Sir Gibbie

Sir Gibbie is an 1879 novel by the Scottish author George MacDonald, written in the Doric dialogue of Scotland, that presents a narrative rags-to-riches arc for the title character, in the context of the actual emphasis on the integrity of Gibbie as an obedient Christian servant, and indeed as a Christ-like figure, despite his challenges and circumstances. Created as a means of supplemental income for MacDonald and his family, the characters of this and thematically related other works of his popular fiction also provided a means by which MacDonald's principle devotion—the spread of the Christian message, and of his conception of Christian obedience—could be furthered as well.

The novel made a significant popular and literary impact in the English-speaking world in its day, both in Great Britain and in the United States, and was reintroduced in the early to mid-20th century through mention of MacDonald and his works by academic and poplar Christian author C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis.

Sir Gibbie replaced a novel of comparable style by MacDonald, entitled Malcolm, in the 1938 (Swinnerton) edition of the influential Arnold Bennett list of notable English language literature, Literary Taste: How to Form It, as an important fictional work in English (alongside Walter Scott, Benjamin Disraeli, Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, Lewis Carroll, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and others). and Sir Gibbie was edited and reproduced alongside several other works of MacDonald's Scottish fiction) by Bethany House, with modernized language, as Wee Sir Gibbie of the Highlands, in the 1990s.

Sir Gibbie was one of several popular works that George MacDonald wrote during a period of years where his primary avocation was to serve as a preacher in the dissenting church to which he had been called. Coincident with the growth in the size and needs of his family, the writing MacDonald did during this time, as a sideline, served to provide very necessary income for their sustenance. MacDonald little expected the wide popular appeal of the works, or that they would be met with widespread adulation in the United States.

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