George MacDonald and Imaginative Engagement

The Victorian novelist George MacDonald, though well-known and well-regarded in the Victorian era (particularly by figures like John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll), is often forgotten today, as the editors of the recent Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries put it: ‘His ideas fell out of fashion, and the majority of MacDonald’s works were relegated to dusty library shelves’. (Glasgow: ASLS, 2013)  Certainly, the combination of the fantastical and the spiritual in many of his works does not suit all tastes; similarly, not all readers will enjoy the moments in his realist novels which focus on moral development. (Though they are often enjoyable no matter what one’s taste for morality might be: Donal Grant, for example, contains drugging, hallucinations, a mad villainous Earl, and not just one but two skeletons in the attic.)

But no matter what one may think of George MacDonald’s answers, the questions he raises are always intriguing and direct his audience in search of nuanced insight, particularly on the way the imagination functions and the way in which we engage with it.  In his own time, he was at the centre of many Victorian debates.  His belief in the shared masculine and feminine nature of the Christian God chimed in with contemporary arguments made by the mid-Victorian feminist Langham Place Group as part of their fight for increased roles for women in public life.  He encouraged his friend Octavia Hill in her efforts to transform tenement housing. 

MacDonald also believed strongly in the social value of the poetic imagination, arguing for its role in investigating ‘the very nature of things’ in his 1867 essay ‘The Imagination: Its Effects and Culture’:

‘It is the far-seeing imagination which beholds what might be a form of things, and says to the intellect: "Try whether that may not be the form of these things;” which beholds or invents a harmonious relation of parts and operations, and sends the intellect to find out whether that be not the harmonious relation of them’.  (‘Imagination’, p. 12)

 MacDonald’s link between the imagination and intellectual inquiry and the innovative potential held in both suggests our modern discourse of public engagement in the humanities. This discourse often focuses on debate and dialogue, as in UCL’s Public Engagement Unit’s manifesto of ‘encourag[ing] a culture of two-way conversations between university staff and students, and people outside the university’ or the Wellcome Trust’s desire that public engagement lead people ‘to consider, question and debate the key issues in science and society’. MacDonald argues that education should not end in an acceptance of fact but in fervent debate:

‘The end of education [ . . .] is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy.’ (‘Imagination’, p. 1)

MacDonald locates this interrogative imagination in humility: ‘We dare to claim for the true, childlike, humble imagination, such an inward oneness with the laws of the universe that it possesses in itself an insight into the very nature of things.’ (‘Imagination’, pp. 12-13) In another essay, ‘The Fantastic Imagination’ he emphasises the importance of valuing anyone and everyone’s interpretation of a work of art, using the example of a fairy tale:

 ‘Everyone [ . . .] who feels the story, will read its meaning after his own nature and development: one man will read one meaning in it, another will read another [ . . .] [Y]our meaning may be superior to mine.’ (‘Fantastic Imagination’, pp. 316-317)

This valuing comes with the acceptance of his audience’s possible disagreement and disengagement with his work:

 ‘A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean [ . . .] It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you.’ (‘Fantastic Imagination’, p. 317)  

MacDonald sends his work out into the unknown with a shrug of his shoulders: ‘Let a fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again.’ (‘Fantastic Imagination’, p. 321)

MacDonald’s championing of interpretative freedom in a humble approach to imaginative initiatives offers, I feel, a useful approach to our current aims of engagement, which Gary Rivett summarizes in this helpful blogpost: ‘Our engagement should aim to disseminate our research to a wide range of audiences, to enrich their appreciation of the past and its relevance to their lives today.’  But engagement is not always quantifiable or even qualifiable. We cannot easily determine whether other people (of whatever community) share our ideas, will interpret them in the same way we do, or whether our ideas are actually of long-lasting value. Responses to initiatives do not always fit nicely into an impact report form – and I do not think we should try to make them fit, if they do not do so easily – though we should ensure that our efforts are well-planned and contain as much opportunity for response as possible. If we respect those with whom we engage in discussion, debate and partnership, we must expect that they won’t always respond, or respond in ways which we can summarize articulately in reports. Rivett, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield,  argues that engagement ‘might be unpredictable and intangible’ and warns against efforts to prevent such unpredictability: ‘Focusing the bulk of our attention on creating ‘outputs’ that disseminate our research, without actually identifying—with local partners—what people might need from universities, one potential, and, to my mind, unsavoury, outcome is likely: university paternalism.’

I hope to use MacDonald’s ideas to shape my own approach to engagement and to avoid the paternalistic dissemination that Rivett criticizes.  I have recently, in collaboration with other MacDonald scholars, launched an online engagement experiment in which we are re-imagining MacDonald’s fairy tale novella The Light Princess through a mixed-media blog: in two-weekly intervals, there is a post on each chapter containing a digital recording of the chapter, a new illustration created for the post, and a reflection by a different MacDonald researcher. I hope that this multi-faceted context will allow for discussion and the sharing of ideas. However, I accept it may well not do so, and not in ways that I might expect. We do not know who might appreciate it and to whom MacDonald’s tale, and our re-tellings, might appeal (if at all). Yet, I hope that, at the very least, it will become a place to share in the pleasures of the imagination (‘a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again’), and so we launch our experiment into the unknown.

 ‘The Imagination: Its Functions and Culture’ in A Dish of Orts (London: Sampson Low, Maeston, Searle and Rivington, 1882), pp. 1-42.

‘The Fantastic Imagination in A Dish of Orts (London: Sampson Low, Maeston, Searle and Rivington, 1882), pp. 313-322.

Alice Through the Reading Group

Whatever my week has been like, my Saturday contains an energizing burst of Victorian fantasyː the chance to read  Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass (1871) in a community reading group that I facilitate (helpfully funded by the Arts Engaged project at the University of Leeds).  This group is made up of people from a range of backgrounds and a range of English-speaking levels, all of whom possess the faculty of bold and insightful criticism.  These critical abilities have come to the fore in the discussions which follow each weekly excerpt from Alice,¹ as I find everything from my perceptions of social categories to my choice of literature challenged. (See footnote below for edition details.)

            In the past few weeks, I’ve been adding to the weekly recipe of reading and discussion by including collaborative poetry writing. A passage from Alice provided the idea for our first attempt at this, and it proved so enjoyable  that I’ve decided to write about it here. Alice’s journey through Looking-Glass Land is full of alienation and bafflement, but there is one brief scene of almost idyllic tranquillity in chapter 5. Though this chapter ('Wool and Water') forms a wider context of disorientation as Alice stumbles from a wool-shop to a rowing boat and back again, accompanied by an incomprehensible sheep, Alice encounters some enchanted rushes.

So the boat was left to drift down the stream as it would, till it glided gently in among the waving rushes. And then the little sleeves were carefully rolled up, and the little arms were plunged in elbow-deep to get the rushes a good long way down before breaking them off -- and for a while Alice forgot all about the Sheep and the knitting, as she bent over the side of the boat, with just the ends of her tangled hair dipping into the water -- while with bright eager eyes she caught at one bunch after another of the darling scented rushes. (214)

Unfortunately, these dream-rushes begin to vanish from the moment she picks them, but the experience of seizing this transient beauty even briefly is inspiringː

What mattered it to her just than that the rushes had begun to fade, and to lose all their scent and beauty, from the very moment that she picked them? Even real scented rushes, you know, last only a very little while -- and these, being dream-rushes, melted away almost like snow, as they lay in heaps at her feet -- but Alice hardly noticed this, there were so many other curious things to think about.  (215)

In his notes to the Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner extends Carroll’s associations of transient beauty still further to the rushesː ‘They are, of course, consciously intended symbols of the fleeting, short-lived, hard-to-keep quality of all beauty.’ (Note 16, p.215)

Well, I thought, why not join Alice in collecting symbols of beauty, transient or notʔ So in the creative writing session which followed, we all took turns writing down our own brief perceptions of beauty – taking our inspiration from anything -- in the room, in our lives, in the window – which was beautiful to us.  Despite the dark tone of some of the imagery, the act of writing itself was rather joyous, as we took turns trying to outdo each other with our images!

Collecting Rushes

Happiness is like scented-rushes.

The snow lies on the trees like icing-sugar.

Lilies are spread in the meadow like gems.

The city glows from the wall behind me.

Horses gallop with their flowing manes, showing their pride

My mother’s eyes give a chocolate-coloured warmth.

Horses gambol with children like magical toys.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel all the world wake up.

 I breathe fresh air and fly with my opinions, and thinking so, I am always singing with the birds, wind, clouds; so my happiness is sharing every thing in nature.

Uncertainty clouds my mind, reminding me of failing love.

I carry many faces in my heart; they speak a language of both joy and pain.

My heart always opens for new feelings, but just nice feelings, and in my heart are living a lot of nice people, and I remember them all the time, so my heart sometimes is tired.

My heart flutters like a shivering bird, seeking fondness, grace and love.

1I've been working from Martin Gardner's edition of Carroll's work: The annotated Alice: Alice's adventures in Wonderland, and, Through the looking-glass , by Lewis Carroll and ed. Martin Gardner (London: Penguin, 2001). This edition includes the original illustrations by John Tenniel.