Warlock that same year. Now with Donal Grant, Sampson Low (who had published a rash of MacDonald titles through 1881-82) stepped aside as quickly as they had come on the scene, and Kegan Paul took over as MacDonald’s primary U.K. publisher. Over the next few years they would reprint more than a dozen of his titles, both old and new, producing more editions of most of MacDonald’s novels than any U.K. publisher in four distinct sets, each with its own binding style.

In the case of Donal Grant, there was no substantial time gap between U.S. and U.K. editions to help us figure out what took place, and which can account for the rewrite between them. Indeed, they were published within a month or two of one another.

One obviously came first. At first glance, the sequence of writing and publication would appear to be straightforward. There was no magazine serialization to complicate the sequence of events. Since long editions usually come first, and are edited down into shorter editions (as with Falconer II and Falconer III—see footnote "Various Editions of Robert Falconer" in the introduction to that book), the traditional assumption has been that the long edition of Donal Grant was the original and was condensed to produce the short.

This is completely logical. The editing process usually shortens. We might well posit a similar one-manuscript-theory and two-manuscript-theory for Donal Grant as we did for Castle Warlock. The situations are remarkably similar.

In this case, presumably MacDonald had written what was by far his longest book. Either he or his publisher decided to condense it by twenty-to-twenty-five percent for future editions. Such was the case with the triple decker of Robert Falconer condensed to produce the shorter Second Edition. This has also fueled speculation that the edited edition was produced by someone other than MacDonald. This conjecture for both Castle Warlock and Donal Grant persists and is occasionally raised in discussions of MacDonald’s work.

But as in the case of Castle Warlock, the situation is not as simple as it appears. The facts tell an astonishingly complex tale. We may never entirely unravel the mystery of the two editions of Donal Grant until new facts come to light from that most significant year of 1883.

Now it is true that when an editor edits a manuscript, it is almost always shortened. Except in minor ways, adding original text does not usually fall within the purview of an editor. But when an author edits his own work, that dynamic shifts. The creative juices continue to flow, sometimes even more during an edit. New material gets added, along with needful condensing edits. We saw that with Castle Warlock, and we will see the same thing here. Even the short version of Donal Grant has added material not found in the long version. When those additions are carefully scrutinized, MacDonald’s literary fingerprint is all over them. The edits are unmistakably his own. This creative process makes determining the order of writing very difficult. (At the same time, the fingerprints of editors, proofreaders, and no doubt inattentive typesetters, are also visible along with their occasional mistakes that MacDonald did not catch—both editions occasionally changing Donal to Donald.)

The long U.S. 1883 edition published by Lothrop, Harper, Routledge, and other American publishers is a huge book, and formed the basis of our Sunrise Centenary facsimile edition (also of 786 text pages) published in 1990. It is recognizable on the first page (written in Italy, hence the reference to Italians) from its lengthy and more leisurely opening:

It was a lovely morning in the first of summer. Yes, we English, whatever we may end with, always begin with the weather, and not without reason. We have more moods, though are less subject to them, I hope, than the Italians. Therefore we are put in the middle of weather. They have no weather. Where there is so little change, there is at least little to call weather. Weather is the moods of the world, and we need weather good and bad—at one time healing sympathizer with mood, at another fit expression for, at yet another fit corrective to, mood. God only knows in how many ways he causes weather to serve us.

It was a lovely morning in the first of summer. Donal Grant was descending a path on a hillside to the valley below—a sheep track of which he knew every winding better than any…

The short U.K. edition published by Kegan Paul in one volume in 1884 (their 397 page Second Edition), and editions by A.L. Burt (U.S., 443 pages, undated), Lovell (U.S. 314 pages, undated), and others, omit the entire first paragraph. This edition is recognizable on the first page from its condensed opening, with slight word changes in addition to the omitted paragraph:

It was a lovely morning in the first of summer. Donal Grant was descending a path on a hillside to the valley below—a sheep-track of which he knew every winding as well as any…

The prevailing school of thought, and my assumption through the years, was that MacDonald’s original first edition (the long version) was edited to produce the short version. An editor’s pen applied to the long version, striking out the first paragraph and rearranging a few words in the next, is a matter of a few pen strokes. The presumed edit from long to short is easy to see.

This led me, early in the years of my MacDonald research, to fall into what I now recognize as the erroneous assumption that someone other than MacDonald may have carried out this edit. My reasons were three:

One, I simply assumed that MacDonald wouldn’t cut one of his novels so drastically. (At the time I was unaware that he had done precisely that for the Second Edition of Robert Falconer.)

Two, so much wonderful spiritually incisive content was missing from the short version, I further assumed that MacDonald would not have left such material out.

And three, the clincher—the central thematic heart, not merely of this one book, but in many ways of George MacDonald’s entire theology, was missing from the short version: Easy to please is he—hard indeed to satisfy.

Surely George MacDonald would never have removed those all-important nine words. Whoever edited the book had obviously blundered badly in omitting them.

Such was my reasoning—that some unnamed editor had edited the original Donal Grant for length, and had inadvertently omitted that pivotal phrase, and thus produced the short version.

When I began working on the new editions for The Cullen Collection, I set out to research the matter in more depth. I had to know whether MacDonald himself, or an unnamed editor, had produced the short edition.

And as I considered the first page more carefully, as a writer I thought to myself how easily just the opposite scenario could have taken place. In looking through his manuscript after the publication of the short opening, MacDonald reads his words, lovely morning in the first of summer…and his brain immediately turns to thoughts of the weather back in England.

He sets his pen down a moment as a smile comes to his face, reminded of the preoccupation of the English and his native Scots with the weather.

A few moments later his pen is back in his hand and he is busy scratching an added aside in the margin about the different responses of the British and Italians to the weather.

This is exactly how writing works, and how books develop. My final drafts are always longer than my early drafts—sometimes much longer. The final edition of George MacDonald A Writer’s Life, is over 200 pages longer than its first proof. Edited manuscripts grow as well as shrink.

This scenario also allows us to explain MacDonald’s addition of the words, Easy to please is he—hard indeed to satisfy, as a phrase he thought of later rather than one he removed.

The two most common U.S. editions of MacDonald’s books were published by Lothrop of Boston and Routledge of New York. The Lothrop and Routledge editions are often confused because their books are precise duplications of one another—mostly in their characteristic green bindings (though both publishers produced lesser-known individual editions as well), with identical spine and cover designs and colors—literally identical in every way. They were the two major U.S. publishers of MacDonald’s books, publishing enormous quantities and sets. What agreement existed between the two firms, I do not know. Clearly a co-publishing agreement or some other shared arrangement was in place.

Routledge continues to be an interesting case. Some of the other publishing magnates of the time emerge onto the pages of MacDonald’s story, a few as close friends—Alexander Strahan (1835-1918), John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), J.B. Lippincott (1813-1886), J.G. Holland (1819-1881). I have seen nothing, however, linking MacDonald personally with American publishing giant Daniel Lothrop (1831-1892) nor with Britain’s George Routledge (1812-1888). Though Routledge was the foremost American publisher of MacDonald titles, with twenty-four titles in their matching dark green set, they were also a major English publishing conglomerate with offices in London, Glasgow, Manchester, and New York.

Routledge’s links go in both directions across the Atlantic. Routledge was connected with Lothrop in the 1880s, and with Strahan as far back as the late 1860s. How many of Routledge’s publications were pirated? We don’t know. It is true (as discussed in footnote The Pirating of MacDonald’s Novels in the introduction to Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood) that Routledge had a reputation as a publisher of cheap shilling volumes (the U.K. version of the dime novel in the U.S). He was the foremost of the British pirates, grabbing up the U.S. works of James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and selling one-and-a-half million cheap pirated copies of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The question is, did Routledge carry his pirating activities across to the U.S., even though it would mean, in a sense, double-crossing his fellow British publishers by pirating their works in the U.S.? If he was willing to pirate from his U.K. brethren, it is curious why Strahan would work with him. And why would Daniel Lothrop co-publish identical editions with Routledge?

MacDonald’s comment to R.W. Gilder in 1876, My book which Routledge is about to publish in America I count one of my most important, ⁷ does not sound like a man annoyed with an upcoming pirated edition, but rather a man enthusiastic about the Routledge release. That he was watching passively while his works were pirated does not fit the facts. MacDonald was aggressively pursuing the American market not sitting helplessly on the sidelines. Probably not all the pirates were villains. (Perhaps straining the credibility of ethics almost to the breaking point, George Munro went so far as to consider himself a reformer, justifying his piracy as a noble responsibility to increase the literacy of the masses.)

Unfortunately, in the literature about the publishing world of the time, Lothrop and Routledge are scarcely mentioned, though they are the most significant players in MacDonald’s U.S. oeuvre. With this evidence of MacDonald’s direct negotiations with both, one cannot but wonder how much of the prevailing American piracy narrative might need to be rewritten.

As noted in the discussion of Castle Warlock, Lothrop also had close links with Harper Brothers. And now for Donal Grant, the two publishers teamed up together again just as they had for the U.S. publication of Castle Warlock. The long American edition of Donal Grant was published in September of 1883 in cheap staple-bound newsprint and three-column format by Harper in its Franklin Square Library series, and in a quality green cloth hardback by Lothrop (and possibly Routledge) about the same time.

With the uncertainty about whether the English weather and hard to satisfy passages had been added or deleted still lurking in the back of my mind, my research now took a complicated turn.

Again, the long-held assumption in MacDonald studies has been that British editions always came first, and that American publications (mostly pirated) were suspect. In other words—British editions good, American editions bad…British editions first and authorized, American editions pirated and illegitimate.

Notwithstanding the piracy problem, by now I realized that this was in many ways a simplistic assumption.

MacDonald’s relationships with American publishers had been on the increase for ten years. After Lippincott’s several authorized editions, and with the U.S. arrangements we saw for Castle Warlock and Weighed and Wanting, as well as Routledge’s 1876 publication of Wingfold and St. George and St. Michael, it was clear that a spirit of hands-across-the-sea was increasingly at work. With A.P. Watt’s help, MacDonald now had numerous relationships and dealings on both sides of the Atlantic.

It was obvious that not all American editions were de facto illegitimate. It was becoming clear, in fact, that some of the U.S. editions—notably Castle Warlock—were actually the true first editions.

But the sequence gets very complex with Donal Grant. With no magazine serialization, no existing original contracts or letters to examine, nor a lengthy time gap between the editions, we have little evidence to offer sequential clues to the evolution of the texts. We are left with only the dates of publication and the texts themselves to unravel the mystery.

ASSUMPTION—THE FALCONER SCENARIO

In a sense it boils down to that first page: Did MacDonald think his original opening too long and strike out the first paragraph? Or did the inspiration about the weather come later and was thus added to his original?

I began my in-depth textual analysis of the two editions of Donal Grant in Scotland. I had copies of both editions (Lothrop/Routledge U.S. long—Kegan Paul U.K. Second Edition short), which I set side by side for comparison. Over several weeks I pored over both texts to see what a textual analysis would reveal.

It did not take long into my research to convince me beyond doubt that MacDonald himself had edited his own editions of Castle Warlock and Donal Grant. My textual analysis of both books revealed MacDonald’s fingerprints everywhere in all the versions. There was no sign of a mystery editor who had hacked 50,000 words out of the long version. Notwithstanding the Easy to please, hard to satisfy conundrum, the short edition was clearly MacDonald’s. The literary and spiritual aura of his presence suffused both texts. Many phrasings unique to each were unmistakably couched in MacDonald’s singular style and syntax and modes of expression. Intrinsic to this conclusion were the numerous phrases and passages that had been added to the short version that no one but MacDonald could have written.

As I proceeded, I compiled a parallel list of passages. These comparisons, however, did not entirely resolve every question of sequence. (As in the case of Castle Warlock, a portion of this list is included for interest at the end of this introduction.)

Another huge question I again had to consider (as with the Malcolm, Marquis, Wingfold, Gibbie, Warlock, Marston, and Weighed and Wanting American editions) was: Where did the U.S. edition of Donal Grant come from? How and when did it get to the States?

The single and double manuscript theories surfaced once more.

The prevailing school of thought, informed by the American-editions-are-pirated-and-bad assumption, went like this:

The moment a serialized or first edition was published in the U.K., copies were put on a ship, arrived in the U.S. a couple of weeks later, and were quickly re-typeset, printed, and bound. Literally within a month or two of the U.K. publication, editions were available from U.S. publishers. (In the case of the Library Editions, sometimes that astonishing turnaround was a mere matter of days!)

Not having yet located the editions of Castle Warlock that obliterated this assumption once and for all, and still working on the British-editions-first theory, I saw no alternative in the case of Donal Grant—because U.K. editions always came first—other than that the U.S. text had come from a copy of the U.K. first edition—the three-volume edition published by Kegan Paul. I assumed that the instant the ink was dry on the triple decker, Lothrop had had copies shipped to the States and immediately began preparing its edition, from which Harper’s Library edition came also. This assumption required that the U.K. triple decker had been published in the long version.

The U.K. Kegan Paul Second Edition (short) which came out a year later in vastly shortened form was easy to explain