This thesis approaches the ways George MacDonald viewed and represented Victorian society in his novels by analysing select social issues which he felt compelled to address. Chapter One introduces the thesis. It contains a review of critical commentary on MacDonald’s work, as well as discussions on his non-fictional texts and essays, industrialism, and the great rural-urban divide of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two concentrates on MacDonald’s representations of the city in Robert Falconer (1868), The Vicar’s Daughter (1872), and Weighed and Wanting (1882) by underscoring parallels between Octavia Hill’s housing and environmental schemes and situations which he experienced firsthand. Chapter Three examines the influence of Nature on MacDonald’s theology and social views. Special emphasis is placed on Wordsworth and the development of MacDonald’s unique pantheism in his texts, such as the short story, ‘A Journey Rejourneyed’ (1865-6), Guild Court (1868), Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872), What’s Mine’s Mine (1886), and Home Again (1887). Chapter Four uncovers MacDonald’s involvement with the animal welfare movement during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Discussions on vivisection, vegetarianism, hunting, animal abuse, evolution, and degeneration are provided with a wide range of MacDonald’s texts, such as Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865), Paul Faber, Surgeon (1879), The Marquis of Lossie (1877), A Rough Shaking (1890), and Heather and Snow (1893). Chapter Five offers a short summation of the thesis. It affirms that MacDonald was deeply troubled by certain social issues that were raised within his society and would use his fiction to express his concerns. The conclusion also offers a few suggestive topics for ongoing research in the field of this thesis.

Though known for his fantastical writings George MacDonald is often considered to be a typical Victorian teacher of religious and moral seriousness. Approaches to MacDonald’s works normally seek to find his ‘message’ by expositing the moral, social, pedagogical, psychological or theological ‘content’ of his work. This study recasts MacDonald in the light of his shorter fairytales for the ‘childlike’ and argues that these seemingly small and insignificant works are a golden key to his artistic enterprise. This is not because of any particular ‘message’ that they carry but because of their peculiarly light mode of generating meaning and the relation of this lightness to theology. Whilst it is frequently disparaged, levity actually has strong parallels with the theological atmosphere of Christianity. Light modalities such as folly, ecstasy, play, vanity, carnival and Sabbath demonstrate that the Christian faith has greater affinities with lightness and whimsicality than its solemn defenders sometimes admit. MacDonald’s fairytales draw upon this surprising harmony between levity and faith to create environments in which readers can playfully reflect upon the nature of ultimate reality and begin to find their own place within that reality. By helping to remove the mask of ‘seriousness’ presented by things in the everyday world, fairytales engender a kind of ‘divine carelessness’ and help people to let go of the weighty cares and fears that keep them tightly bound to worldly things.

The relationship between the Bible and literature is long-standing and has received increasing attention in recent years. This project investigates the interface between the Bible and literature by focusing on the genre of “parable”. The influence of the Bible on Western literature is considerable, and yet in the case of George MacDonald’s writing it is often overlooked. The “parabolic” is a helpful way to focus our discussion as it is an important genre both in Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God and more subtly in MacDonald’s fantasy and fairytale writing. It is remarkable that approximately a third of Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God comes in the form of parabolic speech. Rather than serving as a nice illustrative story to a theological point made elsewhere, the actual form of parabolic speech is crucial for the message it seeks to convey. Form and content work together in Jesus’ parables in a unique way to break open the reality depicted in parable. This thesis attempts to investigate a specifically biblical view of “parable” for understanding certain aspects of MacDonald’s fantasy literature. MacDonald developed a decidedly theological understanding of story as having the capacity to refresh the revelatory nature of Scripture. It is by the imagination that a poet is able to find new forms to recast and recover old and forgotten truths. By designating the poet as a finder rather than a maker, MacDonald resists Coleridge’s idealist inclinations to elevate the poet to a creator. His employment of story and more particularly the “parabolic” is then not only an aesthetic but also a theological choice. MacDonald’s last fantasy romance, Lilith, will serve as our test case to demonstrate this. Considering the “parabolic” in Lilith sheds significant light on the meaning of Lilith and offers up a decisive answer to the important question of whether MacDonald moves in his fantasy and fairytales from a decidedly Christian perspective to a more polyvalent view of reality. This argument shall be further substantiated by bringing to the light the important influence of Novalis on Lilith.

Scholars and storytellers alike have deemed George MacDonald a great mythopoeic writer, an exemplar of the art. Examination of this accolade by those who first applied it to him proves it profoundly theological: for them a mythopoeic tale was a relational medium through which transformation might occur, transcending boundaries of time and space. The implications challenge much contemporary critical study of MacDonald, for they demand that his literary life and his theological life cannot be divorced if either is to be adequately assessed. Yet they prove consistent with the critical methodology MacDonald himself models and promotes. Utilizing MacDonald’s relational methodology evinces his intentional facilitating of Mythopoesis. It also reveals how oversights have impeded critical readings both of MacDonald’s writing and of his character. It evokes a redressing of MacDonald’s relationship with his Scottish cultural, theological, and familial environment – of how his writing is a response that rises out of these, rather than, as has so often been asserted, a mere reaction against them. Consequently it becomes evident that key relationships, both literary and personal, have been neglected in MacDonald scholarship – relationships that confirm MacDonald’s convictions and inform his writing, and the examination of which restores his identity as a literature scholar. Of particular relational import in this reassessment is A.J. Scott, a Scottish visionary intentionally chosen by MacDonald to mentor him in a holistic Weltanschauung. Little has been written on Scott, yet not only was he MacDonald’s prime influence in adulthood, but he forged the literary vocation that became MacDonald’s own. Previously unexamined personal and textual engagement with John Ruskin enables entirely new readings of standard MacDonald texts, as does the textual engagement with Matthew Arnold and F.D. Maurice. These close readings, informed by the established context, demonstrate MacDonald’s emergence, practice, and intent as a mythopoeic writer.