The Water-Babies was written in 1862 by one of the strangest and most beloved men of his age. Charles Kingsley was a writer, poet, amateur naturalist, clergyman and a campaigner for social reform. A man of great energy he was by turns charming, imaginative, argumentative and prone to bouts of depression. He was driven by a combination of personal religious belief; ideas from the Romantics about truth, beauty and the need for intellectual engagement in life, and reaction against the inhuman effects of industrialisation.

Those who had yet to see him speak publicly were taken by surprise by his unprepossessing appearance. He was tall and ungainly with a ‘hatchet face adorned with scraggy grey whiskers’, and he spoke with a stammer. Yet one admirer described how his energy and direct manner of speech would quickly win an audience over.

Anybody could see that the strong impelling force of the speaker’s character was an emotional one; that sympathy and not reason, feeling rather than logic, instinct rather than observation, would govern his utterances.

Kinglsey was forty-three when he wrote The Water-Babies and at a stage in life where he confessed to a friend to being extremely happy. As Rector of Eversley in Hampshire, his engaging sermons had won him wide renown. He had been appointed chaplain to Queen Victoria (he was a personal favourite of hers) and had become Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. His message that true happiness lay in love and justice for all was enormously popular in this new Victorian age.

Kingsley was a family man. He loved his wife Frances ‘body and soul’ and was tender and patient with his four children. He had a hut built for the children in a bit of forest that acted as their outdoor nursery, where they kept their books, toys and tea things. Always keen to arouse their sense of awe in nature, Kingsley would join them after his parish work, bringing them a fresh treasure from his walk: a flower, a field mouse, a rare beetle. ‘I wonder if there is so much laughing in any other home in England as in ours’, he wrote to Fanny. Yet he was often torn between his writing and parish duties and would work to a point of total exhaustion.

Social Reformer

The idea for The Water Babies was sparked by Kingsley’s belief that the upper classes had a responsibility to use their privileges for the benefit of others. He was incensed by the injustices of his age and his earlier novels Yeast (1851) and Alton Locke (1850) had examined the plight of the rural poor and the horrors of sweated labour.

Now he turned to the dire situation for many children in Britain. In 1861 he read a government report on child employment (Report of the Childrens’ Employment Commission, 1842), one of the most important documents of Britain’s industrial history. It examined how orphans and unwanted children were drawn into all types of dangerous and debilitating employment and included thousands of pages of oral testimony from children as young as five.

This document contained an investigation into climbing boys and girls, a fate only narrowly escaped by Dickens’ character Oliver Twist. The House Report on Sweeps revealed that from the age of six, children were being sold into the trade by their impoverished families or, in the case of orphans, by the local parish. They were trained by masters who were frequently brutal; it was common for the master to light fires underneath the children, or stick pins into their feet to make them climb faster. Scaling the narrow chimneys, some of which were only 18 inches wide, they could get jammed in the flue, scrape their flesh on brickwork, and choke on coal dust. Many fell to their deaths, or developed cancer or respiratory diseases from exposure to soot. Few lived to old age.

Deeply moved by these reports and burning with indignation, Kingsley preached in his annual sermon at the Chapel Royal, St James’s:

We kind-hearted English could be sorry for a whole half-hour for the thousands who are used up yearly in certain trades, in ministering to our comfort, even our very frivolities and luxuries…sorry for those children exposed to all sorts of industrial diseases…We English, are relieved that charitable people or the Government are going to do something to alleviate these miseries. And then we return, too many of us, each to his own ambition, or his own luxury, comforting ourselves with the thought that we did not make the world, and we are not responsible for it.

Writing

Realising that sermons could accomplish only so much, Kingsley began to think of other ways to communicate a message. He toyed with the idea of writing a children’s fantasy, full of ‘tomfoolery’ but with serious objectives: to underscore the ‘miraculous and divine’ elements of nature, and expose the exploitation of children. The hero of the book would be a victim of Victorian industrialisation: a climbing boy.

His idea was already brewing when one spring morning over breakfast, Kingsley’s wife Fanny reminded him of his old promise to write a book for each of his children. As she told it in her memoir:

‘Rose, Maurice and May have got their book, and Baby must have his’. He made no answer, but got up at once, and went into his study, locking the door. In half an hour he returned with the story of little Tom.

Fanny later recalled how the book,

was more inspiration than composition, and seemed to flow naturally out of his brain and heart, lightening both of a burden without exhausting either.

The Plot

Tom, a young chimney sweep, is illiterate and dirty, and cruelly treated by his master, Mr Grimes, who starves and beats him. On a job at a grand country house Tom gets lost in its maze of chimneys and falls into the pristinely white bedroom of golden-haired Miss Ellie. There he catches sight of his dirty body in a mirror and his cry of shame awakens her. Ellie’s screams alert the household and Tom, mistaken for a thief, is chased, Keystone Cops style, through the grounds of the great house, into woods and over moors.

Climbing down into a valley, Tom slips into a stream, drowns, and is turned into a tiny water baby by the queen of the fairies. She tells the water babies that she has brought them all a new brother and while they are to keep him safe from harm, they must not let him see them, for he has lessons to learn.

The underwater world Tom enters is strange and magical and he meets many real and imaginary creatures while moving down the river then into the sea, ‘everything is going to the sea, and I will go too’, says Tom, who had become

deafened and blinded for a moment by the rushing waters; along deep reaches, where the white water-lilies tossed and flapped beneath the wind and hail; past sleeping villages; under dark bridge-arches, and away and away to the sea. And Tom could not stop, and did not care to stop, he would see the great world below, and the salmon, and the breakers, and the wide, wide sea.

Along with his message about the cruel fate of chimney sweeps, Kingsley juxtaposes fairies and people, science and romance, and adds glorious descriptions of nature to tell the story of little heathen Tom’s evolutionary and moral journey to redemption; an unusual mix of baptism and resurrection. Tom sheds his bad habits along the way, discovers his conscience and learns the value of love, truthfulness, mercy, justice and courage.  After these lessons he evolves sufficiently to rejoin the land world.

In many respects, the story represents the distillation of Kingsley’s life-long preoccupations that had begun in early adolescence.

Earlier life

Charles Kingsley had a happy and largely uneventful childhood, born in 1819 to Reverend Charles Kingsley and his wife Mary Lucas. A slight, sensitive boy, he began from the age of four to write poetry. Much of his early childhood was spent in the seaside village of Clovelly in Devon where, apart from some home schooling, Charles and his brother Herbert were left to their own devices and spent swathes of time outdoors, running wild.

In 1831 their father sent twelve-year old Charles and eleven-year-old Herbert to a preparatory school run by the Rev. William Knight at Clifton, just outside Bristol. From the beginning the other boys teased Charles about his stammer. He developed a dread of speaking in public, or even of entering a public room. He sought the company of Knight’s daughters and took refuge in the school library and in nature, taking long walks on the nearby downs.

One incident left a lasting impression. There had been unrest in England the previous year (1830) when agricultural labourers began to protest against their dreadful working conditions. These were the first stirrings of a mass uprising of the working classes which became known as the Chartist movement.  In 1831 Lord John Russell introduced a bill of reform to redistribute the electoral districts and extend the vote beyond those owning property. The bill was passed by the Commons but when it was was rejected by the House of Lords, riots broke out in Nottingham and Derby. Having no interest whatsoever in politics or matters of social justice, Charles could not have cared less. But three weeks later the unrest moved to Bristol where buildings, including the prison, were set alight. Seeing the blaze from school, Charles slipped away for a closer look.

He watched bloodied soldiers waiting for orders to charge, while a mob plundered and destroyed all in their wake. Kingsley heard later that some of the mob were on their hands and knees drinking the contents of burst spirit barrels, when the alcohol caught light and exploded, turning a row of drunkards into charred corpses. Escaping from school a second time, he observed a scene that became imprinted in his memory.

Along the north side of Queen’s Square, in front of ruins which had been three days before noble buildings, lay a ghastly row, not of corpses. But of corpse-fragments. I have no more wish that you dilate upon that sight. But there was one charred fragment – with a scrap of old red petticoat adhering to it, which I never forgot – which I trust in God, I shall never forget.

In a lecture in Bristol over a quarter of a century later, Charles recounted this experience, confessing that initially it had turned him into a true blue Tory. He added that a decade later, with maturity, he had drawn a different lesson from it and said that it had awakened his social conscience.

Cornwall

A year later Charles and his brother Herbert were sent to Helston Grammar School in Cornwall’s west. It was run by Derwent Coleridge, the poet’s son, who had liberal ideas about education. Again, Charles was taunted and bullied. A fellow pupil remembered how Charles had been repeatedly ‘chafed to intensest exasperation by [the other] boys.’ But he had an ally in his younger brother Herbert, a sunny natured extroverted boy. There were also the Cornish cliff tops and coastal path to explore and he would often return radiantly happy from his expeditions.

Charles’s deep-rooted love of nature was noticed by the second master, Charles Alexander Johns, who at 22 (just eight years older than Kingsley) was himself a keen amateur botanist. Before long, they were venturing out on regular trips together, in search of plant, shell and mineral specimens. This friendship shored up Charles for what lay ahead.

In the spring of 1834, his brother Herbert died suddenly, having fallen ill with rheumatic fever. Charles’s fellow pupils remembered him being pulled out of class to be told of Herbert’s death. They reported  a ‘cry of anguish’ which many would never forget.

As an adult, Charles was convinced that the stresses of his adolescence had profoundly affected him; he was to suffer nightmares and bouts of melancholy for the rest of his life.

Charles stayed on at the school in Cornwall after his brother’s death. This must have been a bleak time. But the love of natural history he shared with his master Charles Johns would have helped, and they continued to tramp the moors and the coastal path together. Theirs was a lifelong friendship and their own children became great friends too.

A Natural Scientist

Nature continued to sustain Kingsley throughout his life and he became an accomplished amateur naturalist. From middle age he experienced regular breakdowns, forcing him to pause from his frantic schedule of writing, preaching, parish work and lobbying. He recovered by paddling in rock pools and doing some serious ‘botanising’.

In response to a query about his interest in the natural world, Kingsley mentioned his ‘habit of intensity’, which he said had been his greatest help in life (despite it also being injurious to his health).

I go at what I am about as if there was nothing else in the world for the time being. That’s the secret of all hard-working men; but most of them can’t carry it into their amusements. Luckily for me I can stop from all work, at short notice, and turn head over heels in the sight of all creation, and say, I won’t be good or bad, or wise, or anything, till two o’clock tomorrow.

According to Kingsley’s biographer Una Pope-Hennessy (1949) this deep interest in the natural world brought out the best in him:

As a naturalist he remained perennially young and happy, whereas as a reformer he became harassed, irritable, and frequently depressed in spirit. His zeal in the pursuit of flowers, ferns, insects and wild birds would have endeared him to Gilbert White, and his devotional praise of chalk-streams to Izaak Walton.

Prior to writing The Water-Babies, Kingsley had published Glaucus, a successful field guide to rock pools and he brought his naturalist’s eye to this mysterious tale. Little Tom bumps down the grass slopes full of rock-roses, saxifrages, and thyme, past a limestone fountain ‘quelling and bubbling and gurgling so clear that you could not tell where the water ended and the air began’. As a water baby he has a series of encounters with a beautifully observed caddis fly building its water nest, a dragon-fly, a trout and otter, eel and salmon, until the storm-flooded river full of water creatures is swept out to sea.

While writing the book over the summer, Kingsley spent time with a friend in Scotland fishing by a river crammed with fish of every kind. It was his favourite pastime and he said of it:

In a fisherman’s hands, the twelve-foot rod is transfigured into an enchanter’s wand, potent over the unseen wonders of the water-world, to “call up spirits from the vasty deep”.

Doubtless some of these fresh aquatic observations and ‘unseen wonders’ found their way into the story.

Darwin’s Influence

Kingsley was influenced by his old friend Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which had been published just three years before The Water-Babies. The work had rocked Victorians to the core and alienated most churchmen, but not Kingsley, who rallied to Darwin’s side.

Darwin had sent him an advance copy of On the Origin of Species as endorsement from a man of the cloth was invaluable to him. Kingsley replied that he had ‘long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species’. He recognised it could be used as a theological document and persuaded Darwin that biology and belief could coexist.  Pleased with such robust support, Darwin mentioned Kingsley in the third edition of On the Origin of Species (1861):

A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His Laws.

The idea that God had set evolution into motion continued to fire Kingsley’s imagination and The Water-Babies has been described as a slightly distorted version of evolutionary theory. The evolutionary biologist Professor Steve Jones points out that Dawin had called The Origin of the Species ‘one long argument’ and although Kingsley did not use this term, The Water-Babies is an argument about ‘the necessary progress in biology and about the compatibility of evolutionary theory with Christian belief.’ Concepts of natural science course throughout the book.

What? Do you say there are no such things as water babies? But how do you know? No one can say that no water babies exist until they have seen no water babies existing…for there are hundreds of things in the world which we should certainly have said were contrary to nature, if we did not see them going on under our eyes. Less than twenty-five years earlier, learned men still believed that ‘a flying dragon was an impossible monster’ but now they could be found ‘in fossil up and down the world.  People call them Pterodactyles.

But Kingsley’s universe remains god-centred. It pulses with energy and wonder, and every little thing, from the smallest crustacean to the straggliest piece of seaweed is seen as being part of God’s creation, offering glimpses of the eternal.

A Feminine Presence

A striking aspect of The Water-Babies is the presence of powerful women. From the beginning little Tom is followed by an Irish beggar woman, a benign presence, whose true identity is revealed at the river.

And all the while he never saw the Irishwoman: not behind him this time, but before. For just before he came to the river-side, she had stept down into the cool clear water and her shawl and her petticoat floated off her, and the green water-weeds floated round her sides, and the white water-lilies floated round her head, and the fairies of the stream came up from the bottom, and bore her away and down upon their arms for she was the Queen of them all and perhaps of more besides.

In this magical watery world, she is joined by other goddess-like creatures: the twin spirits, Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, and towards the end of the story, Mother Carey, the wise and kind witness to all acts of creation.

And, when he came near it, it took the form of the grandest old lady he had ever seen — a white marble lady, sitting on a white marble throne. And from the foot of the throne there swum away, out and out into the sea, millions of new-born creatures, of more shapes and colours than man ever dreamed. And they were Mother Carey’s children, whom she makes out of the sea-water all day long.

Women had been a source of love and inspiration for Kingsley and his sense of the divine feminine was something he wished to share with Grenville, the son for whom he wrote the book.

Publication

The book was delivered in instalments to the printer to be prepared for publication in serial form for Macmillan’s Magazine. Alexander Macmillan read the first chapters while visiting Kingsley at his home in Eversley, and called it a ‘most charming piece of grotesquery, with flashes of tenderness and poetry’. As each instalment arrived at the printer, Macmillan read it to his children, and his daughter later said it was ‘the greatest excitement in the nursery world that I remember.’ The Water-Babies was published in its entirety in 1863.

Creating Social Change

The book became an instant classic, bringing Kingsley wider acclaim, and dramatising the plight of climbing children, just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin had dramatised slavery. It provoked a long-overdue debate across the country and just one year after the book was published, Parliament responded by starting a process that led to the Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act of 1864. Despite its humane purpose, this Act was largely ineffectual. But in 1875 a more successful Act was passed which required sweeps to be licensed and giving police the power to enforce the previous legislation, which liberated countless children from terrible suffering.

A Place in the Canon

In his time, Kingsley’s highly imaginative work earned him a place beside other great Victorian writers for children like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. In some respects, it foreshadowed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Carroll two years later. Both Alice and Tom slip into other worlds with surreal elements. Strangely, the phrases ‘Grinning like a Cheshire cat’ and ‘mad as a March-hare’ are used first in The Water-Babies and it appears likely that Lewis Carroll ‘borrowed’ them from Kingsley.

But Kingsley’s book, as Richard Coles notes, has a dark, rather ugly underbelly as he often breaks off the narrative to pontificate about anything he believes to be deviant or corrupt. He rants against the sefishness of American individualism and takes against Turks, Jews, Catholics and the Irish. Its prejudice, though typical of its age, is probably the reason why it has failed to remain as popular as others written at the time. Alice in Wonderland fared better in this regard because, although Lewis Carroll was also a man of the cloth, he eschewed moralising and sermonising in his fiction.

Yet in spite of this failing, The Water-Babies, with its reverence for nature and Tom’s mysterious encounter with the deep, is captivating and moving. It remains a testament to this complex man, and his belief that a book might help bring about important changes in the world.

Music

The Testimony of Patience Kershaw, The Unthanks

Sung by The Unthanks and written by Frank Higgins in 1969, this song is based on the true and terrible testimony of seventeen year old Patience Kershaw.

The Report of the Children’s Employment Commission (1842) which had inspired Kingsley to write The Water-Babies examined the working condition of children in all areas of industry.

Patience was interviewed in 1842 for Lord Ashley’s Mines Commission investigating the work of women and children down the pits. She was a hurrier, employed to pull a corf (basket or small wagon) full of coal along narrow tunnels running from the coal face to the surface.

I go to pit at five o’clock in the morning and come out at five in the evening; I get my breakfast of porridge and milk first; I take my dinner with me, a cake, and eat it as I go; I do not stop or rest any time for the purpose; I get nothing else until I get home, and then have potatoes and meat, not every day meat. I hurry in the clothes I have now got on, trousers and ragged jacket; the bald place upon my head is made by thrusting the corves…

the getters that I work for are naked except their caps; they pull off all their clothes; I see them at work when I go up; sometimes they beat me, if I am not quick enough, with their hands; they strike me upon my back; the boys take liberties with me sometimes they pull me about; I am the only girl…

You can read her full testimony and those of others here on the Victorianweb.org.

Connection

The Report on Child Labour of 1842 inspired a rash of protest literature from the likes of Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol), Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (The Cry of the Children).

Of the women novelists of his day, Kingsley rated Elizabeth Gaskell at the top. They shared similar religious and social beliefs and he praised her social realist novel about a single mother, Ruth, which was Gaskell’s brave quest to demand one standard of morality for men and women. It outraged many of her readers at the time and she was subject to a number of attacks. Kingsley wrote to her that these attacks had ‘raised all my indignation and disgust…’ He urged her to take no heed of the ‘snobs and the bigots…May God bless you, and help you to write many more books as you have already written’.

In 1857 Gaskell sent him her life of Charlotte Brontë. Kingsley wrote to thank her:

Be sure, that the book will do good. It will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home-life is consistent with high imaginative genius…

He also confessed the book had made him ashamed of himself.

How I misjudged her! and how thankful I am that I never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me. Well have you done your work, and given us a picture of a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings. I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written.