History Book: A fairy-tale tour

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, October 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Up next, the WORLD History Book. 19th century Scottish novelist, poet, and pastor George MacDonald was well known and respected in Victorian England. But when he arrived in Boston in 1872 for a lecture tour. He wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the rough and tumble Americans. Here’s WORLD correspondent Caleb Welde.

CALEB WELDE: In the fall of 1872 George MacDonald, his wife, and their oldest son arrive in America. They’re starting in Boston then on to Chicago and Montreal.

Forty-eight year old George MacDonald is a busy man. He’s dad to eleven kids and is a prolific author. He’s published eleven books.

TIMOTHY LARSEN: His novels often were about the journey of life.

Timothy Larsen is author of George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles.

LARSEN: People would say that I've modeled my life on this character that you wrote. That I too, have tried to find my way through on these issues, and I'm doing it the way they did it.

Shortly before coming to America, he published his latest book, a fairy tale: The Princess and Goblin.

In Boston, MacDonald receives a celebrity welcome. He meets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and has lunch with Ralph Waldo Emerson the same day. Fifteen hundred people cram into Union Hall to hear his first lecture. A week later three thousand show up. Almost nine thousand pack in, in Philadelphia. MacDonald’s son remembers him being a bit nervous seeing that last crowd but insists, generally his dad is “utterly unselfconscious.”

A Boston journal says the talks are “Not eloquence or poetry, nor is there any straining for effect, but it is the man’s soul that captivates.”

LARSEN: MacDonald is always trying to bring in something edifying and elevating but he's not trying to preach a sermon. He's definitely trying to revel in great literature and make it an artistic literary event.

But he does have a habit of mixing in gospel inspired one-liners:

MACDONALD: The one principle of hell is– “I am my own.”

Or this one:

MACDONALD: It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another.

Before the tour began, MacDonald’s manager worked out a rate of thirty dollars a lecture. But now he’s furious.

LARSEN: He was like, if you had just made clear what you were able to do in a lecture, I could have gotten a lot more money booking these gigs because the audience was so connected.

In New York City, a prominent fifth-avenue church offers MacDonald its pastorate with an annual salary of twenty thousand dollars. That’s more than half a million dollars today. MacDonald says thanks, but no thanks even though, behind the scenes, money is tight.

On January 3rd, he sends a hundred pounds back to England to his daughter Lily who is helping care for the other kids. He admits…

MACDONALD: I don’t expect that to last you long.

The same day, Mrs. MacDonald adds…

MRS. MACDONALD: Tell my Ronald boy, I’m always seeing books I want to buy him–but the bags of gold have failed us.

Their letters home are full of other things perhaps more precious than gold. Words like this from George MacDonald to his “darling Goose.” That’s Lily.

GEORGE MACDONALD: May you have as many happy birthdays in this world as will make you ready for the happier series of them afterwards, the first of which birthdays will be the one we call the day of death down here. But there is a better, grander, birthday than that, which we may have every day– every hour that we turn away from ourselves to the living love that makes our love.

For months MacDonald selflessly gives. And all the travel is taking a toll. Mrs. MacDonald begins having headaches and Mr. MacDonald’s tuberculosis flares up again.

On a bone-chilling January morning in Pennsylvania, Mrs. MacDonald writes a friend.

MRS. MACDONALD: We went on for two miles and suddenly stopped again.

She’s just gotten off a nineteen hour train ride that was supposed to be three.

MRS. MACDONALD: The locomotive to the passenger train in advance of us had become frozen and waterless…

Thick snow had caused a wreck on the tracks, and when the line was finally cleared at two thirty in the morning…

MRS. MACDONALD: And there we remained the whole of the cold, dark night with these wretched seats and wrecheder surroundings. Can he stand all this?

The next night, they get stuck again, with more cars off the line ahead of them. MacDonald says the sub-zero air feels like strong acid cutting his lungs.

MacDonald recovers and continues touring until May, when he decides it’s time to go home. His friends now include Mark Twain who is publicly skeptical of Christianity.

Once again, author Timothy Larsen:

LARSEN: It was an age where doubt seemed to loom very large in their imaginations, and McDonald said, You're asking the wrong question. The question is not, do you understand all these doctrines? The question is, have you discerned that Jesus Christ is good and worthy of your trust, and if so, then you should obey him. What it means to be a Christian is to follow Christ and to be obedient to Christ.

At a farewell dinner, MacDonald closes with these words.

GEORGE MACDONALD: Our hearts are larger and fuller for the love of so many more friends than we had before. Your big hearts, huge in hospitality and welcome, have been very tender with me and mine– so patient with my failures and short-comings.

MacDonald’s influence lasts—on both sides of the Atlantic. The great literary critic and Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton says this of The Princess and Goblin.

GUITE: Of all the stories I have read, It remains the most real, the most realistic, the most like life.

Audio here of Malcom Guite reading Chesterton at Wheaton College:

GUITE: When the evil things besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside, but inside.

Another of MacDonald’s novels—Phantastes—fell into the hands of an English atheist teenager. Only a few hours into the book, C.S. Lewis said he knew he had crossed a great frontier and that…

LEWIS: The true name of the quality which first met me in his books is Holiness. To speak plainly, I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continuously close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.

George MacDonald died in England at age eighty. In all he wrote more than thirty-five books. He’s probably most remembered for pioneering Christian fantasy stories. But he wrote that he wanted one thing for his audience from his writing, to see and experience the glory of God. That trust leads to obedience, and obedience leads to joy.

GEORGE MACDONALD: The one secret of life and development is not to devise and plan, but to fall in with the forces at work – to let the maker handle them as the potter his clay; they would ere long find themselves able to welcome every pressure of that hand upon them, even when it was felt in pain, and sometimes not only to believe but to recognize the divine end in view, the bringing of a Son into glory.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. My thanks to voice actors: Kim Rassmussen, Donna Leland, and John Gauger. I’m Caleb Welde.

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