A boy in an Aberdeenshire town, whose grandmother burns his father's fiddle as an instrument of the devil, grows up to look for the man who ran away and to work among the London poor. MacDonald put more of his own childhood into Robert Falconer than into any other book, including the grandmother and the fiddle. The theology is argued with in the open, and the argument is with Calvinism about who can be lost. Fifty-three plates after Wilkie, Rembrandt and others follow the story from cottage interior to crowded street, matching MacDonald's own passage from the north to London.
