Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T02:55:34.598Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

SERMON AND STORY IN GEORGE MACDONALD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2015

Martin Dubois
Martin Dubois*
Affiliation:
Newcastle University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

George MacDonald took to preaching early in life. In his boyhood he once “rushed into the kitchen, jumped upon the clean-scrubbed table, and began a learned discourse, indicating Bell Mavor, the maid, as a reprobate past redemption”:

She flicked at him with her dish-clout, when he turned upon her in righteous anger, as he set straight the improvised bands about his neck: “Div ye no ken fan ye’re speakin’ til a meenister, Bell? Ye's no fleg [frighten] awa’ the Rev. Geordie MacDonald as gin he war a buzzin’ flee [fly]! Losh, woman, neist to Dr. Chaumers [Thomas Chalmers], he's the grandest preacher in a’ Scotland!” (Greville MacDonald 59)

Before long MacDonald would grow uneasy with the Calvinist beliefs from which this childhood frolic takes its bearings. He would later characterise the religion of his youth as one in which “hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell” (Robert Falconer 1: 152). Coming to feel “that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong” (qtd. in Greville MacDonald 155), MacDonald in maturity embraced a broad and undogmatic theology, and – at the urging of F. D. Maurice – eventually joined the Church of England. Yet the impulse to preach never left him. MacDonald is now principally remembered as a writer of fantasy and fairy tales, but his literary career was in one sense a stand-in for the pulpit. He briefly served as a Congregationalist minister in Arundel before being forced out for his unorthodox views on salvation. Unable to secure another appointment, and sustaining “a hand-to-mouth existence” with his family in Manchester, MacDonald came to prose fiction “through economic necessity” (Raeper 103, 125). Even once he had achieved literary fame, MacDonald continued to preach occasionally by invitation. Over the course of his lifetime he would also publish several volumes of sermons never delivered – not simply spiritual reflections, but, as the title of a series of his volumes has it, Unspoken Sermons (1867–1889).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 577 - 587
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Bebbington, David W.Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.Google Scholar
Bebbington, David W. “The Growth of Voluntary Religion.” The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8: World Christianities, c. 1815-c.1914. Ed. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. 53–69.Google Scholar
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.Google Scholar
Bottigheimer, Ruth B., ed. Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1986.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Ed. McSweeney, Kerry and Sabor, Peter. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Chesterton, G. K.The Victorian Age in Literature. 1912. London: Williams & Norgate, 1925.Google Scholar
Davis, Philip. Why Victorian Literature Still Matters. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dearborn, Kerry. Baptized Imagination: The Theology of George MacDonald. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.Google Scholar
Ellison, Robert H. The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Girardot, Norman J. The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.Google Scholar
Gray, William. Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.Google Scholar
Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunt, Peter. An Introduction to Children's Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knoepflmacher, U. C.Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. Adela Cathcart. 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. Alec Forbes of Howglen. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1865.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. At the Back of the North Wind. London: George Routledge, 1882.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. The Complete Fairy Tales. Ed. Knoepflmacher, U. C.. London: Penguin, 1999.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. David Elginbrod. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1871.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. George MacDonald in the Pulpit. Ed. Joseph Flynn, J. and Edwards, David. Whitehorn: Johannesen, 1996.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. The Hope of the Gospel. London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1892.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. Letter to Georgina Cowper-Temple. 8 October 1877. National Library of Scotland MS.9754.11.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. 1872 and 1883. Ed. McGillis, Roderick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. Robert Falconer. 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1868.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. The Seaboard Parish. 3 vols. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1868.Google Scholar
MacDonald, George. Unspoken Sermons. 3 vols. Vol. 1: London: Alexander Strahan, 1867. Vols. 2 and 3: London: Longmans, 1886–1889.Google Scholar
MacDonald, Greville. George MacDonald and his Wife. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924.Google Scholar
MacLachlan, Christopher, Pazdziora, John Patrick, and Stelle, Ginger, eds. Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries. Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2013.Google Scholar
McGillis, Roderick, ed. For the Childlike: George MacDonald's Fantasies for Children. Metuchen, New Jersey: Children's Literature Association, 1992.Google Scholar
McGillis, Roderick. George MacDonald. Wayne, Pennsylvania: Zossima, 2008.Google Scholar
Manlove, Colin. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Prickett, Stephen. Victorian Fantasy. 2nd ed. Waco: Baylor UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Raeper, William. George MacDonald. Tring, Hertfordshire: Lion, 1987.Google Scholar
Reis, Richard H.George MacDonald. Boston: Twayne, 1972.Google Scholar
Robb, David S.George MacDonald. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic, 1987.Google Scholar
Röhrich, Lutz. Fairy Tales and Reality. Trans. Tokofsky, Peter. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Sumpter, Caroline. The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Welch, Claude. Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972–85.Google Scholar
Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. London: Heinemann, 1983.Google Scholar