Originally published in 1893 by Sampson Low, Marston & Co., London, A Dish of Orts contains fourteen essays on subjects ranging from the imagination to literary forms, Shakespeare, and poets (including Browning, Wordsworth, and Shelley). Includes two sermons. It’s last chapter is the extraordinary essay, “The Fantastic Imagination,” which has been reprinted many times.

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From The Works of George MacDonald

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Hand-bound cloth cover edition, reproduced from the original 1893 edition with photolithography.

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A Dish of Orts: An Overview by Barbara Amell

In 1882, George MacDonald presented an unusual collection titled Orts from Sampson Low Publishers, which they issued in an expanded version as A Dish of Orts in 1894. MacDonald was criticized for his choice of title; but the book was in fact what it claimed to be, a serving of leftovers—reprints in fourteen chapters of essays, book reviews, and a sermon MacDonald had written for various publications, plus press reports of a sermon and lecture. “Browning’s ‘Christmas Eve,’” which MacDonald described as his first prose accepted for publication, was based upon the lecture he gave on this poem, written for the Monthly Christian Spectator September 1853. By adding his 1893 essay “The Fantastic Imagination” (which had many similarities to his introductory comments in lectures on Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner) to the 1894 A Dish of Orts, MacDonald was restoring a sampling of his obscure works covering four decades. 

Most of the original sources for the chapters in Orts were not identified, which naturally resulted in various errors from reviews of this book. The chapter on Shelley, which has some resemblances to MacDonald’s lectures on the poet, was written in shorter form for the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1860. It is understandable that people would think the chapter “Wordsworth’s Poetry” was also written by MacDonald; but this is actually a reprinted press report of MacDonald’s extempore Wordsworth lecture given in Manchester from The Popular Lecturer May 1861. “The Imagination: Its Functions and its Culture” was originally MacDonald’s Address for the Working Women’s College in 1865. This chapter is dated 1867 in Orts, as that was the year it was published in British Quarterly Review. “A Sketch of Individual Development” was written as an Address for the Perry Barr Institute, Birmingham 10/9/1880, and was also published in British Quarterly Review. The text represents a reversal of Jaque’s “Seven Stages of Man” from As You Like It, which MacDonald believed was often misinterpreted as representing Shakespeare’s virtuous standards, rather than those of the amoral character who professed them. Both MacDonald’s book reviews in Orts were written for works by his friends: Rev. Thomas Toke Lynch, for whom MacDonald occasionally preached, and Dr. J. Rutherford Russell. “St. George’s Day, 1564” was also originally a review, untitled and unattributed to MacDonald in British Quarterly Review April 1864, devoted to two 1864 Shakespeare volumes. “The Elder Hamlet,” published in Macmillan’s August 1876, was the product of a six-lecture course on Hamlet that MacDonald had given a few months earlier. At present, I have not been able to locate the date or the source for MacDonald’s reported sermon “True Christian Ministering.” 

A notable aspect of A Dish of Orts is the representation of what George MacDonald was capable of so early in his career as a preacher and lecturer combined, with “Browning’s ‘Christmas Eve.’” I suspect this article was written not long after MacDonald resigned as minister at Arundel, possibly in June or July 1853. Even then, MacDonald’s willingness to incorporate his spiritual insights into an analysis of someone else’s poem had extraordinary results: “The reality of Christ’s nature is not to be proved by argument. He must be beheld. The manifestation of Him must ‘gravitate inwards’ on the soul. It is by looking that one can know.” (p. 206)

Articles about A Dish of Orts

WINGFOLD

Wingfold is a quarterly magazine that restores material by and about George MacDonald, in print since 1993. To subscribe, click here. To request any of the following articles that appear in back issues of Wingfold, contact Barbara Amell at b_amell@q.com.

Summer 2002

Introduction to 1883 edition, by A. P. Peabody