Sir Gibbie is an 1879 novel by the Scottish author George MacDonald, including dialogue written in the Doric dialect 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.
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).
[2] 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.
[citation needed] First publication of Sir Gibbie by MacDonald was in three volumes, in 1879, by Hurst and Blackett of London, and followed likewise styled novels David Elginbrod, Robert Falkoner, Alec Forbes of Howglen, and others.
[5] MacDonald's editor Elizabeth Yates wrote of Sir Gibbie, "It moved me the way books did when, as a child, the great gates of literature began to open and first encounters with noble thoughts and utterances were unspeakably thrilling.