At the Back of the North Wind

by George MacDonald

Overview

At the Back of the North Wind tells the story of Diamond and his magical friendship with North Wind, who comes to him at night and carries him into great and varied adventures and insights. George MacDonald is generally considered the grandfather of modern fantasy novels, and this is generally considered his masterpiece.

MacDonald published this novel first in serialized form from 1868 to 1870 and then as a complete volume in 1871. Our rejuvenated edition makes the story more readable by updating spelling, breaking up very long paragraphs, and replacing quaint but confusing punctuation with more conventional patterns.

C.S. Lewis writes, "I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined."

Although this story was originally written for children, don't assume that this is a children's book! "I write, not for children," MacDonald wrote, "but for the child-like, whether they be five, or fifty, or seventy-five."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631710179
Publisher:	Unorthodox Press
Publication date:	08/31/2021
Pages:	298
Sales rank:	110,769
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

George MacDonald (1824 – 1905) was a Scottish-born novelist and poet. He grew up in a religious home influenced by various sects of Christianity. He attended University of Aberdeen, where he graduated with a degree in chemistry and physics. After experiencing a crisis of faith, he began theological training and became minister of Trinity Congregational Church. Later, he gained success as a writer penning fantasy tales such as Lilith, The Light Princess and At the Back of the North Wind. MacDonald became a well-known lecturer and mentor to various creatives including Lewis Carroll who famously wrote, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fame.

Read an Excerpt

At the Back of the
North Wind

Chapter I

The Hay-Loft

I have been asked to tell you about the back of the North Wind. An old Greek writer mentions a people who lived there, and were so comfortable that they could not bear it any longer, and drowned themselves. My story is not the same as his. I do not think Herodotus had got the right account of the place. I am going to tell you how it fared with a boy who went there.

He lived in a low room over a coach-house; and that was not by any means at the back of the North Wind, as his mother very well knew. For one side of the room was built only of boards, and the boards were so old that you might run a penknife through into the north wind. And then let them settle between them which was the sharper! I know that when you pulled it out again the wind would be after it like a cat after a mouse, and you would know soon enough you were not at the back of the North Wind. Still, this room was not very cold, except when the North Wind blew stronger than usual: the room I have to do with now was always cold, except in summer, when the sun took the matter into his own hands. Indeed, I am not sure whether I ought to call it a room at all; for it was just a loft where they kept hay and straw and oats for the horses. And when little Diamondbut stop: I must tell you that his father, who was a coachman, had named him after a favorite horse, and his mother had had no objection:—when little Diamond then lay there in bed, he could hear the horses under him munching away in the dark, or moving sleepily in their dreams. For Diamond's father had builthim a bed in the loft with boards all round it, because they had so little room in their own end over the coach-house; and Diamond's father put old Diamond in the stall under the bed, because he was a quiet horse, and did not go to sleep standing, but lay down like a reasonable creature. But, although he was a surprisingly reasonable creature, yet, when young Diamond woke in the middle of the night, and felt the bed shaking in the blasts of the north wind, he could not help wondering whether, if the wind should blow the house down, and he were to fall through into the manger, old Diamond mightn't eat him up before he knew him in his nightgown. And although old Diamond was very quiet all night long, yet when he woke he got up like an earthquake, and then young Diamond knew what o'clock it was, or at least what was to be done next, which was-to go to sleep again as fast as he could.

There was hay at his feet and hay at his head, piled up in great trusses to the very roof. Indeed it was sometimes only through a little lane with several turnings,, which looked as if it had been sawn out for him, that he could reach his bed at all. For the stock of hay was, of course, always in a state either of slow ebb or of sudden flow. Sometimes the whole space of the loft, with the little panes in the roof for the stars to look in, would lie open before his open eyes as he lay in bed; sometimes a yellow wall of sweet-smelling fibres closed up his view at the distance of half a yard. Sometimes, when his mother had undressed him in her room, and told him to trot away to bed by himself, he would creep into the heart of the hay, and lie there thinking how cold it was outside in the wind, and how warm it was inside there in his bed, and how he could go to it when he pleased, only he wouldn't just yet; he would get a little colder first. And ever as he grew colder, his bed would grow warmer, till at last he would scramble out of the hay, shoot like an arrow into his bed, cover himself up, and snuggle down, thinking what a happy boy he was. He had not the least idea that the wind got in at a chink in the wall, and blew about him all night. For the back of his bed was only of boards an inch thick, and on the other side of them was the north wind.

Now, as I have already said, these boards were soft and crumbly. To be sure, they were tarred on the outside, yet in many places they were more like tinder than timber. Hence it happened that the soft part having worn away from about it, little Diamond found one night, after he lay down, that a knot had come out of one of them, and that the wind was blowing in upon him in a cold and rather imperious fashion. Now he had no fancy for leaving things wrong that might be set right; so he jumped out of bed again, got a little strike of hay, twisted it up, folded it in the middle, and, having thus made it into a cork, stuck it into the hole in the wall. But the wind began to blow loud and angrily, and, as Diamond was falling asleep, out blew his cork and hit him on the nose, just hard enough to wake him up quite, and let him hear the wind whistling shrill in the hole. He searched for his hay-cork, found it, stuck it in harder, and was just dropping off once more, when, pop! with an angry whistle behind it, the cork struck him again, this time on the cheek.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface, Stephen Prickett
Introduction
George MacDonald: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text and Illustrations

At the Back of the North Wind

Appendix A: Good Words for the Young and the Serial Publication of At the Back of the North Wind

1. Mark Knight, Introduction: Good Words for the Young
2. Cover of Good Words for the Young (1869)
3. Norman Macleod, Editor’s Address (1869)
4. Cover of Good Words for the Young (1870)
5. George MacDonald, Editor’s Greeting (1 December 1870)
6. “The Mother’s Prayer” (1869)
7. Two Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (1 July 1870)
1. “The Rags”
2. “What the Whole Family Said”
8. “Up in Heaven” (1870)
9. Arthur Hughes, Illustration for Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871)
10. Arthur Hughes, Illustration for The Princess and the Goblin (1872)

Appendix B: Children’s Literature and the Victorian Consciousness

1. Review of At the Back of the North Wind, The Athenaeum (March 1871)
2. Mark Twain and George MacDonald
1. Letter from Twain to MacDonald (19 September 1882)
2. Letter from Twain to W.D. Howells (1899)
3. From Poems in Two Volumes, by William Wordsworth (1807)
1. “My heart leaps up” (written in 1802)
2. From “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (written in 1802-04)
4. George MacDonald, “The Child in the Midst” (1867)
5. Cartoon of MacDonald as “Goody Goody” (2 November 1872)
6. George Cattermole, Illustration from Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
7. Hammatt Billings, Illustration from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Appendix C: Literary and Cultural Connections

1. From Aesop, “The North Wind and the Sun”
2. From Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (1863)
3. From Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
4. Henry Mayhew, “Crossing-Sweepers,” from London Labour and the London Poor (1852)

Appendix D: Victorian Fairy-Tale Debate

1. Charles Dickens, “Frauds on the Fairies” (1 October 1853)
2. From George Cruikshank, Cinderella and the Glass Slipper (1854)
3. John Ruskin, “Fairy Stories” (1868)
4. George Cruikshank, Illustration of “Rumple-Stilts-Kin” (1823)
5. George Cruikshank, Illustration of “The Elves and the Shoemaker” (1823)
6. George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination” (1893)

Appendix E: Illustrations of At the Back of the North Wind

1. Jan Susina, Introduction: “The Brotherhood between George MacDonald and Arthur Hughes”: Hughes’s Illustrations to MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind
2. Robert Trexler, Five Early Illustrators of At the Back of the North Wind

Appendix F: Maps and Other Illustrative Images

1. Sandford Map of Central London, 1862
2. Sandford Map of Central London, 1862 (detail)
3. Maps of Hyperborean Region
4. Parts of a Horse
5. Parts of a Hansom Cab
6. Currency in Victorian England

Works Cited
Select Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

This is a remarkable edition, situating a fascinating text in a number of provocative contexts. The annotations provide informative social and historical background while also following textual traces to other MacDonald texts, and to the varied sources used by this highly eclectic Victorian author. The edition pays particular attention to Arthur Hughes’s marvellous illustrations, which are not only reproduced but fully contextualized by original essays appended to the edition. The full apparatus gives us the text but also its worlds, from the streets of London to the imaginary vistas of myth and fairy tale. As an added treat, the eminent literary critic Stephen Prickett has furnished a rich and densely suggestive Preface.” — Doug Thorpe, University of Saskatchewan

“Broadview Editions’ new edition of George MacDonald’s 1871 fairy tale is an excellent and enlightening look at this significant event in children’s literature. With an abundance of supporting material, this volume is veritably a course in the Victorian fairy tale, setting the story in context with nineteenth-century Britain, anticipating the reader’s questions, and addressing the controversies. There is much to be learned from this work.” — George Bodmer, Indiana University Northwest

“This eagerly awaited edition of a major children’s classic of the Victorian era wonderfully fulfills its ambitious aims. Not only do McGillis and Pennington validate the cultural importance once held by At the Back of the North Wind, but also manage to highlight this hybrid fantasy-book’s appeal to readers in the Age of Harry Potter. Appendices that place the book into different kinds of contexts; the careful textual annotations; and, above all, the attention paid to visual matters—Arthur Hughes’s illustrations, as well as other cartoons, maps, and anatomies—make this a truly indispensable item.” — Ulrich Knoepflmacher, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

From the Publisher

"This eagerly awaited edition of a major children's classic of the Victorian era wonderfully fulfills its ambitious aims. Not only do McGillis and Pennington validate the cultural importance once held by At the Back of the North Wind, but also manage to highlight this hybrid fantasy-book's appeal to readers in the Age of Harry Potter. Appendices that place the book into different kinds of contexts; the careful textual annotations; and, above all, the attention paid to visual matters—Arthur Hughes's illustrations, as well as other cartoons, maps, and anatomies—make this a truly indispensable item."

Ulrich Knoepflmacher

"Broadview Editions' new edition of George MacDonald's 1871 fairy tale is an excellent and enlightening look at this significant event in children's literature. With an abundance of supporting material, this volume is veritably a course in the Victorian fairy tale, setting the story in context with nineteenth-century Britain, anticipating the reader's questions, and addressing the controversies. There is much to be learned from this work."

George Bodmer Indiana University Northwest

"This is a remarkable edition, situating a fascinating text in a number of provocative contexts. The annotations provide informative social and historical background while also following textual traces to other MacDonald texts, and to the varied sources used by this highly eclectic Victorian author. The edition pays particular attention to Arthur Hughes's marvellous illustrations, which are not only reproduced but fully contextualized by original essays appended to the edition. The full apparatus gives us the text but also its worlds, from the streets of London to the imaginary vistas of myth and fairy tale. As an added treat, the eminent literary critic Stephen Prickett has furnished a rich and densely suggestive Preface."

Doug Thorpe University of Saskatchewan