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Today marks 121 years since George MacDonald – the Scottish minister, fantasy pioneer and secret weapon behind some of your favorite authors – passed away in 1905. We know he influenced the story of Alice in Wonderland and even helped shape C.S. Lewis’s imagination, but his life was full of stranger, funnier and even more surprising details than some versions suggest. In honor of his death day, we include some of our curious favorites!
A Childhood Allergic to Art
MacDonald grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Scotland where art wasn’t just discouraged… it was literally suspect. His grandmother reportedly tossed her own son’s violin into the fire for being “idolatrous” and his father once took a Sir Walter Scott novel away from young George. All of this might not be a crime, but it is not exactly the household you’d expect to produce one of the founding fathers of fantasy literature.
An Ousted Preacher
Once he “took orders” as a congregational minister, George MacDonald couldn’t quite even out the doctrine of eternal damnation with the God he believed in. His sermons eventually leaned so unorthodox that his congregations pushed him out of formal ministry… a career-ending move that, in hindsight, freed him up to write some of the most beloved fantasy of the 19th century, but at the moment felt like a massive blow to the author.
He Turned Down a Life in the Big Apple
Financial security was never really MacDonald’s thing. This may or may not be true, but he was reportedly offered an immense (for the time) $20,000 a year salary to pastor a prestigious Fifth Avenue church in New York. Wildly for the time, MacDonald said no, choosing his own path over a paycheck.
The OG Alice Enthusiast
Lewis Carroll (or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, his real name) might never have published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland if not for MacDonald. Carroll shared the manuscript with MacDonald’s own children first, and their rather enthusiastic reaction is what convinced Carroll (Dodgson) that it was worth putting into the world. Without MacDonald, we would have one significantly less childhood memory!
Bonus Fact: MacDonald as a Mentor Through the Ages
C.S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia (among other things), called MacDonald his master and said that reading MacDonald’s Phantastes felt like crossing “a great frontier.” The admiration for his “master” ran so deep that Lewis wrote MacDonald himself as a character (a guide in the afterlife) in his novel The Great Divorce.
Honestly? These stories seem not so bad for a preacher’s child whose family once literally burned a violin for being too fun! Today we honor MacDonald, and the interesting parts of his life that we rarely get to read about.
