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    Castle Warlock
    Castle Warlock
    Castle Warlock
    Ebook622 pages

    Castle Warlock

    By George Macdonald and Michael Phillips

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    A novel of a son’s worldly and spiritual inheritance set in the majestic Scottish Highlands—by the nineteenth-century British author of Mary Marston.
     
    Thematically linked to Mary Marston which preceded it, MacDonald here poignantly depicts the father-son relationship as he had earlier that of father and daughter. MacDonald’s storytelling power again returns to the highlands of Scotland, setting his narrative in the hills south of Huntly. We encounter vivid descriptions of that wild terrain, including snowstorms, summer joys, harvests, along with MacDonald’s trademark mysteries, inheritances, treasures, and, of course, romance. Castle Warlock is one of the most thoroughly Scottish of MacDonald's novels, and is a favorite with many for its spiritual, relational, and natural splendor. 
     
    Castle Warlock is unique among MacDonald’s titles, being first published in America in 1881, six months in advance of its British counterpart of 1882. This new edition by MacDonald biographer Michael Phillips streamlines the occasionally ponderous Victorian narrative style and updates the thick Doric brogue into readable English.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 2, 2018
    ISBN9780795352157
    Castle Warlock
    Author

    George Macdonald

    George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a popular Scottish lecturer and writer of novels, poetry, and fairy tales. Born in Aberdeenshire, he was briefly a clergyman, then a professor of English literature at Bedford and King's College in London. W. H. Auden called him "one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century."

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      Book preview

      Castle Warlock - George Macdonald

      Castle Warlock

      George MacDonald

      Introductory material © 2018 by Michael Phillips

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

      Electronic edition published 2018 by RosettaBooks

      ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5215-7

      www.RosettaBooks.com

      The Cullen Collection of the

      Fiction of George MacDonald

      1. Phantastes (1858)

      2. David Elginbrod (1863)

      3. The Portent (1864)

      4. Adela Cathcart (1864)

      5. Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865)

      6. Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867)

      7. Robert Falconer (1868)

      8. Guild Court (1868)

      9. The Seaboard Parish (1868)

      10. At the Back of the North Wind (1871)

      11. Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871)

      12. The Princess and the Goblin (1872)

      13. Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872)

      14. The Vicar’s Daughter (1872)

      15. Gutta Percha Willie (1873)

      16. Malcolm (1875)

      17. The Wise Woman (1875)

      18. St. George and St. Michael (1876)

      19. Thomas Wingfold Curate (1876)

      20. The Marquis of Lossie (1877)

      21. Paul Faber Surgeon (1879)

      22. Sir Gibbie (1879)

      23. Mary Marston (1881)

      24. Castle Warlock (1881)

      25. The Princess and Curdie (1882)

      26. Weighed and Wanting (1882)

      27. Donal Grant (1883)

      28. What’s Mine’s Mine (1886)

      29. Home Again (1887)

      30. The Elect Lady (1888)

      31. A Rough Shaking (1890)

      32. There and Back (1891)

      33. The Flight of the Shadow (1891)

      34. Heather and Snow (1893)

      35. Lilith (1895)

      36. Salted With Fire (1897)

      37. Far Above Rubies (1898)

      The introductions to the 37 volumes form a continuous picture of George MacDonald’s literary life, viewed through the prism of the development of his written legacy of works. While each book can of course be read on its own, every introduction picks up where that to the previous volume left off, with special attention to the title under consideration. The introductions together, as a biography of MacDonald’s life as a writer, are compiled in Volume 38.

      38. George MacDonald A Writer’s Life

      The Cullen Collection

      of the Fiction of George MacDonald

      New editions of George MacDonald’s classic fiction works updated and introduced by Michael Phillips

      CONTENTS

      Foreword to The Cullen Collection

      Introduction to Castle Warlock

      NOTE: As the introductions to the 37 volumes of The Cullen Collection form a continuous portrait of George MacDonald’s life, and as many of the introductions contain comprehensive and detailed discussion and analysis of the title in question—its plot, themes, and circumstances of writing—some first-time readers may choose to skip ahead to the story itself, saving the introduction for later, so as not to spoil the story.

      1.     Castle Warlock

      2.     The Kitchen

      3.     The Drawing Room

      4.     An Afternoon Sleep

      5.     School

      6.     The Old Captain

      7.     Home

      8.     The Student

      9.     Peter Simon

      10.   The New Schooling

      11.   Grannie’s Ghost Story

      12.   The Storm Guest

      13.   The Castle Inn

      14.   That Night

      15.   The Next Morning

      16.   The Afternoon

      17.   The Captain’s Revenge

      18.   A Winter Idyll

      19.   Grizzie’s Suggestion

      20.   The Watchmaker

      21.   The Luminous Night

      22.   To College

      23.   A Tutorship

      24.   The Gardener

      25.   Sickbed Reunion

      26.   Recuperation

      27.   The Knight Who Spoke the Truth

      28.   Cosmo and the Doctor

      29.   A Walk in the Garden

      30.   The Garden House

      31.   Catch Your Horse

      32.   Pull His Tail

      33.   The Thick Darkness

      34.   The Dawn

      35.   Home Again

      36.   The Labourer

      37.   The Schoolmaster

      38.   Grannie and the Stick

      39.   Grizzie’s Rights

      40.   Another Harvest

      41.   The Final Conflict

      42.   A Winter’s Rest

      43.   Help

      44.   A Visit to Mr. Simon

      45.   Suspicions

      46.   Discovery and Confession

      47.   It Is Naught, Saith the Buyer

      48.   A Small Discovery

      49.   A Greater Discovery

      50.   A Great Discovery

      51.   A Visit to Mr. Burns

      52.   Too Sure Comes Too Late

      53.   A Life Well Rounded

      54.   A Breaking Up

      55.   Repose

      56.   The Third Harvest

      57.   Luik To Yer Hert

      58.   The Future of the Glen Called Warlock

      Papa seems so quietly happy.

      —Louisa MacDonald, May 4, 1872, from Deskford (near Cullen)

      Papa does enjoy this place so much.

      —Louisa MacDonald, May 6, 1872 from the Seafield Arms Hotel, Cullen

      Papa oh! so jolly & bright & happy…Papa was taken for Lord Seafield yesterday.

      —Louisa MacDonald, Sept. 2, 1873, from Cullen

      Papa is very poorly. He ought to go to Cullen for a week I think.

      —Louisa MacDonald, October 5, 1873, from London

      FOREWORD

      The Cullen Collection

      of the Fiction of George MacDonald

      The series name for these works of Scotsman George MacDonald (1824-1905) has its origins in the 1830s when the boy MacDonald formed what would be a lifelong affection for the northeast Scottish village of Cullen.

      The ocean became young George’s delight. At the age of eleven, writing from Portsoy or Cullen, he announced to his father his intention to go to sea as a sailor—in his words, as soon as possible. The broad white beach of Cullen Bay, the Seatown, the grounds of Cullen House, the temple of Psyche (Temple of the Winds,) Cullen Burn, the dwellings along Grant Street, Scarnose, and especially Findlater Castle, all seized the youth’s imagination with a love that never left him. MacDonald continued to visit Huntly and Cullen throughout his life, using his childhood love for his homeland as the backdrop for his richest novels, including what is arguably his greatest work of fiction, Malcolm, published in 1875.

      We therefore honor MacDonald’s unique relationship to Cullen with these newly updated editions of his novels. In Cullen, in certain respects more than in any other place, one finds the transcendent spirit of George MacDonald’s life and the ongoing legacy of his work still magically alive after a century and a half. This release of The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald coincides with a memorial bench and plaque established on Cullen’s Castle Hill commemorating MacDonald’s visits to the region.

      To those readers familiar with my previous editions of MacDonald’s novels, I should make clear that eighteen of the volumes in this new series (including this one) are updated and expanded titles from the Bethany House series of the 1980s. Limitations of length dictated much about how those previous volumes were produced. To interest a publisher in the project during those years when MacDonald was a virtual unknown in the publishing world, certain sacrifices had to be made. Cuts to length had to be more severe than I would have preferred. Practicality drove the effort. Imperfect as they were in some respects, I am enormously grateful for those editions. They helped inaugurate a worldwide renaissance of interest in MacDonald. They were wonderful door-openers for many thousands into MacDonald’s world.

      Hopefully this new and more comprehensive set of MacDonald’s fiction will take up where they left off. Not constrained by the limitations that dictated production of the former volumes, these new editions, though identical at many points, have been expanded—sometimes significantly. In that sense they reflect MacDonald’s originals somewhat more closely, while still preserving the flavor, pace, and readability of their predecessors. Nineteen additional titles have been added. The thirteen realistic novels among these have been updated according to the same priorities that guided the earlier Bethany House series. That process will be explained in more detail in the introductions to the books of the series. The final six, which would more accurately be termed fantasy, have not been edited in any way. They are faithful reproductions of the originals exactly as they were first published. These six—Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, The Princess and Curdie, and Lilith—are so well known and have been published literally in hundreds of editions through the years, that it has seemed best to reproduce them for The Cullen Collection with the same texts by which they are generally known.*

      Dedicated followers of all great men and women continually seek hints that reveal their inner being—the true man, the true woman. What were they really like? What made him or her tick? Many biographies and studies attempt to answer such questions. In George MacDonald’s case, however, a panorama of windows exists that reveals far more about his person than the sum-total of everything that has been written about him over the years. Those are the novels that encompass his life’s work. The volumes of this series represent the true spiritual biography of the man, a far more important biography than life’s details can ever tell.

      In 1911, six years after his father’s death, George MacDonald’s son Ronald wrote of the man with whom he had spent his life:

      "The ideals of his didactic novels were the motive of his own life…a life of literal, and, which is more, imaginative consistency with his doctrine…There has probably never been a writer whose work was a better expression of his personal character. This I am not engaged to prove; but I very positively assert…that in his novels…and allegories…one encounters. . .the same rich imagination, the same generous lover of God and man, the same consistent practiser of his own preaching, the same tender charity to the sinner with the same uncompromising hostility to the sin, which were known in daily use and by his own people counted upon more surely than sunshine." *

      Thirty years after the publication of my one-volume biography George MacDonald Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller, it now gives me great pleasure to present this thirty-seven-volume biography of the man, the Scotsman, the prophetic spiritual voice who is George MacDonald. *

      How fitting is the original title in which Ronald MacDonald’s sketch of his father quoted above first appeared, From A Northern Window. For any attempted portrait of the man George MacDonald becomes at once a window into his homeland as well.

      Therefore, I invite you to gaze back in time through the northern windows of these volumes. Picture yourself perhaps near the cheerful hearth described in the opening pages of What’s Mine’s Mine, looking out the window to the cold seas and mountains in the distance, where perhaps you get a fleeting glimpse of highlanders Ian and Alister Macruadh.

      Or imagine yourself walking up Duke Street in Huntly from MacDonald’s birth home, following in the footsteps of fictional Robert Falconer to the town square.

      Or envision yourself on some windswept highland moor with Gibbie or Cosmo Warlock.

      Or walk up the circular staircase of Fyvie Castle to Donal Grant’s tiny tower hideaway where he began to unravel the mysteries of that ancient and spooky place.

      Or walk from Cullen’s Seatown alongside Malcolm selling the fish in his creel, turning at the Market Cross into Grant Street and continuing past Miss Horn’s house and up the hill to the entrance of the Cullen House grounds.

      Or perhaps climb Castle Hill to the George MacDonald memorial bench and gaze across the sweep of Cullen Bay to Scarnose as Malcolm’s story comes to life before your eyes.

      From any of these settings, whether real or imaginary, drift back through the years and gaze through the panoramic windows of these stories, and take in with pleasure the drama, relationships, images, characters, settings, and spiritual truths George MacDonald offers us as we are drawn into his world.

      Michael Phillips

      Cullen, Morayshire

      Scotland, 2017

      INTRODUCTION

      An Ideal of God’s Sonship

      Even from the sunny Mediterranean, where he had relocated for his health in the late 1870s, Scotland was never far from George MacDonald’s heart. Four of his best Scottish novels, and because they are so thoroughly Scottish they are simply four of the best of all his works—Sir Gibbie, Castle Warlock, Donal Grant, and What’s Mine’s Mine—were all written after Italy became his primary home. *

      The second of these, perhaps begun in late 1880 but mostly written in 1881, was originally entitled Warlock of Glen Warlock. It was published as Warlock O’ Glenwarlock in the United States and as Castle Warlock in Great Britain. Though the U.S. and U.K. publications are of approximately equal length, they are textually very distinct, with notable differences not only in most paragraphs, but often in every sentence of many passages.

      This new edition draws on the distinctive features of both publications, using the title Castle Warlock. I will use the same title for the purposes of this introduction, though we will discuss at some length the differences between them. Unravelling the mysteries associated with the sequence of these two editions—published in 1881 and 1882—presents one of the enduring intrigues of MacDonald studies, and opens wide many questions about the piracy of MacDonald’s books, and the related debate over U.K. versus U.S. editions. Some of these issues are discussed in the footnote, Cheap Library Editions of MacDonald’s books in the introduction to Mary Marston.

      LOCALE AND THEMES

      The opening passage, indeed the entire opening chapter of Castle Warlock, gives one of MacDonald’s most pithy and colorful descriptions of those lonely spaces that probably only a Highlander can love as they ought to be loved.

      A rough, wild glen it was, to which, far back in times unknown to its annals, the family had given its name, taking in return no small portion of its history, and a good deal of the character of its individuals. It lay in the debatable land between highlands and lowlands; most of its inhabitants spoke both Scotch and Gaelic; and there was often to be found in them a notable mingling of the chief characteristics of the widely differing Celt and Teuton. The country produced more barley than wheat, more oats than barley, more heather than oats, more boulders than trees, and more snow than anything. It was a solitary, thinly peopled region, mostly of bare hills, and partially cultivated glens, each with its small stream, on the banks of which grew here and there a silver birch, a mountain ash, or an alder tree, but with nothing capable of giving much shade or shelter, save cliffy banks and big stones. From many a spot you might look in all directions and not see a sign of human or any other habitation. Even then however, you might, to be sure, most likely smell the perfume—to some nostrils it is nothing less than perfume—of a peat fire, although you might be long in finding out whence it came; for the houses, if indeed the dwellings could be called houses, were often so hard to be distinguished from the ground on which they were built, that except the smoke of fresh peats were coming pretty freely from the wide-mouthed chimney, it required an experienced eye to discover the human nest. The valleys that opened northward produced little; there the snow might some years be seen lying on patches of oats yet green, destined now only for fodder; but where the valley ran east and west, and any tolerable ground looked to the south, there things put on a different aspect. There the graceful oats would wave and rustle in the ripening wind, and in the small gardens would lurk a few cherished strawberries, while potatoes and peas would be tolerably plentiful in their season.

      Upon a natural terrace in such a slope to the south, stood Castle Warlock. But it turned no smiling face to the region whence came the warmth and the growth. A more grim, repellant, unlovely building would be hard to find; and yet, from its extreme simplicity, its utter indifference to its own looks, its repose, its weight, and its gray historical consciousness, no one who loved houses would have thought of calling it ugly…Summer and winter the chimneys of that desolate-looking house smoked; for though the country was inclement, and the people that lived in it were poor, the great, sullen, almost unhappy-looking hills held clasped to their bare cold bosoms, exposed to all the bitterness of freezing winds and summer hail, the warmth of household centuries: their peat-bogs were the store-closets and wine-cellars of the sun, for the hoarded elixir of physical life. And although the walls of the castle, as it was called, were so thick that in winter they kept the warmth generated within them from wandering out and being lost on the awful wastes of homeless hillside and moor, they also prevented the brief summer heat of the wayfaring sun from entering with freedom, and hence the fires were needful in the summer days as well—at least at the time my story commences, for then, as generally, there were elderly and aged people in the house, who had to help their souls to keep their bodies warm.

      The house was very old. It had been built for more kinds of shelter than need to be thought of in our days. For the enemies of our ancestors were not only the cold, and the fierce wind, and the rain, and the snow; they were men also—enemies harder to keep out than the raging storm or the creeping frost. Hence the more hospitable a house could be, the less must it look what it was: it must wear its face haughty, and turn its smiles inward. [From 1881 Lothrop edition of Warlock O’ Glenwarlock]

      What a masterful piece of prose! I realize this is a long quote for an introduction. I went back over it twice to try to cut it down, but I could not find a single superfluous sentence. I love every word! I cannot imagine what C.S. Lewis was thinking when he called MacDonald inferior in the literary art whose medium is words. ¹ As much as I love him, our dear friend C.S. Lewis is not always an entirely objective analyst. This would appear to be a case where he simply does not recognize the excellence of MacDonald’s fictional and wordsmithing power. The superb word use and descriptive majesty of this passage take my breath away. It is my favorite MacDonald opening, though Phantastes is a close second, with its stream running through the bedroom, leading into the Fairy Land of pre-Narnia.

      The highlands naturally figure into many of MacDonald’s stories, and nowhere more poignantly or descriptively than in the two intensely highland tales, Castle Warlock and What’s Mine’s Mine.

      There is no town corresponding to the Muir of Warlock. This story is loosely set sixteen miles south of Huntly, in a desolate region on the edge of the highlands known as the Cabrach, whose lonely and treeless moors and mountains are beautiful in their starkness. Geographically this setting only borders the highlands, which technically are further west. But the flavor of the story certainly reflects the character of the highlands.

      MacDonald himself was not exactly a Highlander. All that can be said was that his hometown of Huntly lay on the edge of the highlands. Though most of his life was lived in or near London, MacDonald treasured his Scottish roots, loved its highland history, considered himself a son of Glencoe, and at least in part always thought like a Highlander.

      His son Ronald writes,

      "In George MacDonald’s blood the Gael at least preponderated very largely; and I cannot doubt that the tradition which existed in his family of escape from the Glencoe massacre affected his imagination strongly, giving him a heart equally open to the Highland and the Lowland appeal…his occasional picture of a Highlander will stand out from the camera with great distinction, and it may be doubted whether he ever equaled in clarity of characterization or profundity of loving humour his Duncan MacPhail, the blind piper of Portlossie…at once the type of the Celt for his author, and the reconstruction…of the influence upon his author of Highland tradition. Much that Duncan relates of Glencoe and Culloden, as well as certain passages in Robert Falconer…is family history…

      Although George MacDonald’s working life was almost entirely spent outside Scotland…he was, I think, in habit of mind, and in swift brilliance of fancy, radically a Gael. ²

      C.S. Lewis’s description of MacDonald’s homeland is almost as descriptive as MacDonald’s of Glenwarlock. All his life, Lewis writes, he continued to love the rock from which he had been hewn. All the best in his novels carries us back to that ‘kaleyard’ world of granite and heather, of bleaching greens beside burns that look as if they flowed not with water but with stout, to the thudding of wooden machinery, the oatcakes, the fresh milk, the pride, the poverty, the passionate love of hard-won learning. ³

      There are those who voice concern about the spiritual implications of fiction, thinking that the novel is somehow less real than a more didactic presentation of truth. The reality of fiction, however, lies on a deeper plane than mere factness. Reality is indeed a function of truth. But truth comes in many forms. And all truth—however conveyed—is real. Reality pervades the novels of George MacDonald, because the situations and characters point toward truth, and toward the One in whom is contained the highest human personification of truth.

      By communicating his message in such a fashion, George MacDonald was following the example of his Lord. For fiction was frequently the vehicle Jesus used in order to best convey principles of life in God’s kingdom. As he spoke to ordinary people, he found that telling them stories through nonfactual characters was the best means to express realities and truths that might not have been grasped so deeply in any other way. Do good to your neighbor was not a teaching which originated with Jesus but had been set forth by many great men before. It was Jesus, however, who penetrated incisively to the heart of goodness with his parable of the Good Samaritan, immortalizing its truths as no one before or after has ever done. In fictional format, the truth came alive for all time. Through the nonfactual, but highly real genre of the parable, Jesus brought spiritual principles to life.

      Similarly, George MacDonald employed fiction to achieve precisely the same goal. Castle Warlock illustrates in story form many abiding truths of the kingdom. When the disciples asked Jesus about giving up all for him, his reply was, No one who has left home, or land, or family for the sake of the kingdom will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come. George MacDonald used a plot centered on the loss of an earthly inheritance of land to tell of the deeper inheritance of God’s kingdom. Whether the earthly inheritance is won or lost is beside the point. The riches of the kingdom outshine earthly gain. In the old castle, so insignificant in the world’s eyes, good only as a ruin to him who would buy it from Cosmo’s father, lies a secret—what Jesus calls the mystery of the kingdom—found in the heart of Cosmo’s father, a secret that illuminates the riches of God’s life within us. The true inheritance was there all along—but only for those with eyes to see it. The value in the eternal realm is not on the surface, but in the heart.

      Yet such an inheritance is not won without sacrifice. As Jesus said, the inheritance of houses and lands and riches, in this age and in the age to come, is not given to everyone—it comes to those who have left everything for the sake of the kingdom. Thus, the inheritance which comes to Cosmo results from his sacrificial laying down of everything he holds dear in the world. He has to give up his ancient family home, the land, the earthly inheritance that should be his, and lay them on the altar. Cosmo’s most lasting inheritance comes only after he is stripped of every vestige of self, and is ready to go out into the world as a beggar with only the shirt on his back. At that point God steps in. For though our earthly inheritance may be lost, Jesus says that his people will inherit the whole earth. Cosmo becomes an image of the earth-inheritor.

      It is precisely the legacy of this inheritance—an inheritance not passed down by the hands of men, but by the hand of God into men’s hearts—that Cosmo’s father gives to him. Cosmo then passes it into future generations in the flow of his descendants and God’s people. As has been the case since Old Testament times, the heritage of God passes from fathers to sons, from mothers to daughters, from parents to children.

      Like most of MacDonald’s novels, Castle Warlock possesses elements of autobiography. We instantly recognize in young Cosmo Warlock the thoughtful Robert Falconer, and indeed the boy George MacDonald himself. Cosmo (a name used in several of MacDonald’s books) has grown up without his mother. As Cosmo matures, he goes to college, turns to writing poems, and takes a job as a tutor—all of which parallels MacDonald’s (and Alec’s, Hugh’s, and Donal’s) experience. Aspects of these tutorships are almost purely autobiographical, revealing insight into what we know of MacDonald’s first thankless job in London after graduating from university in 1845. And like MacDonald’s, Cosmo’s father managed a small estate of land whose fortunes were on the decline.

      Most striking, however, is the love which exists between Cosmo and his aging father—in the heart of which pulsated the earliest attraction of the boy toward the heartbeat of God himself. Through this relationship the inheritance of God is passed, hand to hand, from father to son. MacDonald unquestionably draws upon the memory of his long relationship with his own father when he writes,

      Nobody knows what the relation of father and son may yet come to. Those who accept the Christian revelation are bound to recognize that there must be in it depths infinite, ages off being fathomed yet. For is it not a reproduction in small of the loftiest mystery in human ken—that of the infinite Father and infinite Son? If man be made in the image of God, then is the human fatherhood and sonship the image of the eternal relation between God and Jesus.

      Through the mouth of Cosmo’s father is articulated the essence of the Godly life. What matters, he says to his son, is not the accumulation of wealth, not the land, not the castle. What comprises the inheritance is to walk humbly with God.

      The desire of his father’s heart is particularly moving: But if I’ve ever had anything to call an ambition, Cosmo, it has been that my son should be one of the wise, with faith to believe what his father had learned before him, and so start further on upon the narrow way than his father had started.

      And out of that dear old man’s mouth comes one of the most succinct statements of life-focus since Jesus spoke the Golden Rule, and one of my favorite nuggets of spiritual wisdom left to us in the entire MacDonald legacy:

      "I don’t doubt there have been some in it who would consider me a foolish man for bringing you up as I have done, but those of them who are up there…don’t. They see that the business of life is not to get as much as you can, but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with your God."

      An interesting feature of Castle Warlock—unlocking great insight into how George MacDonald’s fiction can be read with greater profit and enjoyment—is the recognition of MacDonald’s varying pace of storytelling. It is particularly noteworthy here as, at approximately the halfway point, everything slows. MacDonald uses an illness as the perfect vehicle to quiet the mood, slow events, and turn both his characters and his readers inward. At that point, the book becomes, in a sense, a devotional. Experienced readers of MacDonald quickly learn not to expect the pace of a page-turner all the way through one of his novels. MacDonald is a master at the ebb and flow of pace—drawing us rapidly one minute, then slowing to allow for reflection the next. To appreciate the full-course meal of a MacDonald novel occasionally requires modifying one’s expectations to savor these pace-slowing devotional seasons that come and go through the narrative.

      The Scots dialect is an intrinsic part of Castle Warlock’s unique highland flavor. People often ask about the nature of the dialect, but the study of the origins of languages is a complex field. Being no linguistic historian, I can only offer some rudimentary observations. It seems there are essentially four major language groups identifiable in the Scots dialect called Doric. George MacDonald grew up with this dialect, and it found its way into at least eleven of his books. He himself once referred to it as the broad Saxon of Aberdeen. Those elements are Gaelic, Scandinavian, German, and English.

      A number of words and phrases, though still English, take on a peculiarly Scottish tone or flavor when spoken—still recognizable, but altered to fit the rough, rhythmic, and rapid Scottish tongue. Thus, where becomes whaur, from becomes frae or fae, don’t becomes dinna, can’t becomes canna.

      Any language has colloquialisms, and Scottish has more than its share—words such as gloamin’ (dusk), gowk (fool or lout), burn (stream), laird (landowner), and bairn (child).

      And finally, many thousands of Scottish words are simply foreign to contemporary English, such as: ken (know), ilk (every), lauchen (laugh). gar (make), lippen (trust), lave (rest or remainder), speir (ask), ohn (without), gien (if), gaein’ (go or going), and siller (money). I happen to be familiar with German so I can identify the above similarities. No doubt those who speak Gaelic or any of the Scandinavian languages would identify other parallels with those Celtic and northern roots.

      Most of the dialect has been removed from the volumes of The Cullen Collection with enough left, as explained in other of the introductions, to flavor the narrative with the sound and feel of Scotland, giving translations in footnotes where appropriate. In this particular book, as the dialect is fundamentally linked to the highlands and the struggle of the people who lived there in the 19th century, I have left a little more than usual. I don’t plan my methods according to formula, but try to let the story and its characters dictate the rhythm and syntax of the narrative. ⁴

      I won’t, however, leave you scratching your heads entirely with such passages as the following, but will only retain enough so that you know you are truly reading a highland tale.

      "But anent that, michtna ye jist ca’ to min’, laird, ‘at a gi’en gift’s yer ain, to du wi’ what ye like; an’ I wad na heed man, no to say a cratur ‘at belangs richtly to nae warl’ ava’,’at wad play the bairn, an’ want back what he had gi’en. For him, he’s a mere deid man ‘at winna lie still. Mony a bairn canna sleep, ‘cause he’s behavet himsel’ ill the day afore! But gi’en, by coortesy like, he hed a word i’ the case, he cudna objec’—that is, gien he hae onything o’ the gentleman left intil him, which nae doobt may weel be doobtfu’—for wasna he a byous expense wi’ his drink an’ the gran’ ootlandish dishes he bude to hae! Aften hae I h’ard auld Grannie say as muckle, an’ she kens mair aboot that portion o’ oor history nor ony ither, for, ye see, I cam raither late intil the faimily mysel’. Sae, as I say, it wad be but fair the auld captain sud contreebit something to the needcessities o’ the hoose, war it his to withhaud, which I mainteen it is not." [1881 Lothrop Warlock O’ Glenwarlock]

      "I’m thinkin’ whan he begud to ken himsel’ growin’ auld, his deed cam back upon ‘im fresh-like, an’ that wad be hoo he cudna bide to hae my lady oot o’ the sicht o’ his een, or at least ayont the cry o’ his tongue. Troth! he wad whiles come aboot the place efter her, whaur I wad be at my wark, as it micht be the day, cursin’ an’ sweirin’ as gien he had sellt his sowl to a’ the deevils thegither, an’ sae micht tak his wull o’ onything he cud get his tongue roon’! But I never heedit him that muckle, for ye see it wasna him ‘at peyt me—the mair by token ‘at gien it had been him ‘at had the peyin’ o’ me, it’s never a baubee wad I hae seen o’ my ain siller…But it was aye an oonsaitisfactory kin’ o’ a thing, for the trustees they caredna a bodle aboot keepin’ the place dacent, an’ tuik sae sma’ delicht in ony pleesurin’ o’ the auld lord, ‘at they jist allooed him me, an’ no a man mair nor less…Gien it hadna been for rizzons o’ my ain, I wad hae gane, mony’s the time, for the sicht o’ the ruin o’ things was beyon’ beirin’. But I bude to beir’t; sae I bore’t an’ bore’t till I cam by beirin’ o’ ‘t to tak it verra quaiet, an’ luik upo’ the thing as the wull o’ a Providence ‘at sudna be meddlet wi’." [1881 Lothrop Warlock O’ Glenwarlock]

      TWO TEXTUALLY DISTINCT EDITIONS

      As we saw in the case of Robert Falconer, ⁵ several of MacDonald’s longer titles (this discussion will continue with Donal Grant) as well as a few of his shorter ones (Salted With Fire), were edited and changed by MacDonald—sometimes condensed, sometimes lengthened for successive editions, though we usually cannot identify the sequence in which these changes took place.

      Though we do not know the nature of the discussions MacDonald had with his publishers, some of these ongoing edits may have been prompted by the sheer length of his novels. My publishers are constantly trying to shorten my work. If I write a novel of 150,000 words, they want it cut to 125,000. If my final draft is 125,000, they want it cut to 100,000. But if I write a novel of 100,000 words, they want it cut to 75,000. It seems doubtful, however, that MacDonald faced this kind of pressure during an era where long books were the norm. Most of his novels were between 160,000 to 190,000 words—huge by today’s standards but commonplace 150 years ago.

      Far more likely is that for certain titles MacDonald simply couldn’t settle within himself on a final edition he was comfortable with. As I have noted elsewhere, MacDonald was an inveterate editor of his work. His 1871 letter, quoted in the Falconer introduction, lamenting having reduced the three-volume edition of that book for a new edition, reveals his hand in the constant editing process even after publication. Yet when the three-volume edition of Falconer was republished later in a single volume, still more changes were introduced, with the result that there are several variant textual editions of Robert Falconer floating about. Raw book length was clearly not MacDonald’s primary concern (though as we shall see, it may have been a contributing factor in the two editions of Donal Grant).

      This hypothesis is confirmed by the case of Castle Warlock, which presents us with a more complex set of mysteries than Robert Falconer. The discussion is simplified in that the variant editions are limited to two that I am aware of, not the multiple texts of Falconer. But the two textual editions of Warlock are so distinct as to indicate an almost wholesale rewriting of every paragraph. They are approximately the same length—just different, sometimes very different. In the case of Falconer, the difference between editions are on a larger scale than phrases and sentences. Big chunks, even entire chapters, from one edition are missing in the other. But where the material coincides, the editions are usually identical. The modifications are thus easy to identify and track.

      Castle Warlock, however, was completely edited—sentence by sentence, line by line—from one edition to the other. To give you a brief idea, here is the opening passage from the U.K. edition that corresponds with the excerpt quoted earlier at the beginning of the introduction. You will see that it is generally the same (some of the differences underlined) as the other passage from the U.S. publication, but certainly not identical.

      A rough, wild glen it was, to which, far back in times unknown to its annals, the family of Warlock had given its name, sharing in return no small portion of its history, and a good deal of the character of its inhabitants. Glenwarlock lay in debatable land between Highlands and Lowlands; most of its people spoke both Scotch and Gaelic, and there was in them a notable mingling of the chief characteristics of the widely differing Celt and Goth. The country produced more barley than wheat, more oats than barley, more heather than oats, more boulders than trees, and more snow than anything. It was a thinly peopled region, consisting mostly of bare hills and partially cultivated glens, each glen with its small stream, on the banks of which grew here and there a silver birch, a mountain ash, or an alder tree; but the trees were small, and there was nothing capable of giving much shade or shelter, except cliffy banks and big stones. From many a spot you might look in all directions without seeing a sign of human or other habitation. Even then, however, you might, to be sure, most likely smell the perfume—to some nostrils it is nothing less than perfume—of a peat fire, although you might be long in finding out whence it came; for the houses, if indeed the dwellings could be called houses, were often so difficult to distinguish from the ground on which they were built, that except the smoke of fresh peats were coming pretty freely from the wide-mouthed chimney, it required an experienced eye to discover the human nest. The valleys that opened northward produced little; there in some years the snow might be seen lying on patches of oats yet green, destined now only for fodder; but where the valley ran east and west, and any tolerable ground looked to the south, things put on a different aspect. There the graceful oats and the long-bearded barley would wave and rustle in the ripening wind; in the small gardens would be found potatoes and peas in their season; and there also would lurk for weeks a few cherished strawberries. [From the 1882 Sampson Low triple decker and subsequent Kegan Paul one-volume editions of Castle Warlock]

      The historical record gives us an abundance of clues, but no definitive information to determine positively what was in MacDonald’s mind, the sequence of the writing of the two editions, or which of the two was edited from the other. We might pore over these two openings forever and never know why MacDonald changed Teuton to Goth, or Goth to Teuton, changed individuals to inhabitants (or vice-versa), or reversed the order of the strawberries, potatoes, and peas in the last sentence of the first paragraph, and which rendition of that sentence came first. Most of my analysis in what follows through the rest of this introduction, therefore, will fall under the heading of educated guesswork.

      The only fact that somewhat simplifies the situation is that the two variant textual versions originally carried distinct titles—Warlock O’ Glenwarlock published in the U.S., and Castle Warlock published in the U.K. This helps us keep the two editions straight, but doesn’t answer the questions about Teuton and Goth, potatoes, peas, and strawberries. Nor does it tell us about MacDonald’s use of a far more contentious word we will encounter later, used heavily in one edition and almost non-existent in the other—the expletive damn. (See footnote, "Comparison of 1881 Warlock O’ Glenwarlock and 1882 Castle Warlock.")

      Besides looking at the publication dates of the two editions, my method, as I explained in the introduction to Robert Falconer, is what scholars call textual criticism—analyzing the texts themselves, absent outside historical data, to see what they can reveal, examining changes to words, phrasings, sentence structure, even minor details of punctuation, to ferret out clues to the sequence of writing and reasons for whatever changes were made. Without extant copies of notated or dated manuscripts, we are left to speculate on the emergence of the distinct editions, trying to piece together the chain of events as it likely took place. We are attempting to unravel a literary mystery, when the only clues we have are the books themselves, the publication dates, and the relationships and publishing companies associated with them.

      The goal is not to establish sequences because one edition necessarily reads best in every passage. We’re trying to understand what MacDonald might have been thinking at the time. With this in mind, it is helpful to reconstruct a picture of how his work progressed, how the various editions evolved, and why they were published in the form they were.

      This is not as easy as one might think. Sometimes MacDonald altered his copy by shortening, at other times by adding text, at other times (the damns) by simple substitution of one word or phrase for another. The sheer length of a passage tells us nothing for certain about which came first, or which might have been MacDonald’s preferred text. The two opening paragraphs, for instance, only differ by a total of twelve words—an insignificant difference of length. But elsewhere both editions contain whole passages that do not exist in the other. MacDonald left out, added and rephrased material in both editions. Because the edits both shorten and lengthen, untangling the order of events is thus very difficult.

      Neither can one judge by the sound, feel, flavor, or syntax of a passage. Some phrasings sound more like MacDonald, others less. In some instances the U.S. version reads with greater clarity, at other times it is the U.K. version that seems best. Some passages also seem poorly constructed in one or the other. MacDonald was always working fast, editing by hand on already heavily marked manuscripts (on boats, trains, even in bed). It was not a perfect process.

      It is possible, therefore, that he simply goofed from time to time and didn’t catch his own oversights or mistakes. I am occasionally left shaking my head trying to figure out in what order, and why, MacDonald altered his texts from one version to another.

      THE BRITISH FIRST MYTH

      Several myths prevalent in MacDonald studies obscure objectivity in trying to unravel such conundrums and have led to some erroneous conclusions through the years. Two of those assumptions concern so-called first editions and the pirating of MacDonald’s books.

      It has commonly been held that all American editions were unscrupulously pirated without MacDonald receiving payments for them, and that these publications were therefore somehow illegitimate. This has led to the related assumption that only British editions represent the true first editions of every title. These U.K. editions were grabbed up by agents for U.S. publishers, quickly shipped off to America (if a magazine edition hadn’t been pilfered first), where they were printed and sold without payment to MacDonald or his publishers in hasty, low-quality, pirated editions. If not said in so many words, this implication nearly always informs the conclusions of American as well as British authors, biographers, researchers, and commentators.

      The British editions (especially the extremely rare three-volume triple decker first editions) have thus traditionally been considered preeminent, and the American editions viewed, if not with scorn, certainly of less significance in the overall MacDonald oeuvre. They were cheap editions, hastily rushed into print, and with none of the stature of the British editions. In consequence, many early British editions have become very collectable and costly in antiquarian circles (and usually for good reason, being rarer and their artistry at a higher level), while their American counterparts (with cheaper bindings and less artfully exquisite covers) are largely ignored.

      Quality of editions notwithstanding, this obsession with the British editions is largely based on the two prevailing myths:

      British-editions-always-came-first, and most-American-editions-were-pirated.

      Now certainly pirating was a huge factor in nineteenth-century publishing. For the first several years of MacDonald’s career, it may indeed have represented the norm insofar as American editions were concerned (though not necessarily was this exclusively true, as we saw in the case of Annals). Pirating continued and many publishers engaged in the practice. However, it does not tell the whole story.

      After MacDonald’s America tour of 1872-73, when he established enduring relationships with several American publishers who were great fans of his work, the tide slowly began to turn. The publishing firms of Scribner, Lippincott, and Dodd Mead led the way. In the 1870s, Lippincott published Malcolm, The Marquis of Lossie, Paul Faber Surgeon, Sir Gibbie, and Mary Marston, and continued to publish other titles through the years. MacDonald had personal connections with the Macmillan family, publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. From MacDonald’s friendship with the Lippincott family, it is reasonable to assume—given that some of his titles were published as Author or Authorized editions—that these were not pirated editions and that MacDonald was treated fairly. We have noted (in the footnote, Cheap Library Editions of MacDonald’s Books in the introduction to Mary Marston) J.B. Lippincott’s statement—though there are no records to substantiate it—that he always paid the authors.

      As these Lippincott editions were being published, MacDonald’s 1876 letter to Macmillan (see footnotes to introduction of Thomas Wingfold Curate)—as had his 1872 contract with Henry King for Malcolm earlier—makes clear that in spite of what piracy may have been going on, MacDonald was also by then negotiating deals for American copyrights. We know that Dodd Mead’s edition of The Wise Woman (A Double Story) in 1876 was legitimate and not pirated.

      By the decade of the 1880s, the sequence of events surrounding the publication of Castle Warlock seems to indicate that MacDonald’s direct relationships with American publishers was expanding yet further.

      A new development we have explored elsewhere was shaking up the publishing world about this time—the advent in the United States of extremely cheap library edition publishing. These were newsprint quality, 8 ½ x 11 inch staple-bound paper editions, usually in three columns with microscopically small print, that sold for the ridiculously low price of ten or twenty cents. Hundreds of thousands of copies of these library editions flew off the presses into the hands of an eager public. (To a lesser extent, the same thing was also going in in the U.K.)

      Naturally the library-edition movement exacerbated the controversy surrounding the pirating of the works of well-known publishers. George MacDonald was but one of many Victorians caught up in these developments. By the early 1880s, discussions were swirling in the publishing world—especially in the United States and in the U.S. Congress—about the need for international copyright laws. By then some leading publishers—Lippincott, Appleton, and Harper Brothers among them—were paying U.K. authors what they called a courtesy. In spite of the increasing pressure on publishers to treat foreign authors more equitably, the leading pirating publishers (Munro and Lovell) resisted the international copyright movement, and continued to pirate whatever they could get their hands on and pay nothing for them. ⁶

      It is difficult to know exactly what direct arrangements MacDonald had with American publishers during these years of change, or what arrangements his U.K. publishers may have negotiated on their own. There are, however, a few letters and records from the 1870s and 1880s in which MacDonald specifically references payments received from American publications—some of them actually quite lucrative. (See footnote, Two Sides of the Piracy Conundrum in the introduction to Thomas Wingfold Curate.) This represents the untold other side of the piracy story. And by the late 1870s and early 1880s, MacDonald was definitely involved in the manuscript production and delivery for various editions being published in the U.S.—which would have been impossible in the case of pure piracy. And this is where the series of events gets very murky.

      The owners of Harper & Brothers were among the pioneers in American publishing decrying the practice of pirating. As it may concern MacDonald directly, however, Harper & Brothers was also on record as having written to Sampson Low (the U.K. publisher of Castle Warlock) saying that they could not guarantee making voluntary payments to their British authors in every case. It may be that to a certain degree the Harpers were talking out of both sides of their mouths—condemning pirating, while continuing to practice it. ⁷ We looked at this in depth in the footnote, Cheap Library Editions of MacDonald’s Books, in the introduction to Mary Marston.

      Nevertheless, this publishing giant is well-known as one of the leaders of the effort to establish international copyrights. And looking briefly ahead—by the mid 1880s, Harper’s prestige had helped sway most of the industry, with the result that a copyright law protecting foreign works in the U.S. became law in 1891.

      In the 1880s, however, the Harper brothers were also among the leading publishers of library editions. They had established their Harper’s Franklin Square Library series in 1878. Still with no copyright law in place, Harper apparently paid royalties to some of their library edition authors, but not all. They eventually published six library editions of MacDonald’s novels between 1881 and 1893.

      A SURPRISING FIRST EDITION

      When Castle Warlock entered the picture in 1881, Sampson Low continued to be enthusiastic about their newly signed author. (Their first MacDonald publication being Mary Marston published that same year.) They contracted with MacDonald for the Warlock story almost concurrent with their release of Mary Marston. A rare copy of the Sampson Low contract appears in Bulloch’s 1925 bibliography. It is dated March 11, 1881. MacDonald was paid £400 for the copyright. The title on the contract reads Warlock of Glen Warlock.

      In that contract is duplicated the same exclusion we noted in MacDonald’s 1872 contract with Henry King for Malcolm.

      Clause 2, reads: SAMPSON, LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, AND RIVERTON are to act as Publishers and sole Wholesale Vendors for Great Britain and Ireland, the British Dominions, the Continent of Europe, and the United States of America.

      The words the United States of America are lined out. A publication date of September 15, 1881 was specified.

      Exactly as was the case with Malcolm, this deadline was missed by a mile. (At least in delivering a manuscript to Sampson Low—their edition would not be released for over a year after the contract date.)

      On the other side of the Atlantic, however, a different series of events was taking place. Though Sampson Low did not publish on schedule per this contract, the fact is that MacDonald did complete the book before September of 1881. We know that because it appeared in the late summer and fall of that year in three separate publications, in the United States.

      For unknown reasons, no British magazine contracted for the serialization rights to Castle Warlock. Neither did the two U.S. magazines who had serialized his stories in the 1870s—Scribner’s Monthly and Lippincott’s Magazine. Were no offers made? Why were MacDonald’s friends the Lippincott’s not involved?

      Or did MacDonald (or Watt) decide to try someone new? This happens. Publishing relationships change, people and editors come and go who handle an author’s work differently. An author may begin to feel creatively stifled for one reason or another, even with a house he has published happily with for years, and feel he needs a change. There can be innumerable reasons for publishing with a different house.

      The question may be as simple to answer as that, with Watt now handling MacDonald’s contractual affairs, he shopped Warlock around and Lothrop made the best offer.

      Whoever initiated the arrangements, whether Lothrop approached MacDonald, or perhaps Watt presented the new project to them, the Boston publisher presented an opportunity for both a magazine edition and a book edition in the United States. Whether or not they had been involved in piracy in the past (notwithstanding that its founder Daniel Lothrop was a man reportedly of high integrity), Lothrop was about to become the authorized publisher of Castle Warlock. This could

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