The Princess and the Goblin

This new edition of George MacDonald's 1872 children's classic is presented and introduced as Volume 12 in The Cullen Collection by Michael Phillips.As editor of the magazine Good Words for the Young, George MacDonald had a ready audience for fairy tale and children’s stories, and produced some of his most famous titles during this period of his writing life. The third of his stories for the magazine, The Princess and the Goblin, published in 1872, is universally acclaimed as MacDonald’s best pure fairy tale, and has been enchanting readers for well over a century. This story of princess Irene, her mysterious ageless namesake "grandmother,” and miner’s son Curdie surely provided inspiration for C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.MacDonald himself was enthusiastic about The Princess and the Goblin even when writing it. Speaking of “the fairy element,” he said in a letter to his wife Louisa in early 1871, “My story shall be finished in two months…I know it is as good work of the kind as