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Born in Huntly where a strong evangelical dissenting tradition influenced his religious thought just as the local landscape and customs formed the background to much of his literary work. Up to the end of the first quarter of this present century it was his novels, especially David Elginbrod, which were generally appreciated but in recent years it is Phantastes and his children’s stories which are interesting educationists and psychologists. From Aberdeen he went to the Congregational College at Highbury and from that time his contacts with Scotland were limited to vacations. He had an unfortunate ministry at Arundel where his office-bearers cut his salary in half because they disapproved of his liberal views. He moved to Manchester where he hired a room and preached to a small gathered congregation, but the numbers did not increase. He was unsuccessful in academic life for when he applied for a post in his college library he was turned down, just as later, when he competed for the Edinburgh Chair of Rhetoric it went to Masson. He was not finding it easy to get much of his work published; David Elginbrod was rejected by several publishers. Even when he returned to Huntly he was not asked to preach. He blamed many of his failures on popular suspicion of his liberalism, but there are people who never quite manage to reach that for which they aim, and perhaps George Macdonald was among these. He had undoubted talent, much of which is only beginning to be understood, but he surrounded himself for the most part with friends who were of giant stature and beside whom his less weighty intellect was dwarfed. Among these friends were Ruskin, who seems to have sought his advice often, Thomas Carlyle, Lady Byron, who helped him financially and in many ways, Erskine of Linlathent, Octavia Hill, Norman MacLeodt, Professor Blackie and F. D. Maurice. He attended Maurice’s church in Vere Street, London, and became a member of the Church of England. He had a very happy home life although an early lung illness kept recurring and demanded long holidays in Italy, which as his literary talents came to be recognized, he could afford. In 1897 there came upon him what his son, in his biography of his father, called ‘his long vigil’. He lost almost all his faculties and endured eight years beforc he joined his faithful and caring wife who had died in 1902. |