This is one of those stories many people believe themselves familiar with, but which is actually much, much odder than they realise. Maybe you read it awhile ago and have forgotten just how fuck-off weird it actually is; maybe you read a simplified or bowlderised version that downplayed the oddness. Conceivably, tut-tut, you never got around to reading it -- in which case, get on with it! It's available free online, nicely illustrated; it isn't long, and though it is intermittently bonkers, racist and dyed-to-the-marrow religious, it's also strangely powerful and insistent, and deserves to be resurrected from its general oblivion. Its racism doesn't deserve to be so resurrected, of course; and part of me worries that the antediluvian attitudes to race can't be separated out from Kingsley's larger project. But for its assault on ideas of unfettered Capitalism, its exploration of poverty and childhood, its insistence -- rare for a book of its time, and doubly so for a writer of Kingsley's religious stamp -- that innocence as ignorance is a great evil, and above all its unprecedented and well-nigh unfollowed big Fantasy worldbuilding genius in throwing together fairy tale, Celtic myth, Darwinism and New Science ... for all these reasons, it is worth a read.
Tom is a chimney sweep boy who ‘could not read nor write, and did not care to do either; and he never washed himself, for there was no water up the court where he lived. He had never been taught to say his prayers. He never had heard of God, or of Christ.’ [1] He is, that is to say, Kingsley’s version of unaccommodated man, the boy-thing itself: a deliberate mashing together of the categories of ‘innocence’ and ‘ignorance’. Accordingly, theologically, Tom’s story is one of spiritual redemption, inflected via Kingsley’s muscular Anglicanism, and not least of the muscularity of it is the way it burleys straight through centuries-old church debates. So: Tom stumbles into the wrong room when working the chimneys of a north-country manor house; is chased away by a hue-and-cry of pursuing servants.
Away he flees, over the limestone heights, growing more and more parched and exhausted Eventually he falls into a river and drowns—a grim way to start a children’s story, to be sure. But although the lord of the manor weeps tears at the misunderstanding that lead to his accidental death, pays his master £10 compensation (which the wicked old master drinks in a week) and buries Tom’s body in a fine grave, Kingsley insists this is all missing the point. Because Tom has not died; he has been transformed into a water baby, a tiny riverbeast with external gills, perhaps something like an axolotl.
He lives in the river for a while, admiring carefully described dragonflies (another symbol of the rebirth of the dazzling soul from the chaff of the earthly body):
Eventually he washes down to the sea, and has adventures there, not least an encounter with a splendidly stubborn old lobster.
All these talking beasts! So: can the unbaptised get to heaven? The Catholic church (we can imagine Kingsley spitting superstitiously) is not sure: according to the catechism of that faith, baptism by water, by blood (as in the case of martyrs) or—failing that—baptism by ‘desire’, the active will on behalf of the individual to receive the grace of Christ, may be enough. But what of children too young, or like Tom too ignorant, to be able to formulate this latter? Well, says the Catholic catechism, warily, ‘the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God’ [1261]. Kingsley comes at it another way: the whole of Tom’s post-mortem experience is one long baptism, the washing away of sin. Death is itself (the novel is saying) a baptism; a kind of Heracleitan baptism of flow. Kingsley, who got a first in classics at Magdalene, knew very well that the Greek verb βαπτίζω means both ‘clean, wash, ablute’ and ‘plunge, sink, disable, overwhelm, go under, draw from a bowl.' Baptism for Kingsley is neither a sprinkling, nor an immersion; it is a whole new fluid idiom of existence. At sea is meets Ellie again (the girl into whose room he stumbled), goes on a quest to redeem his -- now dead -- old master Grimes, and matures into a spiritual being of selfless love and virtue.
To this deeply figurative stuff on the washing away from sin, Kingsley mixes in great doses of carefully observed observational natural history, and a properly non-teleological Darwinism. Evolution for Kingsley was not a narrative of progress, but of continuous change without any providential direction. Because he is writing a fairy story, he replaces the environmental pressures that power natural selection in The Origin of Species with moral pressures. As a water-baby, Tom’s new life is given shape by the presence of two female spirits, Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid.
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When Tom bullies some sea anemones, he is mutated into a hideous prickly creature by the karmically-named latter, and must embark on a long quest to redeem his vicious old master in order, by the sheer power of selfless love, to return to the tender embraces of the former. A Darwinist might object that the river should actually be governed not by these two explicitly moral sisters, but by two far more forbidding clones, Mrs Eatorbeeaten and Mrs Beeatenoreat. But that would only be to translate the idiom of the story from the ethical to the practical realm, and one of the points of The Water Babies as a book is to demonstrate that our practical realm actually only exists in order to stage the ethical drama—because, in Kingsley’s opinion, God created our world on exactly those terms. So, creatures that deny the cosmic necessity of duty and karma are shown as devolving (hence the most offensive of several racist blots on the book, where black Africans are shown as being on the downward devolutionary path towards gorillas because as men they put pleasure and indolence before duty and service); but creatures that are well adapted to a universe shaped by duty and karma move upwards towards a pure shining maturity. It doesn’t describe the actual world, I think; but it gets at something important about the world of Story, and that is a universe through which humans move and which inflects behaviour and beliefs.
Kingsley, sent an advance review copy of The Origin of Species and wrote to Darwin that he had ‘long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species.’ Darwin added a version of Kingsley's closing remarks to the next edition of his book, stating that ‘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 and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.’ Contemporary scientists make an appearance. Here Richard Owen (left) and Thomas Henry Huxley examine a water-baby, but, lacking a place for such an entity in their taxonomy, refuse to believe that it exists.
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One of the madder sections of The Water Babies (what can young kids in the 1860s—or, more, in the 1900s, or 1950s—have made of it?) satirises the heated dispute that followed the publication of Origin of Species as ‘the Great Hippocampus Question’. Owen insisted that men have hippocampi in their brains, and apes do not, demonstrating the (divinely ordained) gulf between them. Huxley (correctly) insisted that apes have hippocampi too. The debate raged. Kingsley’s levity is a little plodding on the matter:
He held very strange theories about a good many things. He had even got up once at the British Association, and declared that apes had hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have. Which was a shocking thing to say; for, if it were so, what would become of the faith, hope, and charity of immortal millions? You may think that there are other more important differences between you and an ape, such as being able to speak, and make machines, and know right from wrong, and say your prayers, and other little matters of that kind; but that is a child’s fancy, my dear. Nothing is to be depended on but the great hippopotamus test. If you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, you are no ape, though you had four hands, no feet, and were more apish than the apes of all aperies. But if a hippopotamus major is ever discovered in one single ape’s brain, nothing will save your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greater-greatest-grandmother from having been an ape too. No, my dear little man; always remember that the one true, certain, final, and all-important difference between you and an ape is, that you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, and it has none; and that, therefore, to discover one in its brain will be a very wrong and dangerous thing, at which every one will be very much shocked, as we may suppose they were at the professor.—Though really, after all, it don’t much matter; because—as Lord Dundreary and others would put it—nobody but men have hippopotamuses in their brains; so, if a hippopotamus was discovered in an ape’s brain, why it would not be one, you know, but something else.But his point is, in a nutshell, ‘negative capability’; or more precisely a negative-theological version of this somewhat akin to Newman’s Grammar of Assent:
You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows; not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Owen, or Professor Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley, or Mr. Darwin, or Professor Faraday, or Mr. Grove, or any other of the great men whom good boys are taught to respect. They are very wise men; and you must listen respectfully to all they say: but even if they should say, which I am sure they never would, “That cannot exist. That is contrary to nature,” you must wait a little, and see; for perhaps even they may be wrong.—Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies, ch.2Otherwise, Kingsley had a bracing and nicely counter-intuitive sense of the glamour, romance and manliness of Science, that sets his book at odds with the tradition then starting up, a tradition that developed into a great delta of texts in the 20th-century in which scientists are troped as weedy geeks. Here, from his non-fiction Glaucus is Kingsley’s idea of Science:
Let no one think that this same Natural History is a pursuit fitted only for effeminate or pedantic men. I should say, rather, that the qualifications required for a perfect naturalist are as many and as lofty as were required, by old chivalrous writers, for the perfect knight-errant of the Middle Ages: for (to sketch an ideal, of which I am happy to say our race now affords many a fair realization) our perfect naturalist should be strong in body; able to haul a dredge, climb a rock, turn a boulder, walk all day, uncertain where he shall eat or rest; ready to face sun and rain, wind and frost, and to eat or drink thankfully anything, however coarse or meagre; he should know how to swim for his life, to pull an oar, sail a boat, and ride the first horse which comes to hand; and, finally, he should be a thoroughly good shot, and a skilful fisherman; and, if he go far abroad, be able on occasion to fight for his life. [Kingsley, Glaucus (1855)]Speaking as a man equally effeminate and pedantic, I must say: I like the sound of this. I’ll check with my colleagues in the Science Faculty as to its accuracy.
There’s a good discussion of the novel in Colin N. Manlove’s too-little-known Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (CUP 1975). Manlove notes that
The most striking feature of The Water Babies is the amount of what we can call for the moment irrelevance. There is much material in the book which has little relation to Tom and his history—as much, in fact, as takes up one quarter of the whole. There are, for instance, long descriptions of the curious architecture of Harthover House (20-3), the geological make-up or Vendale (45-9), or the structure of St Brandan’s Isle (with history of the saint attached, 193-6). When Tom reached the salmon river, Kingsley asks, ‘what sort of a river was it?’ … and there follows a page-long account of the nature of Irish streams, the quality of the fishing and the characters of the ghillies; after which he proceeds in the same way to try Wales, Hampshire and Scotland, until after three pages in all he announced, ‘No, it was none of these, the salmon stream at Harthover’. (117-22)This is in part taken from Rabelais, a writer Kingsley admired (hence the fondness in The Water Babies for long lists of bizarre things, and galloping knight’s-move shifts in narrative direction). Though many critics, and more readers, have thought this only a kind of sloppiness, Manlove makes a good case that ‘the very violence by which the carpet is continually pulled from under us suggests that the method could be deliberate.’ [21] ‘Kingsley is being patronisingly nonsensical for his chid readers, or else the nonsense has real artistic function in his fantasy.’ [23]
I’m going to make the case for deliberate design in the novel by picking out one of its features: the way the prose keeps being tugged back into a buried set of rhythms. This, it seems to me, marks the transition from sin to repentence. Bunyan’s Christian (one of Kingsley’s textual models) carries his sin as a great pack on his back, which drops off at the foot of the cross. We might think that Tom carries his sin externally: blackened by his life up chimneys, like Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy’ his soul is white; and washed clean by the river this becomes apparent. But in fact, even after he has drowned Tom carries a propensity for wickedness inside. And the rhythms of the book’s prose carry, inside them, a mode of marking this.
I’ll explain what I mean. The first thing we hear Tom say is in response to seeing his master Grimes wash himself in a stream Tom ‘stopped, quite astonished’ and said ‘Why, master, I never saw you do that before.’ Let’s lose the Master, because if the novel is clear about anything it is that Grimes is not Tom’s true Master and we have a strange line of decasyllabic verse:
Why I never saw you do that before.The second thing Tom says is reported as saying is:
I wish I might go and dip my head in.Which starts with two standard iambs, but then jolts awkwardly about to close on three trochees. And pre-water-baby Tom is prone to speaking in decasyllabic lines of verse littered with wrongfooting trochaic emphases:
Poor man—and he looks so kind and quiet.What prevents us from recognising this as blank verse, howsoever crude, is the way it repeatedly throws out the iambic rhythm, presumably because Tom’s rough-and-ready being-in-the-world is not up to such refinements yes. Occasionally an iambic pentameter will fall onto the page:
But why should the lady have such a sad
Picture as that in her room? Perhaps
It was some kinsman of hers, who had been
Murdered by savages in foreign parts,
And she kept it there for a remembrance.
I must get out of this or I shall stay …But only to be knocked-back by the unmetrical follow-up:
I must get out of this or I shall stayBut as we get closer to the death-baptism, the metre starts to regularise in interesting ways. Dying Tom believes it to be Sunday, though it’s not. Asked why he thinks so, he replies:
Here till somebody comes to help me—which
Is just what I don't want."
Because I hear the church-bells ringing so.The refrain ‘I must be clean, I must be clean’, which is repeated several times to incantatory effect, is two strong iambs, and falls into blank verse easily.
I must be clean, I must be clean, I mustAnd, seeing the stream that will become the medium of his transformation, Tom becomes more metrically eloquent.
be clean, I must be clean, I must be clean.
I must be quick and wash myself; the bellsAfter his transformation, Tom speaks this way most of the time: ‘you are an ugly fellow to be sure!’; ‘And where do they come from? And what are men?’; ‘Oh stay! [Oh] Wait for me! Down to the sea?/For everything is going to the sea’; ‘I only want to look at you; you are/So handsome’; ‘“So there are babies in the sea?” cried Tom/“Then I shall have some one to play with there?”’; ‘"Oh, then I shall have playfellows at last!’; ‘Oh, where have you been all this while? I have/Been looking for you [for] so long, and I/Have been so lonely’; ‘“Dear me!" cried Tom. "And I know you, too, now’; ‘Miss Ellie, I will know why I cannot/Go with you when you go home on Sundays,/Or I shall have no peace, and give you none’; ‘Because I was all over prickles? But/I am not prickly now, am I, Miss [E]?’; ‘I am so miserable here, I'll go’; ‘How cruel of you to send Ellie away!’; ‘But, please, which is the way to Shiny Wall?’; ‘But what am I to do, ma'am? For I can't/keep looking at you when I am somewhere’; ‘I am not going west, as you may see’; ‘But can't I help you any other way?’; ‘“I should be glad enough to go,” said Tom’; ‘“Oh, Miss Ellie,” said he, “how you are grown!”’; ‘You are the Irishwoman who met me/the day I went to Harthover!’. Not everything Tom says disposes itself into pentameters; of course; but the proportion of his speech that does is too great to be explained by chance. More, the blank verse falls away during incidents when Tom comes closest to backsliding on his new mode of life.
Are ringing quite loud now; and they will stop
Soon, and the door will then be shut.
