The pitch
A year or two after the goblins, Curdie is a miner’s boy going slowly and quietly bad
— nothing dramatic, just a boy who has stopped bothering — and one evening he shoots a
white pigeon out of the sky because he can. The bird belongs to the great-great-grandmother
in the tower, and she does not punish him. She tells him to put both arms into a fire made
of roses, and when he takes them out he can feel, in any handshake, the creature a person
is turning into inside. Then she sends him away from the mountain altogether: down to
Gwyntystorm, the king’s own city, where the shops cheat, the servants drink the royal
cellar dry, the councillors have claws, and the doctor at the king’s bedside is killing
him a spoonful at a time. Curdie goes with a mattock, a hideous loyal monster called Lina,
and forty-nine more monsters behind her. It is the strangest thing MacDonald wrote for
children, and the last two hundred words of it have been arguments at kitchen tables for
a hundred and forty years.
What to know
Read The Princess and the Goblin first — it is free here, it comes complete in itself, and
this book opens straight into its tower without explaining anything. Then leave a gap. The
sequel is a step up in every direction: Accelerated Reader measures the full text at 8.4
against the first book’s 6.1, the published Lexile is 1120L, and the difficulty is not just
sentence length. The goblins were comic villains a six-year-old could laugh at; here the
villains are a physician, a lord chamberlain and a town, and the book is arguing with you
about what a person is. Families who read the first aloud at six and seven usually find
this one lands at nine or ten. It reads aloud beautifully — MacDonald was a preacher and
the sentences are built for a voice — and a listener can go younger than a reader can.
Our text is the complete 1883 novel in its first American printing, J. B. Lippincott of
Philadelphia, carrying all eleven of James Allen’s drawings from the first edition, each
placed at the page the printed book bound it against, with its own legend beneath. Allen
works in pure line, so we took the plates from a full-resolution scan of the same copy
rather than the reduced ones the free text carries. The cover is that copy’s own
gold-on-brown board. Read the content note before you hand this over — not for anything coarse,
there is none, but because of what happens on the last page.
Life when written
MacDonald wrote it in England and it ran as a serial in Good Things: A Picturesque Magazine
for Boys and Girls between January and June 1877 — six years before it reached hard covers,
which is unusual and suggests a book nobody was in a hurry to sell. He was fifty-two, he had
eleven children, and 1877 was the year he was granted a civil-list pension of £100 for
services to literature, which tells you how the sums had been working out. Then tuberculosis
came through the household: Mary Josephine died in 1878, Maurice in 1879, and from 1879 the
family lived at Bordighera on the Italian coast, in a house they called Casa Coraggio —
Bravery House — where they staged plays and gave readings and MacDonald wrote nearly half
his life’s work. Chatto & Windus published The Princess and Curdie as a book in 1883, with
James Allen’s eleven illustrations; Lippincott issued it in Philadelphia the same year.
Between the serial and the book, in other words, he buried two of his children. Nobody can
say what that did to the last page, and MacDonald never explained it.
