HE has often been overlooked but George MacDonald is considered by many to be the founding father of fantasy fiction and it is arguable that without him Alice in Wonderland would never have been published.

GK Chesterton said MacDonald’s Princess and the Goblin had “made a difference to his whole existence”, while Mark Twain, Hilaire Belloc, Walter de la Mare and J R R Tolkien are all thought to have been influenced by his writings.

CS Lewis (below) looked on MacDonald as his “mentor”, stating that he knew he had “crossed a great frontier” after he read Phantastes which he had picked up at a train station bookstall.

Born in Huntly on December 10, 1824, MacDonald grew up in a literary environment. His father, a farmer who was a descendant of a Glencoe MacDonald who survived the 1692 massacre, enjoyed reading Burns, Coleridge, Newton and Darwin, while his mother had been given a classical education. One of his uncles collected Celtic poetry and fairy tales as well as editing the Gaelic Highland Dictionary, a cousin was another Celtic scholar and his step-uncle was an expert on Shakespeare.

The National: Author CS Lewis

The household was also intriguingly eclectic when it came to religion. Although his parents were members of a Calvinist influenced Congregational Church, his paternal grandfather was a fiddle playing, Catholic born Presbyterian elder who supported the publication of the controversial Ossian text, one of his uncles was a Gaelic speaking radical and moderator of the disrupting Free Church, while his stepmother was the daughter of a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church.

A lad o’ pairts, MacDonald obtained a Masters degree in physics and chemistry from the University of Aberdeen but an apparent lack of funds stopped him pursuing a career in medicine.

Instead he went into the ministry where his failure to persuade his congregations of the universal love of God is in sharp contrast to the influence he subsequently had on fiction. His sermons, which also contained the message that everyone was capable of redemption, found so little favour his salary was cut in half.

He eventually resigned from his post at Trinity Congregational Church in Arundel on the grounds of ill health. As a child he had suffered from asthma, bronchitis and tuberculosis and his weak lungs continued to dog him in adult life, causing him to resign from the ministerial work he took up in Manchester after he left Arundel.

He then taught at the University of London and edited Good Words for the Young before publishing his first novel, David Elginbrod, in 1863.

More well-known are his fantasy novels, Phantaste, The Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind and Lilith, along with fairy tales like The Golden Key and The Light Princess.

“I write, not for children but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five,” he said.

The books’ success led to an invitation to lecture in the US where he was a hit, with crowds of 3000 people turning up to hear him speak about Burns and Shakespeare.

Mark Twain apparently didn’t take to MacDonald initially but eventually became friends with him as did Longfellow and Walt Whitman.

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In the UK, MacDonald became friends with Lewis Carroll (above), advising him to publish Alice, and was also friends with philosopher John Ruskin, serving as a go-between in his courtship with Rose La Touche.

As well as his fiction, MacDonald published his sermons which struck a chord with CS Lewis who collected some of them in an anthology.

In his foreword, Lewis wrote: “My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help – sometimes indispensable help toward the very acceptance of the Christian faith… I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.”

Lewis added: “In making this collection I was discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation. Honesty drives me to emphasise it.”

Although it is his fantasy fiction and fairy tales that have stood the test of time, MacDonald’s non-fantasy fiction was similarly innovative as they were some of the first “realistic” novels, many of them set in Scotland, to be published.

He was given a civil list pension in 1877 and two years later moved with his family to Liguria in Italy, founding a literary studio there which became a noted cultural centre.

He returned to Britain a few years before his death in Surrey in 1905 but his ashes are buried in Liguria along with those of his wife, Louisa, and daughters Lilia and Grace. MacDonald and Louisa had 11 children in total, with one son, Ronald, becoming a novelist while his eldest son Greville became a renowned medic and a pioneer of the Peasant Arts Movement. He also wrote fairy tales and made sure his father’s works continued to be published.

The writing talent continued through the generations with grandson, Philip MacDonald, becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, far from his grandfather’s childhood home in Huntly.