SOURCE: “Sacred and Secular Visions of Imagination and Reality in Nineteenth-Century British Fantasy for Children,” in Webs and Wardrobes: Humanist and Religious World Views in Children's Literature, University Press of America, 1987, pp. 66-78.

In the following essay, Milner and Milner include MacDonald's works in a discussion of religious and poetic symbolism in nineteenth-century fantasy literature.

Writing classic British children's fantasies in the 1860's and 1870's, George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll essentially established the traditions of modern fantasy. Though they were personal friends and admired one another's work, these two writers held profoundly different views of reality. MacDonald, strongly influenced by Romantic conceptions of childhood and imagination, saw the universe as an orderly and miraculous creation, the work of a loving God whose will would finally prevail. Carroll, despite his conscious expressions of faith, seemed in the Alice fantasies acutely aware of disorder and chaos, of an uncertain and...