Personally, I would prefer to categorise MacDonald as speculative dream fiction, and give the title of modern fantasy progenitor to William Morris. The Princess and the Goblin (1872), as it happens, was a key influence on Tolkien’s Orcs, while Phantastes (1858) can be considered the first modern fantasy novel for adults, depending on one’s definition. Strictly, he’s a writer of dream-adventures after the manner of Lewis Carroll, albeit with a more Christian twist. I’d read a reasonable amount of MacDonald’s fantasy works before – insofar as one can actually call him fantasy in a modern sense. Specifically, Lilith (1895) by George MacDonald. Today, I’m going to look at one of those texts that is important to the development of the fantasy genre, while also rather playing into that particular stereotype about Victorians. It’s not actually true, of course, but it’s still amusing. There’s the joke that the difference between the Victorians and our current era is that the Victorians were obsessed with Death and acted as though Sex didn’t exist, whereas current modernity is the other way around.
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