At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald

First published: 1871 (serial form, Good Words for the Young, 1868-1870)

Type of work: Fantasy

Themes: Nature, family, jobs and work, poverty, health and illness, and death

Time of work: The mid-nineteenth century

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: London, Kent, and the south coast of England

Principal Characters:

• Diamond, a frail young boy, who travels to the back of the North Wind and later drives his father’s cab in London
• North Wind, a mysterious lady, who personifies the north wind
• Nanny, an orphan, who sweeps crossings
• Mr. Raymond, a kind man, who writes fairy tales

The Story

At the Back of the North Wind tells two related stories in two interconnected settings. First is the story of Diamond’s adventures with North Wind, who whisks him into the night sky to show him what work she does and to take him to the far north, where he passes through the figure of North Wind to the world at her back. This world is akin to Beulah, a limbo world between everyday reality and the ultimate reality of Heaven. Diamond’s experience here gives him a poetic sensibility and spiritual aura noticed by people in the real world of London when Diamond returns.

Diamond’s night rides with North Wind occur in the first third of the book. North Wind is a maternal figure, who reconciles within herself a number of opposites: beauty and fear, dream and reality, the natural and the supernatural. She serves a pedagogic function for Diamond in that she teaches him to accept mystery, to have patience, and to do the work which comes to him. Her presence in Diamond’s life coincides with a serious illness which takes him close to death and which leaves him frail. His trip to the land behind the North Wind takes place during the worst moment of his illness, and when he returns, his mother confesses that she thought he had died. To convalesce, Diamond goes with his mother to the seaside, and here the second story begins.

The second story chronicles the fortunes of Diamond and his family in mid-Victorian London. While Diamond and his mother are at the seaside, Diamond’s father loses his place as coachman to the wealthy Mr. Coleman when the latter loses his money as the result of poor speculation. Joseph, Diamond’s father, accepts the invitation of an acquaintance in Bloomsbury to take up the life of a cabman, and the family moves into rooms above the stable where the cab horses are kept. Here Diamond entertains his baby sister with poems, rescues the baby next door from the abuse of its drunken father, and sometimes accompanies his father in the cab. He becomes friends with an orphaned crossing-sweeper, Nanny, and with a kind man, Mr. Raymond. When Nanny does not appear at her crossing for four days, Diamond decides to look for her. His excursion into the slums of London has a distinctly Dickensian flavor; he nearly loses his clothes to a group of predatory women, but he finally finds Nanny and, with Mr. Raymond’s help, gets her to a hospital. Then Joseph becomes ill and cannot work. Diamond, much to the amusement of the other cabmen, drives his father’s cab.

Diamond picks up a fare whom he takes to the house of the Colemans. This is Mr. Evans, Miss Coleman’s fiance thought lost at sea. By now, Joseph is recovering from his illness, Nanny is improving in the hospital, and Mr. Raymond is preparing to travel abroad. Before leaving on his journey, Mr. Raymond offers Joseph the use of his horse, Ruby. Things go well with Diamond’s family, but they find themselves cramped when Nanny comes to live with them. Mr. Raymond returns, however, married now, and he asks Joseph to be his coachman. Joseph accepts, and the family moves to Mr. Raymond’s country home in Kent. Here the narrator of the novel, a friend of Mr. Raymond, meets Diamond. Before long, Diamond dies or, as the narrator prefers to say, he goes to the back of the north wind.

Context

The Princess and the Goblin (1872), The Princess and Curdie (1883), and At the Back of the North Wind are the best known of MacDonald’s books for children. All three first appeared in the children’s periodical Good Words for the Young, which MacDonald edited from 1869 to 1873. At the Back of the North Wind is unique among MacDonald’s books for children in its setting. In MacDonald’s other fantasies, characters either pass from this world to the land of faerie or they inhabit from the beginning a secondary world. In At the Back of the North Wind, Diamond does travel to another world, a faerie realm, but he does so only in the first third of the book. The rest of the time he spends in a realistically presented mid-nineteenth century setting, which has led several commentators to suggest that the book is bifurcated. MacDonald’s idea, however, is that the two settings, one in reality and one in faerie, are interconnected. Once Diamond has returned from the land at North Wind’s back, he has not left it behind; rather he has internalized it. Several times in the latter half of the novel, the reader has evidence that North Wind continues to influence the action.

North Wind herself has affinities with the grandmother figure in the Princess books and with maternal females in several Victorian fantasies for children. Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid and Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby in Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863), the Gray Lady in Dinah Maria Craik’s The Little Lame Prince (1875), and the Godmother in Mrs. Molesworth’s Christmas-Tree Land (1884) are examples. This female is mysterious and magical. She acts as spiritual guide and protector to the children in these stories, and she is intimately associated with nature. Often, as in MacDonald’s books, she stands in opposition to the materialism and utilitarianism of Victorian society.

Despite its overt depiction of mid-Victorian society, At the Back of the North Wind is universal in its imaginative and spiritual power. North Wind is a compelling figure who can be interpreted on several levels: Christian, Freudian, and mythic. Diamond is an exemplary child whose adventures in the streets of London and in the night world of North Wind offer much to challenge the reader’s imagination. The book presents a sensitive treatment of the “unusual” child and a deft treatment of death.