December 2024—
Growing Younger with George MacDonald (1824-1905)

by Amanda B. Vernon

This month marks the 200th birthday of the Scottish writer, theologian and literary scholar George MacDonald (1824-1905). All birthdays bring with them the (welcome or unwelcome) opportunity to reflect on the idea of growing older. In the case of MacDonald, though, it seems more fitting to reflect on the idea of growing younger.

Amongst the many roles MacDonald performed during his career (including that of Congregationalist minister, novelist, literary scholar, and editor), he is perhaps best known as a children’s writer. His children’s fantasy novels like At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872) are still published and read today and impacted generations of fantasy writers from J. R. R. Tolkien to Joan Aiken to Ursula LeGuin. Reading children’s books is not, however, what I mean by growing younger—although reading MacDonald’s fairytales may well require us get in touch with our “inner child.” As he writes in an essay on fairytales “I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five” (A Dish of Orts, 317).

Growing younger has less to do with reading children’s stories and more to do with the distinctively theological mode of all MacDonald’s writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, fantasy, realist novel, or poetry. The idea that one must become more childlike is, to some extent, a fairly typical idea in Christian theology. After all, Jesus himself tells his disciples that unless they become like children they cannot enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 18:2-5). What MacDonald does, though, is to take the idea and develop it into a theology of childlikeness with a childlike God at the centre. True childhood, for MacDonald, is characterised by humility, trust, openness, and, most importantly, unselfconscious love. He writes in the first volume of his Unspoken Sermons (1867) that childlikeness is an aspect of the divine nature (Unspoken Sermons: First Series, 1-26). A bit less typical!

True childhood in MacDonald’s work is also, somewhat paradoxically, true old age. We often find this idea of youthful old age—and its connection with the divine—fictionalised in MacDonald’s works of fantasy and faerie. These works frequently feature an archetypal wise woman character: a shape-shifter who at times appears to be old, withered, and fragile, at other times young, radiantly beautiful, and strong, and at others again a child. Her shifts between old age, childhood, and youth reflect the eternal nature of this mystical figure. She exhibits other characteristics that MacDonald associates with the Christian God (such as invisible guidance and the power to cleanse and heal through fire), as well as qualities of divine childlikeness.

In MacDonald’s children’s novel The Princess and the Goblin (1872), we encounter the mysterious great-great grandmother who lives at the top of the young Princess Irene’s house, but is only to be found on occasions when she chooses to reveal herself. One evening, when Princess Irene has found her way up to her grandmother’s room, she is startled to find not an old woman with white hair as she has found before, but a young woman with hair of “a rich golden colour, stream[ing] like a cataract,” and a face like “that of a woman of three-and-twenty” (The Princess 145). Upon Princess Irene asking her grandmother if it is her crown that makes her look so young, her grandmother replies:

“[…] it is because I felt so young this evening, that I put my crown on. And it occurred to me that you would like to see your old grandmother in her best.”
“Why do you call yourself old? You’re not old, grandmother.”
“I am very old indeed. It is so silly of people—I don’t mean you, for you are such a tiny, and could’t know better—but it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs. I am older than you are able to think, and—”
“And look at you, grandmother!” cried Irene, jumping up, and flinging her arms about her neck. (157-58)

The grandmother’s unthinkable age hints at her divinity, what MacDonald elsewhere describes as “the old age of everlasting youth” (The Wise Woman 195). But ancient youth or divine childhood are not only for the likes of Irene’s great-great grandmother or the Old Man of the Fire (the mystical child who features in MacDonald’s “The Golden Key”). Childhood is also human: “the deepest heart of humanity—its divine heart” (Unspoken Sermons: First Series 16). While distinctly human, the process of growing younger—of cultivating qualities of childlikeness—is the work of a lifetime. Or, rather, the work of multiple lifetimes.

In an 1872 letter to his daughter Lily, MacDonald reflects on the nature of eternity and the possibility of continued spiritual life beyond the grave. While this might seem an odd theme for a birthday greeting to a twenty-one-year-old daughter, the occasion of Lily’s birthday is precisely what precipitates MacDonald’s reflection on the subject of death. He wishes her, “as many happy birthdays in this world as will make you ready for a happier series of them afterwards. The first of which birthdays will be the one we call the day of death down here” (Letter). These preparatory birthdays are not just the yearly anniversaries of Lily’s physical birth, but also moments of spiritual birth. He goes on to write that ‘there is a better grander birthday than that [of death], which we may have every day—every hour that we turn away from ourselves to the living love that makes our love, and so are born again.” The process of daily rebirth—of becoming a child each day—is a process of turning towards the childlike God at the “heart of the universe” (Unspoken Sermons: Third Series 95).

MacDonald was a writer and thinker who sought to defamiliarise what we think we understand: whether old age and childhood, birth and death, or even the nature of God. His willingness to take his theological ideas to radical conclusions, and his use of the fantastic to explore those ideas, make his work striking and distinctive. Two hundred years after his birth (or, as he might say, his first birth), MacDonald’s work continues to invite us to “grow younger”—startling us into re-examining our familiar “adult” ways of thinking, and opening us up to the possibility of seeing things afresh.

Works Cited

MacDonald, George. A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespere. London: Sampson Low Marston & Co., 1893.

MacDonald, George. Letter to Lily MacDonald. 22 Dec. 1872. George MacDonald Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, GEN MSS 103, box 4, folder 163.

MacDonald, George. The Princess and the Goblin. London: Blackie and Son, 1911.

MacDonald, George. The Wise Woman: A Parable. London: Strahan, 1875.

MacDonald, George. Unspoken Sermons: Third Series. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889.