The Princess and Curdie

By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

The Victorian-era fairy tale and sequel to The Princess and the Goblin from the Scottish author who influenced C.S. Lewis.
 
This second “Curdie” installment, published in 1882, is far more than a mere “children’s story.” The themes and linguistic style of The Princess and Curdie are considerably more advanced, and the depth of its spiritual analogies extensive in subtlety and scope. After being thrust into the rose-fire, the discerning gift of Curdie’s hand to know toward what any man or woman is growing (beast or child), is one of MacDonald’s most memorable, though chilling, images. It is a theme that became profoundly illuminated in later years by MacDonald’s spiritual protégé C.S. Lewis, when he wrote in Mere Christianity, “Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature.” Lewis’s words embody a truth that emerges directly out of Curdie’s story. This edition for The Cullen Collection is unedited in any way.
 
Praise for The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie
 
“The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie are two of the most unusual and haunting fairy tales ever written.”—The Guardian
 
“Absorbing stories, a rich feast for the imagination also intended to nourish the souls and intellects of the hearers.”—Vintage Novels

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795351914

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

The Princess and

Curdie

The Cullen Collection

George MacDonald

The Princess and Curdie

Introductory material © 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): 978-0-7953-51914

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 The Princess and Curdie

1. The Mountain

2. The White Pigeon

3. The Mistress of the Silver Moon

4. Curdie’s Father and Mother

5. The Miners

6. The Emerald

7. What is in a Name?

8. Curdie’s Mission

9. Hands

10. The Heath

11. Lina

12. More Creatures

13. The Baker’s Wife

14. The Dogs of Gwyntystorm

15. Derba and Barbara

16. The Mattock

17. The Wine Cellar

18. The King’s Kitchen

19. The King’s Chamber

20. Counter-plotting

21. The Loaf

22. The Lord Chamberlain

23. Dr. Kelman

24. The Prophecy

25. The Avengers

26. The Vengeance

27. More Vengeance

28. The Preacher

29. Barbara

30. Peter

31. The Sacrifice

32. The King’s Army

33. The Battle

34. Judgement

35. The End

"Papa seems so quietly happy."

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

"Papa does enjoy this place so much."

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

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

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

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

—Louisa MacDonald, October 5, 1873, from London

FOREWORD

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

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

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

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

This series of new editions is an outgrowth and expansion of my series of edited MacDonald novels published by Bethany House in the 1980s. It includes many more titles and follows the same general priority of creating more readable editions that faithfully preserve the spirit, style, and flavor of MacDonald’s originals. Six of these newly added titles, which would more accurately be termed fantasy, have not, however, been edited, updated, or altered in any way. They are faithful reproductions of the originals exactly as 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—have been published literally in hundreds of editions through the years, and are thus reproduced for The Cullen Collection with the same text 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, 2017

INTRODUCTION

Choices That Set the Course of Character

The Princess and the Goblin, published in 1872, ended with the tantalizing words: "The rest of the history of The Princess and Curdie must be kept for another volume." *

These are almost exactly the same words with which MacDonald ended Malcolm. Clearly he planned sequels for both titles. But whereas Malcolm’s sequel came after just two years, it took over ten years for the second installment of the Princess fairy tales to be published. (Many call them the Curdie books because whereas there are many princesses in fairy tale literature, there is only one Curdie.)

It did not take ten years for Curdie’s story to be written. The Princess and Curdie actually made its first appearance in one of Alexander Strahan’s last magazines, Good Things for the Young. It ran from January through June of 1877, completed only months before the magazine expired and just as Malcolm’s sequel, The Marquis of Lossie, was being released. Curiously, however, it was not published in book form for another five years.

During these years of the late 1870s and early 1880s, George MacDonald was on a creative roll. Following the release of the U.K. edition of Castle Warlock, the year 1882 saw three more new titles published.

The first was a collection of essays entitled Orts (literally, scraps), which was changed to A Dish of Orts when re-released in 1893. It provides the only published volume of literary treatises that parallels many of MacDonald’s spoken lectures. Orts contained essays on Hamlet, Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, Shakespeare, the Imagination, True Christian Ministering (which MacDonald says was supposed to be called True Greatness), a sermon on opinion vs. truth, and an intriguing essay on writing entitled, On Polish. Orts was published in America under the title The Imagination. When reissued and re-titled in 1893, a new essay entitled The Fantastic Imagination was added.

During this year of great productivity, two partial reprints were also released in new editions. The first was a collection of stories and tales entitled The Gifts of the Child Christ, later released under the title Stephen Archer and Other Tales. This collection of stories is particularly noteworthy for several new stories and the first appearance in print of MacDonald’s late 1850s play, If I Had a Father, which had formed the basis for his failed first novel Seekers and Finders. Though trashed by reviewers in this published collection, one yet sees in germinal form the underlying theme of Robert Falconer, which indeed it eventually became.

Rolland Hein elaborates:

"MacDonald completed this collection of tales by including as the final entry his drama, If I Had a Father. Having tried intermittently since its conception in 1859 to arouse some publisher’s interest in it, he finally resorted to bringing it out in this way. He must have been chagrined at the reviewer’s remark in The Atheneaum: ‘Of the last and longest piece, a drama, it is hard to say anything good, the incidents and plot being tame and trite to a degree, while it is heavily handicapped by the hideous Lancashire dialect.’ The critic concluded, ‘On the whole, Mr. MacDonald is more successful in more serious efforts.’ ¹ It is difficult to conceive of anything being more serious to MacDonald than the theme of this drama, the quest for a spiritual father." ²

A new edition of Adela Cathcart was also released in 1882, an edition which would have involved considerably more work and rewriting than a mere volume of reprints. The new edition contained a different collection of stories than the 1864 edition. This of course also required rewriting some of the overlay portions. The end result is a significantly different book. These divergent editions are discussed at length in the introduction to Adela Cathcart, Volume 4 of The Cullen Collection.

Then finally The Princess and Curdie was published in book form in either late 1882 or early 1883. A book so distinct from its predecessor can scarcely be imagined. Was its dramatically different tone and message the reason MacDonald’s usual publishers were not anxious to scoop it up, and thus why it sat unpubished for five years? It was eventually published by Lippincott in the U.S. and Chatto & Windus in the U.K., a newcomer to MacDonald publishing, who would go on to release more titles in the years to come.

While it is true, therefore, that the year 1882 saw only three entirely new titles released (dating Curdie in 1882, though it is often listed among MacDonald’s 1883 releases), if we count reprints in the total, we could claim 1882 as the most productive year of George MacDonald’s career, with the release of five titles in all. This is, of course, splitting hairs by including reprints. Yet even reprints, when they involve the editing and refashioning of former titles, as these clearly did, require time, creative energy, and focus.

The tone of the Curdie sequel is dramatically different from The Princess and the Goblin. Commentators analyze it from many perspectives. But there may be a simple and obvious explanation—MacDonald’s own eleven children were growing up. They had matured. MacDonald may have written a more sophisticated story because the entire MacDonald household—its relationships and conversations—were at a higher level now. There were toddlers in the home when he was writing Goblin. Now five of his eleven sons and daughters were over twenty and Greville was at university. By the time of the book’s publication MacDonald’s oldest son had been to India and back and was a practicing physician.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the literary flavor presented by MacDonald in The Princess and Curdie is quite distinct from that of its predecessor. It still qualifies, in a sense, as a children’s story in style. But the lighthearted tone from Goblin of, Wait, Mr. Author… with MacDonald speaking as if to a group of children, is completely missing. We sense that things of heavier import are lurking ahead.

William Raeper comments on this shift:

"Crossing over into The Princess and Curdie [from The Princess and the Goblin] is like entering into another country. If At the Back of the North Wind is the most moving, and The Princess and the Goblin the most poised, then The Princess and Curdie is the most powerful of all MacDonald’s books for children. It was published in 1883, eleven years after The Princess and the Goblin first appeared in book form. While The Princess and the Goblin is, in many ways, a straightforward story for children, in The Princess and Curdie MacDonald asks his readers to wrestle with many difficult ideas…

"In this book the old Princess Irene reveals her darker shapes, a little like North Wind, and her cosmic power is more in evidence…

"The Princess and Curdie, along with At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin…take children seriously and do not underestimate their ability to cope with difficult existential, moral and metaphysical problems. At the same time they allow children some free rein to participate imaginatively in the stories. Though most nineteenth-century children’s writing has a serious moral purpose, MacDonald’s innate imaginative power has given his stories a lasting power…an irrefutable testimony to his mastery as a story-teller." ³

Rolland Hein expands on these themes:

"…its largely theological implications are well integrated into the story…

"Two themes in the story are of particular interest. One is MacDonald’s view of human nature, which quickly divides people into the two categories of righteous and wicked. The categories are defined in terms of either progressing in life toward a greater goodness or regressing toward a deeper wickedness. The Uglies are formerly wicked people who have sunk to become animals and who have since begun to learn righteousness. MacDonald’s fertile imagination devises for each a shape that is appropriate to the particular type of evil to which it had succumbed in life. They have now begun the long road of becoming fully human in righteousness. The story implies that such long experience, in which one learns righteousness by the doing it and comes thereby to appreciate what true freedom is—and love it and seek it—is necessary to their final spiritual health.

The second theme is the perception that people serve God as they imagine him and that they are not able to serve a God higher than they are capable of imagining. In one of MacDonald’s most memorable scenes, when Curdie and his father Peter meet the great-great-grandmother Irene, she appears as a shining figure in resplendent glory…The coarse-minded miners, on the other hand, see her as Old Mother Wotherwop and assign her a number of other names according to their natures, superstitiously attributing to her a range of unworthy activities. ⁴

These two points highlighted by Dr. Hein are packed with significance in many directions.

The unifying theme of the book is growth, change, movement, and spiritual directionality. In a sense, the entire story depicts a fictionalized representation of Lewis’s brilliant central thing passage from Mere Christianity. We can hardly doubt that this concept from MacDonald—found both in Curdie and elsewhere—was the direct