Adela Cathcart

By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

Fairy tales told around the fire on Christmas Eve—including “The Light Princess,” “The Shadows,” “The Golden Key,” and “The Giant’s Heart.”
 
Reminiscent of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, MacDonald’s attempt to package a collection of short stories in the guise of a novel is built around a group of snowbound travelers attempting to pass the time in a country house by sharing stories in hopes of distracting young Adela Cathcart from her illness. Early in his career, MacDonald was trying different genres and storytelling methods, and this is a prime example of his creative experimentation. First published in 1865, the included stories changed with a new edition in 1882. Some of MacDonald’s well-known short stories made their first appearance in one of the two editions. This new publication from Michael Phillips includes the best from both original editions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9780795352676

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

Adela Cathcart

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): 978-0-7953-5267-6

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 Adela Cathcart

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. A Snowy Solitary Ride

2. Arrival

3. Christmas Eve

4. Church on Christmas Morning

5. After Church

6. Christmas Dinner

7. Mrs. Bloomfield’s Story

8. The New Doctor

9. The Plan

10   First Story

11. The Light Princess

12. What is the Moral?

13. The Next Day

14. The Bell

15. Discussion and Plans

16. A Visit With the Schoolmaster

17. Birth, Dreaming, and Death

18. Song

19. The Curate and His Wife

20. The Curate Continues

21. A Brief Sermon

22. My Second Story

23. The Shadows

24. A Walk

25. The Evening at the Curate’s

26. Percy and His Mother

27. The Broken Swords

28. The Lost Church

29. Mrs. Armstrong’s Story

30. My Uncle Peter

31. Watching for Wakefulness

32. The Giant’s Heart

33.   How the Children Took My Story

34. The Lost Lamb

35. The Snow Fight

36. A Ballad

37. A Child’s Holiday

38. Interruption

39. Percy

40. The Cruel Painter

41. After the Story

42. The Fox Hunt

43. The Castle: A Parable

44. Another Parable

45. The Little Boy and the Wise Man

46. An Invalid’s Winter: A Sketch of Algiers

47. A Journey Rejourneyed: A Sketch of Switzerland

48. Private Moment

49. What Next?

50. Generalship

51. An Unforeseen Foresight

52. The Dream of the Marble Faces

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 honour 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 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. Imperfect as they were in some respects, I am enormously grateful for those editions. They helped inaugurate a worldwide renaissance of interest in MacDonald. 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.

Nineteen additional titles have been added to the original Bethany House series of novels. The thirteen realistic novels among these (including this one) 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—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 from Cullen’s Seatown 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 to Scarnose 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, 2019

INTRODUCTION

1864

Tales of a Christmas Holiday

In the introductions to the previous volumes of The Cullen Collection, we traced the high points of George MacDonald’s life that led to the beginnings of his career as a novelist. To gain a more complete picture of the events and circumstances that culminated in the publication of Adela Cathcart in 1864, readers may want to consult those earlier volumes. *

The five-year period between the publication of Phantastes in 1858 and David Elginbrod in 1863 can be seen as somewhat experimental for MacDonald. The young author was trying different styles and genres. Indeed, by the end of 1863, he had published five books—all five representing different genres. In today’s idiom, we might say that as an author, MacDonald hadn’t yet found himself. It was a slow transition out of poetry and fantasy into the world of fiction.

Even after the success of David Elginbrod, MacDonald continued to waver between the two styles of storytelling. His next book added a sixth genre to his repertoire—more accurately, a hodge-podge of mixed genres that no one has ever been quite able to satisfactorily categorize.

Adela Cathcart sits squarely between the two worlds—half realistic novel, half fairy tale. It perfectly illustrates not merely MacDonald’s diverse skill to write in different genres, but also his occasional ambivalence in being able to separate the two. He had been writing children’s stories and fairy tales for several years. Up till then he had only managed to get a few placed in magazines. He also wanted to see them in a book. So MacDonald decided to follow the example of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

In Adela Cathcart, therefore, he tried his hand at another creative and literary experiment. (Might we perhaps look at all his early writings as experiments, as he tried to find a genre that would satisfy his creativity, and would also translate into sales?) In it he employed the setting of a realistic novel to frame a storytelling club in which the members tell each other fairy tales. Chaucer’s work was a classic. Why shouldn’t he do the same? The end result is a collection of tales sandwiched into a loose realistic story centered around Adela Cathcart and her father.

When, where, and why George MacDonald began writing children’s stories, along with that companion genre loosely known as fairy tales, is unknown. We can identify several factors that were probably at work during the late 1850s and 1860s. The most obvious is the fact that he was a father of a young, growing, and steadily increasing brood of sons and daughters and made up stories to tell them. This seems plausible. But does it fully explain MacDonald’s fascination with this genre?

As an increasingly public figure and for reasons of health, MacDonald was away from home a good deal. It is not hard to read between the lines the conclusion that most of the parenting duties fell to Louisa. It would be a mistake to characterize MacDonald with the absentee father brush. Yet it does not seem that he was intimately involved in the daily lives or educational instruction of his children. Nor does the biographical record suggest that he was especially close to his sons until young Maurice began to mature. His oldest son Greville, growing up in a family, till then, of older sisters, confessed his difficulty getting close to his father until he was nearly grown and that, in fact, he was afraid of him. ¹ It is sad to realize that the boys believed that their father preferred his daughters to his sons. ²

So did MacDonald write his stories for his own children? Or was he simply writing to get published and make a living?

His son Greville writes:

"Now and again, in place of a lecture he would read or recite a fairy tale—particularly The Light Princess. All the fairy stories comprised of the little volume, Dealings with the Fairies…had been written before the end of 1863…The Light Princess, written on a long scroll, perhaps with some idea of making its form accord with vocal delivery…hardly compares with the other fairy stories which were expressly written for the little people who rushed the platform of his knees and the arms of his chair, or transformed the lap of the mother and the footstool at her feet into the front rows of his auditorium. The Giant’s Heart remains to this day associated with my father’s dramatic reading of it." ³

Obviously Greville has fond memories in spite of the occasional distance he felt from his father. There is surely reality here. MacDonald clearly loved children and had keen insight into the childlike heart.

Juxtaposed alongside Greville’s remembrance, however, are George MacDonald’s own words, which paint a different picture. His later dedication of a fairy tale collection to his children begins with the words, You know that I do not tell you stories as some papas do. This is almost as astonishing to hear from MacDonald as telling his sons they would never measure up to their sisters. (For more on this, see footnote #2.)

Commenting on this dedication, William Raeper illuminates further:

"It would be tempting to suggest that MacDonald’s success was due to the fact that he understood children better than most of his contemporaries—after all, he had eleven of his own—but this does not appear to have been the case. Dodgson and Lear were far more at home with children than MacDonald ever was, and his preface to Dealings with the Fairies (1867) stated:

"‘My Children,

"‘You know that I do not tell you stories as some papas do. Therefore, I give you a book of stories. You have read them all before except the last…’⁴

This suggests that these stories were not told first to his own children as one might have supposed. ⁵

We can only speculate whether, between the lines of the novel Weighed and Wanting twenty years later, we are hearing MacDonald’s poignant lament that in fact he wasn’t as close to his own sons or daughters, now that they were grown, as he wished he might have been:

There had never been tender relations between Mark and his father like those between the boy and his mother and sister. His father was always kind to him, but between him and his boys he had let grow a kind of hard skin. Even when as tiniest children they came to be kissed before going to bed, he did not like the contact of their faces with his. No woman, and perhaps not many men will understand this, but it was always a relief to Mr. Raymount to have the nightly ceremony over. He thought there was nothing he would not do for their good, and I think his heart must in the main have been right toward them. But the clothes of his affections somehow did not sit easy on him, and there was a good deal in his behaviour to Cornelius that had operated unfavourably on the mind of the youth. Even Mark, although, as I have said, he loved him dearly, was yet a little afraid of him—never went to him with a confidence, never snuggled close to him, never sat down by his side to read his book in a heaven of twilight peace, as he would with his mother. He would never have gone to his father’s room for refuge from sleeplessness. ⁶

The words are heartbreaking when we consider that this was written in the aftermath of the death of MacDonald’s universally recognized favorite son, fifteen-year-old Maurice who was the clear model for Mark Raymount in the story. Maurice’s death hit MacDonald hard. He was still coming to terms with the loss when Weighed and Wanting was written. Surely MacDonald is looking in the mirror with these wistful reflections embedded in the novel he was writing at the time.

William Raeper, as he occasionally does, goes a little Freudian at this point. Yet there may be a grain of truth in what he says, when he writes: For all his talk about love, MacDonald had been starved of physical affection as a boy, and it may have been that he found it difficult to be tender, especially with his sons. ⁷

If such speculation has basis in fact, MacDonald may be evidencing nothing more than the example of his own father. C.S Lewis has said, An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. ⁸ But it may not have been a perfect relationship, because after the age of eight, George had no mother. That hole in the life of a child colors everything. On the other hand, that absence of mother-love might also have drawn him and his father closer.

Nor can it be denied that in the world of nineteenth century Britain, fathers (even occasionally mothers in wealthy families, though clearly not in Louisa’s case) were not as integral to the daily goings-on of their children’s lives as is often more typical today. There was no man on earth George MacDonald loved more than his father. Their adult friendship was a foundation stone in MacDonald’s life. But during his younger years, his father was a hard-working farmer and businessman whose dawn-to-dusk work ethic took priority. When George’s mother died, the child-raising duties fell to George’s aunts and grandmother. During many of the summer months George was shipped off to the relatives in Portsoy and Banff.

There was no lack of love in the hearts of the son or the father. There may, however, have been a lack of time spent together by the standards with which we judge parenting today. If so, that void surely became part of the adult George MacDonald’s inner child of the past.

In spite of losing his mother, however, it is clear that George MacDonald had wonderful memories of growing up in and around Huntly. The frolicsome fun, summers, rivers, rafts, the sea, games and kites and shenanigans, the revelry of Alec Forbes and Ranald Bannerman, all illustrate that the soil was equally rich for the growth of joy.

Linking MacDonald’s good memories to his fairy tales, William Raeper adds this insight, Childhood is an elusive thing, and the need to maintain such an image of childhood in himself was strong in MacDonald as his…constant revisiting of Huntly with all his childhood haunts suggests. He became almost one of his own ghosts, haunting the places of his past…Separated from his rural past, MacDonald must have looked back to his boyhood days as almost existing in a foreign time and place. They had become a fairy-tale. ⁹

I know the feeling exactly—the redwood forest where my sisters and I grew up was magical. I live those days over in my memory with delight. Redwood forests with mysterious streams running through them are the fairy tale world of my childhood.

It is no wonder, then, that MacDonald would want to capture the magic of his own boyhood in stories. One cannot read MacDonald’s fictionalizing of such boyhood adventures and draw any other conclusion but that his childhood took on the aura of fairy tale in his memory.

It may be here that we discover the origin of MacDonald’s affection for the genre even more than from bouncing his children on his knee.

Yet the revelry of holidays at Mr. Lammie’s farm is counterbalanced by Robert Falconer’s lonely broodings in his garret room. The darkness of his grandmother’s theology hangs over his boyhood like a pall. He has no father, no friend but Shargar. That half of Robert Falconer’s is a boyhood without light, without warmth, without sunshine. Similarly, the joy of Ranald Bannerman and the upbeat fearlessness of Alec Forbes are to a degree balanced out by Cosmo Warlock’s introverted childhood, sharing a decrepit castle with three old people, not to mention Annie Anderson’s nighttime terrors in her grim rat-infested garret.

Childhood is a fairy tale, yet a conflicted fairy tale of light and darkness constantly interweaving, casting alternating shadows and patterns over the childhood saga that slowly and inexorably leads to adulthood.

This is one of the fascinating elements of the fairy tale—dark strands float in and out through what may seem but a light-hearted story. It is more than just a bad giant or witch in the woods. It’s a tone, an undercurrent, a melody in a minor key with reminders of poor Annie trying to sleep while listening to the rats. It is the joy Robert’s violin and kite bring him, with the terror of their being discovered.

It may be this aspect of faerie that drew MacDonald—the subtle hues of the gregarious, optimistic, happy side of his personality working in combination with the melancholy undercurrent of mysticism that also pervaded his nature. It is the childhood worlds of Ranald Bannerman and Robert Falconer, of Cosmo Warlock and Donal Grant and Sir Gibbie all struggling somehow to coexist in children’s stories and fairy tales that are often weird and do not contain straightforward plots or interpretations.

Some of MacDonald’s stories are just plain strange. His most famous and enduring work, At the Back of the North Wind, is suffused with gray, drab, cold, loneliness, with North Wind herself oscillating at times between the worlds of light and darkness. You never really know what’s up with North Wind, or what or who she represents.

Such, of course, is the magic of the fairy tale and of MacDonald’s writings—they offer diverse perspectives of interpretation. But in North Wind’s occasionally paradoxical characterization, though we may perceive her creator’s genius, we may also discern his own enigmatic, and perhaps inscrutable, nature.

There is certainly no doubt that the world of faerie drew MacDonald. In the late 1850s, when he was searching for commercially viable ways to make money with his writing, he was keenly aware that the world of faerie and children’s literature was growing rapidly. The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen had been wildly successful. Many of the Victorian novelists (Dickens, Carlyle, Thackeray) were getting into the act with children’s stories, Christmas fantasies, and fairy tales of their own.

By the early 1860s MacDonald had begun to accumulate a backlog of tales. In 1862 he took The Light Princess to a publisher, but without success. His family’s friendship with Charles Dodgson must have acted as a great stimulus—the two men talking about ideas, both spiritual and fanciful. Dodgson was a great favorite with the MacDonald children, hitting it off with them in some ways more than MacDonald himself. And when Dodgson (aka, Lewis Carroll)—his own work in progress on Alice’s Adventures Underground—asked the MacDonald family to read and advise him what to do with it, the wheels of MacDonald’s brain must have been spinning with similar fairy-world ideas of his own.

MacDonald’s attempt to mix fairy stories into the loosely constructed novel of Adela Cathcart was published in 1864. It didn’t work particularly well. The critics didn’t like it, and MacDonald never tried it again. But it succeeded in getting his first short stories into print. He would never again have trouble placing his fairy tales and children’s stories.

William Raeper offers this summary:

"In fact, MacDonald had a very grown-up vision of the purpose of fairy-tales, but they had to be floated on to the children’s market as there was nowhere else for them to go. He slipped some in, rather unsuccessfully, to Adela Cathcart in 1864, for which the critics rapped his knuckles, and the commercial failure of Phantastes in 1858 persuaded MacDonald’s main energies away from fantastic writings. He did publish a few scattered fairy-tales in the early 1860s which were collected in Dealings with the Fairies in 1867 and reissued with much of MacDonald’s other work (including Phantastes) in the ten-volume set Works of Fancy and Imagination in 1871. Fairy-writing remained a negligible part of MacDonald’s output, however, until he took up the editorship of Good Words for the Young in 1869 which gave him a children’s outlet for the kind of writing that he did best. It was almost by accident that Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood, At the Back of the North Wind, and The Princess and the Goblin came to be written." ¹⁰

Adela Cathcart opens in MacDonald’s familiar voice, again in first person, and curiously eschewing his own roots by adopting the guise of an Englishman. As we begin, we might naturally assume ourselves embarking on a traditional MacDonald novel. And we immediately see again his astonishing wordsmithing gift, raising once more the obvious question: Why did MacDonald have doubts about being able to write fiction, and why did he have such a hard time getting his early work published?

The opening passage draws us in with powerful imagery that is vintage MacDonald.

The afternoon of Christmas Eve was sinking towards night.

All day long the wintry light had been diluted with fog. Now the beginning of darkness was coming to aid the mist, so that the dying day was nearly smothered between them.

As I gazed through the window, it was into a vague and mysterious region where anything might be going on, and out of which anything might come without warning. Nothing did come out of it, however, except small sparkles of snow. As we swept rapidly onwards and the darkness deepened, the snow struck faster and faster against the weather windows.

Myself and a fellow passenger, of whom I knew nothing, for I had caught but a glimpse of him earlier in the station, sat in a railway carriage, darting along at a frightful rate northwards from London.

Being the sole occupants of the carriage, we had made the most of it, like Englishmen, by taking seats diagonally opposite to each other, laying our heads in the corners and trying to go to sleep.

Having aspired to the ministry, and being a clergyman himself, though not again holding a pulpit, we also encounter here an early glimpse of a persistent theme that surfaces in a number of MacDonald’s novels—his revulsion with the professional clergy. He would later write memorably of numerous ideal clergymen. But the type that to him seemed more emblematic of the church of his day was exemplified by Rev. Carmichael of Donal Grant. His opening passage of Adela Cathcart continues in a similar tone.

I proceeded to occupy my time by trying to imagine a conjectural mould of my companion across the car. I had already discovered that he was a clergyman, but this added to my difficulties in constructing a mould into which his face, dress, and carriage would fit. For I possessed a theoretical dislike to clergymen in general, having usually found that the clergy absorbed the man. For most clergymen whom I had met regarded mankind and their interests almost solely from the clerical point of view, seeming far more desirous that a man should be a good churchman, as they called it, than that he should love God.

Hence, there was always an indescribable and, to me, unpleasant odour of their profession about them. If they knew more concerning the life of the world than other men, why should everything they said remind one of mustiness and mildew?

We feel ourselves being drawn into what promises to be an engaging and perhaps mysterious plot. What awaits us, however, is instead the storytelling club in which a series of tales are recounted by the group’s members. Unless one is riveted by the stories themselves, it’s not exactly a page-turner.

Rolland Hein comments on the book:

"The plot of Adela Cathcart is meager. A group of English friends are gathered at the home of Colonel Cathcart to spend the Christmas holidays. But the joy of the season is lessened by the curious illness of his adolescent daughter Adela, a malady for which the attending doctor can find no cure. As a guest the narrator suspects that her basic problem is one of the soul that must be addressed before the doctor can successfully treat the body. So he proposes that the various guests all tell a separate story each evening. The scheme works; Adela improves in soul and body.

"Some of the stories that have such curative powers are among MacDonald’s finest fairy tales…A reviewer writing in the Athenaeum, however, was unimpressed. He suggested that MacDonald had ‘ransacked his desk for all old bits of writing he had in his possession’ and related them by a ‘story-telling club,’ an assessment that did not help sales." ¹¹

The reviewer’s conclusion is not unfair, though one wonders if he would be so scathing about Canterbury Tales. It seems that this is exactly the model MacDonald had followed. When Adela Cathcart was published in March of 1864, MacDonald sent a copy to his friend and mentor A.J. Scott, even seeming himself to admit that it wasn’t destined to be one of his best.

The name of it is stupid, MacDonald told Scott, but that is my publisher’s fault, not mine. It is made up of almost all the short things I have written (some of which have been published before) embedded in another tale. Although slight, I don’t think you will consider it careless, not unworthy of filling a gap between the last and the next book which is on the way.

MacDonald’s letter to Scott goes on, admittedly getting a little ahead of the story at this point, but foretelling things that are already on the horizon in MacDonald’s thinking:

"Some day I hope to write a book good enough in my own eyes to let me ask you to allow me to dedicate it to you. I have long had one in my mind, for which I have some material ready—a life of the Robert Falconer who is introduced in David Elginbrod. For that I hope to be able to make the request." ¹²

MacDonald did indeed dedicate Robert Falconer to A.J. Scott four years later.

Nearly all MacDonald’s books contain distinctive elements not found in any other. These are more than mere differences of plot and characterization. MacDonald also pushed the limits of genre. His pastoral mentor F.D. Maurice wrote sermons. An entire library of some twenty volumes was published in the nineteenth century. But Maurice wrote only sermons. MacDonald’s contemporary Charles Dickens is perhaps the best-known novelist of the Victorian period. Yet perhaps with the exception of The Christmas Carol, Dickens is mostly one-dimensional. As Maurice did not write novels, Dickens did not write theology. MacDonald’s favorite poet and fellow Scotsman Robert Burns wrote only poetry, as did Alfred Lord Tennyson and many of the era’s renowned poets. Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson are perhaps the closest comparison to MacDonald in writing in multiple genres, yet even they do not come close.

In the works of George MacDonald, one finds a near unparalleled breadth of variety and scope. He was widely recognized as a formidable influence as a novelist, poet, theologian, literary essayist, and writer of short stories, fairy tales, and fantasy (both juvenile and adult). Added to all this are his foreign language translations, a volume of literary criticism, and another of literary history. He even wrote hymns.

It is out of this great diversity, according to C.S. Lewis, that MacDonald’s literary genius emerges. Lewis echoes the Scotsman’s review of MacDonald’s 1857 volume of Poems ¹³ when he calls MacDonald’s writing, …an art, or a gift…in some ways more akin to music than to poetry…It gets under our skin… ¹⁴

In 1924 G.K. Chesterton commented, If we test the matter by originality of attitude, George MacDonald was one of the three or four greatest men of the nineteenth century. ¹⁵ His view was echoed by W.H. Auden fifty years later, who called MacDonald, one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century. ¹⁶

This little detour focusing on MacDonald’s multi-genre excellence gives us a window through which to appreciate Adela Cathcart on several levels. In a sense, perhaps more than any, this book typifies MacDonald’s penchant for mixing his metaphors, so to speak—mixing his genres.

It’s not something a writer is supposed to do. But MacDonald does it all the time. We encounter sermons and poetry in his novels. We find fantasy and reality mingling throughout his corpus in ways we cannot quite explain. We often find MacDonald, pausing the action and stepping onstage as the director of his drama to talk to the audience for a minute or two about the play or one of the characters, breaking the plane so to speak. Then he shouts, Action! and sits down again and the story resumes. Author intrusion represents one of the cardinal sins of fiction writing. Yet when MacDonald steps onstage, we love it. He re-wrote the rules of story-telling.

Critics can argue that such rule-shatterings betray literary weakness. I call it instead literary creativity.

Adela Cathcart presents us with an imaginative potpourri representing all that is best in MacDonald—realistic adult fiction, theology, fairy tale, poetry, and realistic short story. In no other single volume from his pen do we discover so much variety. We even discover within the pages that follow a couple of sermons and some of his translations from the German.

MacDonald also gives us numerous snippets of self-portraiture in the pages of this book. In the discussions between the characters, I find myself wondering if MacDonald is debating with himself about the notion of publishing his fairy tales, and what might be their public reception, especially what will be the response of conservative Christian readers. The very personal thoughts and images drawn from MacDonald’s own life are scattered all the way through the narrative interludes of Adela Cathcart.

"This is Christmas time, you know, and the perfect season for story-telling," I added.

"I trust it is a story suitable to the season," said Mrs. Cathcart, smiling.

"Yes, very much, I said, for it is a child’s story—a fairy tale. Though I confess I think it more fit for grown than young children. I hope it is funny, though. I think it is."

"So you approve of fairy tales for children, Mr. Smith?"

"Not for children alone, madam—for everybody that can relish them."

"And at a sacred time such as this?"

Again as she spoke she smiled a would-be insinuating smile.

"If I thought God did not approve of fairy-tales, I would never read, not to say write one."

And then later the spiritual implications of Fairyland:

"One thing…I must object to. That is, introducing church ceremonies into a fairy-tale."

"Why, Mrs. Cathcart, answered the clergyman…do you suppose the church to be such a cross-grained old lady, that she will not allow her children to take a few gentle liberties with their mother? She’s able to stand that surely. They won’t love her the less for that."

"Besides, I ventured to say, if both church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles, without injury to either. They must have something in common. There is the Fairy Queen, and the Pilgrim’s Progress, you know, Mrs. Cathcart. I can fancy the pope even telling his nephews a fairy-tale."

Then MacDonald teases his reader with a statement like: Suppose we were to put this story club, members, stories, and all, into a book… For what is MacDonald doing but precisely that!

I also read MacDonald himself in Mr. Bloomfield of The Schoolmaster’s Story. Are we here offered a glimpse of MacDonald’s personal doubts about leaving the pastorate after a single failed pulpit?

"I studied for the church. But I aimed too high. My heart burned within me, but my powers were small. I wanted to relight the ancient lamp, but my wick would not kindle it…I was not orthodox in my views. I hesitated, I feared, I yielded, I withdrew. To this day I do not know whether I did right or wrong. But I am honoured yet in being allowed to teach, and if at the last I have the faintest ‘Well done’ from the Master, I shall be satisfied…"

"The world is the better for you at least, Mr. Bloomfield, I said. I wish more of us were as sure as you of helping on the daily Creation, which is quite as certain a fact as that of old, and is even more important to us than that recorded in the book of Genesis. It is not great battles alone that build up the world’s history, nor great poems alone that make the generations grow. There is a still, small rain from heaven that has more to do with the blessedness of nature and of human nature than the mightiest earthquake or the loveliest rainbow."

Many point to MacDonald’s description of Dr. Harry Armstrong’s bay mare as in reality MacDonald’s own favorite boyhood mount, his mare Missy who will make another even more vivid appearance later in Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood.

In fact, she was a thorough hunter, no beauty certainly, with her ewe-neck, drooping tail, and white face and stocking. But she had an eye at once gentle and wild as that of a savage angel, if my reader will condescend to dream for a moment of such an anomaly, while her hind quarters were power itself. Her foreleg was flung right out from the shoulder with a gesture not of work but of delight, the step itself being entirely one of work—long in proportion to its height. The lines of her fore and hind quarters converged so much that there was hardly more than room for the saddle between them. I had never seen such action. Altogether, although not much of a hunting man, the motion of the creature gave me such a sense of power and joy that I longed to be scouring the fields with her under me.

And does the very lengthy Curate’s story give us perhaps a picture of MacDonald’s own spiritual awakening, and a reminder again of The Portent’s fabulous library, and the conjectured great library in the north of MacDonald’s own biography:

Not a spot of wall was to be seen for books…They were mostly books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a large mixture from the nineteenth, and more than the usual proportion of the German classics, though, strange to say, not a single volume of German Theology could I discover.

It also seems clear that the curate here, Mr. Ralph Armstrong, can represent none other but the brainchild for one of MacDonald’s most memorable fictional characters, Thomas Wingfold. Can we not recognize the challenge from skeptic George Bascombe in the opening pages of Thomas Wingfold Curate, in the blunt words spoken to Armstrong:

"I do not think you believe what you say in the pulpit…"

"I stood and felt like a convicted criminal before the gray eyes of my judge…What refuge could there be from one who spoke the truth so plainly?…There stood the visible truth before me, looking out of the woman’s gray eyes."

Adela Cathcart set in motion a pattern MacDonald would follow with many of his subsequent titles, editing and changing his originals for future printings. In this case, eighteen years after its first printing, a new edition was issued in 1882 with a different, though overlapping, collection of tales. Of the fifteen, only four appear in both editions.

The 1864 edition contained eleven stories: The Light Princess, The Bell: A Sketch in Pen and Ink, Birth, Dreaming, and Death, The Curate and his Wife (personal reminisce, not in story form), The Shadows, The Broken Swords, My Uncle Peter, The Giant’s Heart, A Child’s Holiday, The Cruel Painter, and The Castle: A Parable.

The 1882 edition contained eight stories: Birth, Dreaming, and Death, The Curate and his Wife, My Uncle Peter, The Lost Lamb, The Snow Fight, A Child’s Holiday, An Invalid’s Winter, and A Journey Rejourneyed. ¹⁷

Though the page counts of the two editions are comparable, the earlier edition contains substantially more fairy tale while the later edition contains more narrative involving the storytelling club. For this edition of The Cullen Collection I have combined both the 1864 and 1882 editions so that the complete set of all fifteen stories is included. *

I have also left a greater amount of MacDonald’s original poetry than for some of the other titles in the series as it seemed fitting and appropriate for this particular book that obviously strays noticeably outside the boundaries of a traditional novel. (See footnote, Background of ‘Story of the Seashore’ and ‘A Child’s Holiday’ in the introduction to Malcolm for the fascinating true-to-life origins of A Child’s Holiday.)

Here is a story perfect for Christmas reading as befits long winter nights before a cheery fire. Not only does most of the book encompass a two-week holiday period, MacDonald continually focuses his reader’s attention on the meaning of Christmas, with some of the most moving devotional thoughts about the birth of Jesus we will ever encounter. When I had completed my reading of one of these sections, I could do nothing more than turn back and read it again, slowly and prayerfully, allowing MacDonald’s thoughts to penetrate yet more deeply into my heart. No longer was I reading a novel, but rather re-considering the very meaning of Christ’s incarnation.

And as I came to the exquisite poem The Mother Mary to the Infant Jesus, I felt as though I were stealing a private and holy glimpse into the heart of that most mysterious of human relationships, until, as I approached the final stanza and sensed the triumph toward which MacDonald was building, my whole body was swept through with chills. At last reaching the final line, I broke out in laughter, even as I blinked back the tears, of sheer marvel and delight.

MacDonald indeed gives us more than stories. His books are experiences!

I would hope that we might all read what follows slowly. The deep currents in Adela Cathcart move more leisurely than does the world of today. To flow most feelingly with those currents may require disengaging from our world’s pace, and drifting back in time to a Christmas country house…far from the city…snow beginning to fall outside…logs crackling in the fireplace…

Adela Cathcart was first published, like David Elginbrod the year before, as a three-volume triple decker. Both it and The Portent were released in the spring of 1864—probably Adela Cathcart in April and The Portent in May. However, in recognition of the fact that the early version of The Portent was written several years earlier for serialization, we have presented the two books in what seems the most appropriate order in The Cullen Collection.

Michael Phillips

Cullen, Morayshire

Scotland, 2018

NOTE ON FOOTNOTES: For the reader’s ease in referencing frequently quoted titles, I have dispensed with the scholarly ciphers, more mystifying than helpful for the average fiction reader. These books will therefore be noted in the footnotes below as follows, rather than with the formal notations of op. cit., loc. cit., ibid., etc.

Greville, Biography—George MacDonald and His Wife by Greville MacDonald, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1924.

Hein, Mythmaker—George MacDonald, Victorian Mythmaker by Rolland Hein, Star Song Publishing, Nashville, TN, 1993.

Lewis, Anthology—George MacDonald An Anthology by C.S. Lewis, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1946.

Raeper, MacDonald—George MacDonald by William Raeper, Lion Publishing, Tring, England, 1987.

---

1 Greville MacDonald, Reminiscences of a Specialist, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1932.

2 NOTES ON MACDONALD’S RELATIONSHIP TO SON GREVILLE

As seemingly shocking as is this statement, without quoting the incident in full I simply refer to p. 345 in Raeper, MacDonald, and a letter from Ronald to Greville (January 2, 1932) in which—according to Ronald’s memory—MacDonald berated his sons. A portion of Ronald’s recollection of that day after Maurice’s death, as quoted by Raeper, is as follows: A few days after came Father’s birthday, when he summoned all his sons…we trouped in…Then he gave a homily, the gist of which was that none of us four could hope ever to become as good as our sisters…He went on to say that I had been rude to my mother, and added that I had already begun to do harm (I can’t remember the phrase precisely) to Maurice before he died…

Granted, childhood memories are often far from accurate. I would hate to think my life will be evaluated by the skewed memories of my own sons. Yet Ronald’s words were written when he was 71. By then he had presumably had plenty of time to reflect on the veracity of his memory, and to put his father’s words into perspective.

Greville confirms this view himself, writing, I do not know that my sisters were ever punished. That girls were far above boys in goodness was always impressed upon me. [From Reminiscences of a Specialist, pp. 28-9.] Greville remarks in a footnote in George MacDonald and His Wife (p. 300) about the household’s seeming obsession with women’s issues and rights, that he felt inferior for no other reason than that he was a boy: Indeed, for a time, thanks to the frequent talk of women’s rights, adopted even by my three elder sisters in their white stockings, crinolines and Sunday, straw-poke-bonnets with pink bows and curtains, I am still crushed at times by the conviction—originating, I believe, when I was five or six…that I, as a male, am still a worm. With MacDonald’s own outspoken preference of his daughters to his sons, this feminine atmosphere in the home must have made it difficult for the sons, and seems to give credibility to Ronald’s memory above.

Kathy Triggs adds, Things were made worse by Greville’s position in the family as a boy between three older and two younger sisters…George had a preference for girls, and his daughters were so good that Greville’s ‘naughtiness’ stood out all the more by contrast. [Greville had what we would probably today call learning difficulties," exacerbated by a hearing loss that was not discovered until his teens, which may go far in explaining some of the family dynamic.] Add to this the interest of the whole family in women’s emancipation and a picture emerges of a small boy feeling himself isolated in a woman’s world, looking to his father as the only and natural ally, and receiving from him only a small measure of the reassurance he needed. Greville’s summary of his boyhood relationship with his father makes sad reading… ‘I doubt if I should question his theory of education except that it made me look upon my father with some fear. He stood for the inexorable…It compelled submission, but never made me repentant…But worse, it made an over-sensitive child craving for love. So truly afraid of his father that more than once I lied to him’ [From Reminiscences of a Specialist, p. 27]" [Kathy Triggs, The Stars and the Stillness, p. 86]

MacDonald himself said the same, writing to his father on September 16, 1854 after the birth of daughter Caroline that Louisa had hoped for a boy, but, Not I, I like girls best. [From Greville, Biography, p. 215]

3 Greville, Biography, p. 325.

4 The full dedication reads: My Children, You know that I do not tell you stories as some papas do. Therefore, I give you a book of stories. You have read them all before except the last. But you have not seen Mr. Hughes’s drawings before. If plenty of children like this volume, you shall have another soon. Your Papa.

5 Raeper, MacDonald, p. 310.

6 Weighed and Wanting, The Cullen Collection edition, Chapter 40.

7 Raeper, MacDonald pp. 258-59.

8 Lewis, Anthology, Preface, p. 10.

9 Raeper, MacDonald, p. 305.

10 Raeper, MacDonald, p. 310.

11 Hein, Mythmaker, p. 164.

12 An undated letter from GMD to Alexander Scott in early 1864, quoted in Hein, Mythmaker p. 165.

13 Quoted on pp. 280-81 of Greville, Biography, from the Scotsman’s review of Poems, 1857: The second volume from the pen of Mr. MacDonald is marked with the striking characteristics which distinguished his former work; the earnestness of thought, the deep religiousness, and the mingled simplicity and power of utterance are the same…His poetry is not for the few who have erected a particular standard of taste, but for the many who are scattered, for the sheep having no shepherd. The dogmatist, if he lingers there, will find the tightly-wound coil of his prejudices unwinding he knows not how, and the child-heart somewhere hidden in the breast of every living man, awaken and yearn towards the truth.

14 Lewis, Anthology, Preface, pp. 16-17.

15 G.K. Chesterton’s obituary article in the London Daily News, Sept. 23, 1905.

16 W.H. Auden in the Introduction to The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald, ed. Anne Fremantle, The Noonday Press, 1954, pp. v-vi.

17 COMPARISON OF THE TWO EDITIONS OF ADELA CATHCART

ADELA CATHCART

1864

The Cullen Collection

Volume 4

— One —

A Snowy Solitary Ride

The afternoon of Christmas Eve was sinking towards night.

All day long the wintry light had been diluted with fog. Now the beginning of darkness was coming to aid the mist, so that the dying day was nearly smothered between them. *

As I gazed through the window, it was into a vague and mysterious region where anything might be going on, and out of which anything might come without warning. Nothing did come out of it, however, except small sparkles of snow. As we swept rapidly onwards and the darkness deepened, the snow struck faster and faster against the weather windows.

Myself and a fellow passenger, of whom I knew nothing, for I had caught but a glimpse of him earlier in the station, sat in a railway carriage, darting along at a frightful rate northwards from London.

Being the sole occupants of the carriage, we had made the most of it, like Englishmen, by taking seats diagonally opposite to each other, laying our heads in the corners and trying to go to sleep. But for me it was no use trying any longer. I did not have anything particular on my mind, but a man cannot always go to sleep at spare moments. If anyone can, let him consider it a great gift, and make good use of it accordingly.

As I could not sleep, I proceeded to occupy my time by trying to imagine a conjectural mould of my companion across the car. I had already discovered that he was a clergyman, but this added to my difficulties in constructing a mould into which his face, dress, and carriage would fit. For I possessed a theoretical dislike to clergymen in general, having usually found that the clergy absorbed the man. For most clergymen whom I had met regarded mankind and their interests almost solely from the clerical point of view, seeming far more desirous that a man should be a good churchman, as they called it, than that he should love God.

Hence, there was always an indescribable and, to me, unpleasant odour of their profession about them. If they knew more concerning the life of the world than other men, why should everything they said remind one of mustiness and mildew? In a word, why were they not men at worst, when at best they ought to be more of men than other men?

And here lay the difficulty: by no effort could I get the face before me to fit into the clerical mould which I had all ready in my own mind for it. I was hardly even surprised when, all at once, he sat upright in his seat, and asked me if I would join him in a cigar.

I gladly consented.

And here let me state a fact which added to my interest in my fellow passenger, and will serve now to excuse the enormity of smoking in a railway carriage. We were going to the same place. We must be, for there would be no more stops between here and there, and nobody else would therefore be entering the carriage before then.

We were a long way yet, however, from our destination. The night grew darker and colder, and after the necessary unmuffling occasioned by the cigar process, we drew our wraps closer about us, leaned back in our corners, and smoked away in silence, the red glow of our cigars serving to light the carriage nearly as well as the red nose of the neglected and half-extinguished lamp. For we were in a second-class carriage, a fact for which I leave the clergyman to apologize. It does not matter to me, for I am a nobody.

There was, however, light enough for me to see, and in some measure scrutinize the face of my fellow passenger. I could discern a strong chin, and good, useful jaws, with a firm-lipped mouth, and a nose more remarkable for quantity than disposition of mass, being rather low, and very thick. It was surmounted by two brilliant, kindly, black eyes. I lay in wait for his forehead, for he wore a hat and it was some time before I was gratified with a sight of it. I did see it eventually, however, and was indeed gratified. For when he wanted to throw away the end of his cigar, finding his window frozen shut by the snow blowing from that side, and seeing that I opened mine to accommodate him, he moved across, and, in so doing, knocked his hat against the roof of the car. As he picked it up briefly to readjust it on his head, I had my opportunity. It was a splendid forehead for size, but chiefly for breadth. A kind of rugged calm rested upon it—a suggestion of slumbering power, which it delighted me to contemplate. I felt that he was the sort of man to make a friend of. But I did not yet make any advance toward further acquaintance.

My reader may be desirous of knowing what kind of person is making so much use of the pronoun I. He or she may have the same curiosity to know his fellow-traveller over the region of these pages that I had to see the forehead of the clergyman. I can at least prevent any further inconvenience from this possible curiosity, by telling him enough to destroy his interest in me.

I am an—.

Well, I suppose I am an old bachelor, not very far from fifty. I am old enough, in fact, to be able to take pleasure in watching without sharing, yet ready, notwithstanding, when occasion offers, to take any necessary part in what may be going on. I am able to sit quietly alone and look down upon life from a second-floor window, delighting myself with my own speculations, and weaving the various threads I gather into webs of varying kind and quality. Yet at the same time, neither am I the last to rush downstairs and into the street upon occasion. I may just mention too, that having many years ago formed the resolution of never growing old, I am as yet able to flatter myself that I am likely to keep it.

In proof of this, I may state that every year, as Christmas approaches, I begin to grow young again. At least I judge so from the fact that a strange, mysterious pleasure, well known to me by this time, though little understood and very varied, begins to glow in my mind with the first hint, come from what quarter it may, whether from the church-service or a bookseller’s window, that the day of all the year is at hand. I enjoy it like a child. I buy the Christmas number of every periodical I can lay my hands on, especially those that have pictures in them. And though I am not very fond of plum-pudding,