George MacDonald not only included “The Fantastic Imagination” in an 1893 collection of his essays but also decided to use it, in the same year, as an introduction to an American edition of The Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales. Written more than a decade after he had published “The History of Photogen and Nycteris,” the last of his fairy tales, it remains a valuable starting point for the sequence of stories collected in this edition.
MacDonald’s choice of a dialogic format for this essay is important, since the fairy tales themselves always posit a recalcitrant reader. That reader is sometimes cast as a member of an actual trial audience—the obdurate Mrs. Cathcart, for instance, resists “The Light Princess” in the first printed version of that story. But such acts of resistance are always inscribed in the plot of the stories themselves; and those characters who learn to decode “laws” that are not “the laws of the world of the senses” become our helpers as agents for our own submission to meanings that MacDonald refuses to simplify or rigidify. The reader addressed in this essay is therefore an implied presence in each of the eleven tales that follow.