Volume 9, Number 11 · December 21, 1967
The Other Country
By Denis Donoghue
The Golden Key
by George MacDonald, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, Afterword by W.H. Auden
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 86 pp., $3.95
On October 14, 1863, Charles Dodgson, soon to become Lewis Carroll, visited his friends the MacDonalds at their home, Elm Lodge, Heath Street, Hampstead. During the afternoon he took a photograph of George MacDonald and his eldest daughter, Lilia. It is a curious picture. Lilia is as sweet as any of Lewis Carroll's heroines, even if she is a little too old to be perfect. But her father, reading to her in the garden, is caught with a haunted look, as if his text were the quintessence of dust and the garden a charnel-vault. The picture is probably misleading. There is nothing in the available record to suggest that MacDonald was much possessed by doom. Visits to Elm Lodge, according to Carroll's diary and other sources, were always genial occasions. Often they included private theatricals, once Pilgrim's Progress, again Polyeuctus. On formal occasions the company was always interesting and sometimes fine. Carroll noted, after a later visit: 'Met Mr. Clemens (Mark Twain) with whom I was pleased and interested.'
Review, 2848 words
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