The Bicentennial of George MacDonald

Photographed by Lewis Carroll, 1852

Two hundred years ago today, 10 December 1824, George MacDonald was born in Huntley, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He is remembered for classic original fairy tales ("The Golden Key", "The Light Princess", etc.),  children's novels (The Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind, etc. ), and the two adult fantasy novels that bookend his career (Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women, and Lilith). His writings inspired David Lindsay, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C .S. Lewis, among others.

This year also marks the centenary of the first major biography of him, George MacDonald and His Wife, by his son, Greville MacDonald. George MacDonald died on 18 September 1905, in Ashtead, Surrey, England, at the age of eighty. 

Wormwoodiana today tips the hat in remembrance of MacDonald. I show a few of my own shelves of MacDonald books, one of criticism, the other of a large selection of his collected works, as put out in fine cloth-bound editions by Johannesen Printing and Publishing of California in the 1990s. Most notable of their editions is a two volume Variorum Edition of Lilith, publishing for the first time multiple manuscript versions. At bottom I have reproduced MacDonald's bookplate from Greville MacDonald's book. 

One Thousand Posts (a co-post by Mark Valentine and Douglas A. Anderson)

It was on 19 June, 2009 that Doug approached me with the idea of a blog to augment Wormwood, a journal of the fantastic I had started editing for Tartarus Press. I at once agreed: and it was also Doug that came up with the name. Just three days later the new blog began with a post by Doug, and my own first post, appropriately enough, was on the forgotten writer J.C. Snaith, whom Doug had drawn to my attention the previous year.

Ever a slow adopter, I had no notion of how to set up a blog, and it wouldn’t have happened without Doug’s inspiration and impetus. Ever since then, Doug has carried out all the admin and backroom work that goes with the blog, handling comments (and lots of spam) and resolving technical issues. Let it be stressed that this shared blog only happens because of all his work.

It seems astonishing that we have now reached our one thousandth post. We have covered lost authors, lost books, lost artists, classic authors, books in their centenary year, important new publications, events and exhibitions, obscurities and oddities, archival and bibliographical records, and a fair number of quite unclassifiable things.

I’d also like to venture another claim. The average length of a post is, I think, about a thousand words: certainly, that’s what I aim for when I’m writing about a forgotten author or book, a book-collecting expedition, or some discovery I want to share. Of course, some posts are much briefer, but others have been quite a bit longer. So 1,000 posts at an average of 1,000 words means that we must have around one million words here: one million words of free-to-read commentary and news on fantastic literature. If anyone wants to count them just to make sure, you are most welcome.

As well as the regular posts by Doug and me, we’ve also been fortunate to receive excellent contributions by guests, and I’d like to thank all those who have enriched the blog in this way. The same goes for our readers, whose comments have often offered new information, ideas or perspectives. Thank you for your interest and support: your comments are always read and welcomed. Finally, Doug maintains the Blog Roll which lists fellow blogs in similar fields of interest to us, and these continue to offer encouragement and camaraderie in our mutual interest in the fantastical.

Mark Valentine

 

Mark has said above almost all of what I might say in observing our one thousandth post in our fifteenth year of this blog. I might add that I chose the name Wormwoodiana because I felt it echoed and expanded upon the field as covered in the (now sadly defunct) journal Wormwood, which Mark edited. I felt a blog could cover lots of topics that were too small to make the fuller coverage of an essay as usually found in Wormwood. Plus there would also be opportunities to give attention to various books, zines, music, authors, artists, blogs, etc. Initially, the comments were open and unmoderated, but as the spam increased I felt the need to moderate—which means primarily to approve real comments and junk the spam, when I get to it, which is usually fairly quickly (save for during my sleeping hours).

I would also add a large thanks here to Mark, and express my gratitude as well to our various guest bloggers and contributors. Overall, I think we have carved out our own tiny corner in the web, and I am grateful too for the readers and commentators who join us here.

Douglas A. Anderson

The Centenary of "Ghosts and Marvels" edited by V.H. Collins

Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, published in December 1924, is a small pocket-sized book of some 506 pages plus some xvi pages of front-matter. It is one volume of "The World's Classics" series published by Oxford University Press (the imprint was begun in 1901 by Grant Richards, and purchased by Oxford University Press in 1906). While the stories included are top shelf, making for an excellent anthology in and of itself (see the contents pages reproduced below), that is only a small part of the reason for celebrating this book's centenary. The main reason is that the editor or publisher had the inspired idea to get M.R. James to write the nine-page introduction. James begins with a statement that he is not responsible for the stories included, which gives him the chance to criticize or praise freely.  James continues:

Often I have been asked to formulate my views about ghost stories and tales of the marvellous, the mysterious, the supernatural. Never have I been able to find out whether I had any views that could be formulated. The truth is, I suspect, that the genre  is too small and special to bear the imposition of far-reaching principles. Widen the question, and ask what governs the construction of short stories in general, and a great deal might be said, and has been said. There are, of course, instances of whole novels in which the supernatural governs the plot; but among them are few successes. The ghost story is, at its best, only a particular sort of short story, and is subject to the same broad rules as the whole mass of them. Those rules, I imagine, no writer ever consciously follows. In fact it is absurd to talk of them as rules; they are qualities which have been observed to accompany success.

Then James continues with his views and personal impressions. It is a valuable introduction because it is one of the few essays by James on the type of literature in which he himself would achieve great acclaim, with his antiquarian ghost stories.

The editor V. H. Collins was Vere Henry Gratz Collins (1872-1966), who was born in Windsor of an Irish father and a Canadian-Jewish mother, and who studied at Balliol College, Oxford, receiving Third Class degrees in 1892 and 1894. After some years as a schoolmaster, he worked for many years at Oxford University Press in London. He edited singly, and with others, more than a few dozens books for Oxford University Press, including Poems of Home and Overseas (1921), co-edited with Charles Williams, the poet and novelist who was later a member of the Inklings. Collins does not seem to have been much interested in the weird fiction genre (it was his boss, Humphrey Milford, who instructed him to compile the anthology), but he knew whom to ask for advice and recommendations. Charles Williams is thanked by Collins in both Ghost and Marvels ("the compiler owes thanks to . . . Charles Williams, from whose wide reading and judgement he has benefited throughout the preparation of the book") and its sequel, More Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Sir Walter Scott to Michael Arlen (1927, with an identically worded acknowledgement to Williams). 

In 1952, Collins published under the pseudonym Mark Tellar, A Young Man's Passage: An Intimate Autobiography of the Victorian Age (London: Home and Van Thal), which told (with identities disguised) candidly of his passionless first marriage (in 1897) and subsequent divorce, his numerous affairs with prostitutes and his sharing his personal sexual history with Havelock Ellis, the pioneer sexologist. The first chapter tells, sympathetically, the tragic story of Collins's father, Dr. William Maunsell Collins (1844-1926), whose increasing money problems led to charges of forgery in 1892, and in 1898, he was convicted of manslaughter in the death of a upper class married woman upon whom he had performed an illegal abortion, a crime he had been suspected of at least once previously. The TLS noted that "Mr. Tellar conceals little. . . . He rarely passes judgment on those who condemned him. His invented dialogue is seldom artificial. . . . And yet, on closing the book, the reader is left with wondering--without malice--what impelled him to write it" (6 June 1952).