“For my own part,” he writes, “being now able to earn my own living, and so taking no share in the dramatic representations, I could never rejoice in the work if only because the old peace and rest of the home was thenceforward, till 1887, made impossible by the exigencies of the drama. Although it was hardly successful economically, it certainly made more possible the half-yearly journeys to Italy. Physically the work seemed too much for my sisters, and was in danger of interfering with my brothers’ prospects…

“As I have said already, many friends were sad about the enterprise, in spite of my father’s whole-hearted endorsement of it.” ¹⁰

Perhaps the most personal aspect of Weighed and Wanting is the lovely haunting caricature of peaceful Mark Raymount, an obvious fictional portrayal of MacDonald’s son Maurice, whose death two years before its writing (1879) caused MacDonald far more anguish than finances. In the writing of this novel, is MacDonald, in a sense, still working through his own grief? I think it likely, coming to terms with it perhaps by elevating Mark to the mysterious stature of a child-Christ whom God specially took because of his goodness. Nor can the character of Moxy be coincidental—another M-named boy who follows in beloved Maurice’s footsteps. I cannot but wonder, however, what MacDonald’s other sons thought, knowing that both Mark and Moxy were drawn after their brother Maurice, when they read in this novel, “The parents loved Moxy more tenderly than…his brothers.”

There are other clear hints of autobiography woven through the book’s pages.

MacDonald’s love of mystery houses reappears, with secret doors and passageways and entrances and garrets.

There are echoes of daughter Lilia’s broken engagement to a young aristocrat when she would not agree to the condition imposed by his aunt (fictionalized as Miss Vavasor) that she give up what she considered her creative calling. Lilia’s passion was acting. Hester’s was working with the poor. Neither young woman was willing to relinquish her pursuit, even to marry—which neither ever did.

Hester’s fearlessness around smallpox perfectly reflects the MacDonald family’s ministrations to friends. Indeed, the MacDonalds’ work with those suffering from TB no doubt incurred criticism from family and friends, just as did Hester’s. Years later, after her failed engagement, this ministry cost Lilia MacDonald her life at thirty-nine, after she contracted TB from a suffering friend whom she would not abandon.

I also find of particular interest—as one who has watched with some heartbreak many MacDonald enthusiasts lose themselves in the details of intellectual analysis while missing the true gold of his writings—MacDonald’s own prophetic recognition of this unfortunate principle at work. He writes in Weighed and Wanting:

The ruin of a man’s teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood—its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence.