George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination by Colin Manlove

Abstract

Reviewed by: George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination by Colin Manlove Erin Sheley (bio) George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination. By Colin Manlove. Cascade Books, 2019. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined a literary "symbol" as "characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General" (30). This taxonomic approach to a particular tool of the imagination echoes throughout Colin Manlove's new monograph George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination. It is hard to imagine a comprehensive scholarly treatment of the Victorian cleric's lifelong interest in the imagination that does not compare it to Coleridge's, whose Romantic conception of the creative imagination opened the nineteenth century. Indeed, a major thread in Manlove's argument distinguishes MacDonald's version of the imagination from Coleridge's: "Where Coleridge emphasizes the power of the imagination in re-making the world outside it, MacDonald sees it as seeking out something already given" (121). Specifically, Manlove argues, the belief that "God actually lives in the imagination of man and is the author of man's creativity is perhaps the most striking feature of MacDonald's thought" (6). Starting from this premise, Manlove offers a comprehensive classification of the functions of the divine imagination in all of MacDonald's major children's fantasy work, where, he argues, it operates both within and upon both the external world and the internal self. Manlove's project is descriptive, in the sense that he never interrogates MacDonald's own core assumptions or their broader social implications, but richly and rigorously so, offering a useful intellectual framework in which to understand the author's widely varied and often mysterious work. While MacDonald's evocative work has attracted a wealth of critical attention from notable scholars including U. C. Knoepflmacher and Roderick McGillis, much of the existing scholarship has been article- or chapter-length and focused on particular aspects of MacDonald's myth-making in certain stories, within the broader context of the Victorian fairy tale. There have been surprisingly few recent, book-length works on MacDonald (the most recent being Daniel Gabelman's 2013 George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairy Tale Levity). Thus Manlove's sustained treatment of the full body of the author's work for children is a welcome addition. In his first chapter, Manlove takes up MacDonald's short stories as a group in order to show how they represent a range of "types of the imagination" (14). In Manlove's system of classification, MacDonald shows the imagination operating in a range of modes, some good and some bad: as fancy, delusion, perversion, creation, spiritual insight, and vision (23). Each of the following chapters focuses on one of MacDonald's longer children's works and demonstrates one of the [End Page 182] operations of the specifically divine imagination that Manlove identifies. For Manlove, At the Back of the North Wind (1870) depicts the operation of the divine imagination within the world, while The Princess and the Goblin (1872) shows how it functions within the individual self. Symmetrically, Manlove argues, in The Wise Woman (1875) MacDonald shows how the imagination mobilizes God's creative powers against the individual self and, in The Princess and Curdie (1882), against the world. While this structure sometimes feels a bit too tidy, for the most part Manlove avoids the pitfall of subordinating research to argument. Indeed, despite the author's obvious intratextual interest in tracing MacDonald's theological positions, his argument is meticulously well situated within both the immediate context of nineteenth-century fairy tale writing and in the longer historical trajectory of imaginative English literature going back to Spenser and Shakespeare. (His comparison of Spenser's Una and Duessa to MacDonald's ageless wise women and their flawed pupils is particularly useful in illustrating the proposed distinction between visionary and delusional imagination in the latter texts.) Indeed, some of this book's most valuable contributions occur in the specific readings that Manlove offers in service of his broader argument. For example, he notes the relationship between objectivity and divine imagination in MacDonald's short stories...