What Is the Water-Babies?

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Lessons from a Lobster, or, A Preface toa Somewhat Abridged, Slightly Annotated Version of The Water-Babies

by Anne White

What is The Water-Babies?

The Water-Babies is a moralistic-yet-fun fairy tale from the mind of the English minister-professor-naturalist-poet Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875). Its style and themes are planted solidly in the mid-Victorian world, but reflect his own sense of humour and slightly unorthodox Christian beliefs. Ambleside Online Curriculum students using The Water-Babiesin Year 3 will also be reading Kingsley’s version of several Greek myths, The Heroes (The Water-Babies also contains references to Epimetheus, Prometheus, and Pandora). Those who continue with AO’s Year 4 will find the style of Madam How and Lady Why very familiar, as Kingsley continues the conversation with the young boy whom he addresses as “my little man” in The Water-Babies. (The last Kingsley book used in the AO/HEO curriculum is Westward Ho! in Year 8.)

The Water-Babies contains so many descriptions of river and ocean creatures, and puts so much emphasis on kindness to animals and respect for nature, that some people think of it as a natural-history rather than a literature choice. However, it is more of a didactic (learn-your-lesson) story, on two levels: first, aimed at getting children to do-as-they-would-be-done-by; but also as a platform for Kingsley to air his views on social reform, the issue of science (and pseudo-science) vs. faith, and a few other things that were aimed at parents and the general public rather than the child reader. Kingsley had more than a few opinions about various cultural, religious and ethnic groups, as well as quack medicine, bad children’s books, junk food, and too-tight boots, and did not hesitate to include those in his books.

And first he went through Waste-paper-land, where all the stupidbooks lie in heaps, up hill and down dale, like leaves in a winterwood; and there he saw people digging and grubbing among them, tomake worse books out of bad ones, and thrashing chaff to save thedust of it; and a very good trade they drove thereby, especiallyamong children.

The Water-Babies was published around the same time as Lewis Carroll’sAlice in Wonderland, and, like Alice, contains a bit more nonsense (and also interest in things like numbers and looking-glass reversals) than earlier children’s books. It predates The Adventures of Pinocchio and George MacDonald’s children’s fantasies, but shares some themes and imagery with those books (Tom’s prickles can be compared to Pinocchio’s long nose).

Why an abridged/annotated version?

1. To avoid Kingsley’s ethnic and religious slurs.
2. To avoid the longest of his off-topic rambles, and some of his more baffling Victorian references.
3. Or to give a bit of advance warning when a ramble is coming up—you then have the choice of jumping over the rabbit trail or plowing through it.
4. To add a few vocabulary notes.

What is it about? (Spoilers included)

The main character, Tom, starts out as a mistreated apprentice chimney-sweep. During a job at a country estate, he accidentally goes down a chimney into a little girl’s bedroom, which raises an uproar in the house and causes him to be chased off as a thief. After a mad dash across the moors and down a cliff, he ends up in a river where he is turned into a “water-baby” and begins a new life (although his human body is discovered floating in the riverand he is assumed to be dead).

Tom-the-water-baby lives in the river for some time, but eventually becomes lonely for others like himself and finds his way out to sea. At first he cannot find any water-babies there either, but after showing kindness to a trapped lobster, his eyes and ears are opened and he suddenly sees them swimming and hears them singing. The water-babies take him to their home under the sea, where they are visited on Fridays by ugly Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, and on Sundays by her beautiful sister Mrs.Doasyouwouldbedoneby.

Although Tom misbehaves by stealing sea-candy, he does learn his lesson and is joined by Ellie, the little girl whose room he had stumbled into. Ellie had been hurt (we assume fatally) in an accident, but does not seem to be exactly a water baby; she “goes home” every Sunday, which makes Tomboth curious and jealous. When he asks how he can earn the same privilege, the fairy sistersexplain that he needs to do something he would not naturally like to do—in Tom’s case, helping his hated former master Grimes. Mr. Grimes had also fallen in the river (while poaching) and had since been taken to The Other-end-of-Nowhere.

From this point on the plot becomes Tom’s quest to find Grimes and achieve the water-baby equivalent of earning an angel’s wings. After journeying to the Shiny Wall and meeting “Mother Carey” (who seems to be somewhere between Mother Nature and God; her name may be derived from Mater Cara, “dear mother,” which also refers to the Virgin Mary), he continues through various allegorical “lands.” (This part of the story owes something to Gulliver’s Travels, and may have inspired parts of Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz).

Eventually Tom finds Mr. Grimes, imprisoned in a chimney (the theme of suitable punishment comes up throughout the book). Tom succeeds in his mission and is rewarded as promised, returning to the water-babies’ home and Ellie—and discovers that he and Ellie have become adults.

Down Kingsley’s Rabbit-hole

Sorting out how Kingsley’s fairy-tale world works is somewhat confusing (and he would remind us that it’s only a fairy tale). Nobody seems to actually die (and stay dead) in this story; even the blubber-eating birds are old whalers being punished for their greed. This rather loose arrangement is similar to that in “The Little Mermaid,” with different kinds of beings in different stages of existence, and sometimes in different physical places as well (such as The Other-end-of-Nowhere). Time also shifts in a confusing way: Ellie’s accident happens some time after Tom’s, but when he needs a “teacher,” she arrives in the form of a girl rather than a baby, and seems to have already gone beyond Tom’s level of progress. (You might say that Tom was just a much slower student than Ellie, but the time element does seem confusing.)

Do people like this book?

A lot of people have heard of The Water-Babies and may be aware of a few images and scenes from it; however, few have actually read it. My own early exposure to it consisted of borrowing a cousin’s copy, thinking it looked way too long, not understanding it at all, and giving it back again fairly quickly. (I’m not sure why I had the impression then that it was so long; it has only eight chapters, and the copy I have now is less than 200 pages.) I read it with my oldest daughter when she was about nine, but it was one of her less-enjoyed Ambleside books (although I do remember her giving a good narration of Mr. Grimes in the chimney).

British writer J.G. Ballard echoed a common reaction to The Water-Babies when he called it “a masterpiece in its bizarre way, but one of the most unpleasant works of fiction I have ever read..." (from an essay included in The Pleasure of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser, Bloomsbury, 1992)

Why bother reading it then?

This year we acquired a set of My Book House volumes, one of which contains a very short version of The Water-Babies. I read it to my book-loving first-grader, and told her that there really was more to the story than that; so she asked to be read The Real Thing. I hesitated, remember my older daughter’s dislike of the story; but we started off, skipping things here and there but otherwise enjoying the story more than I remembered from that earlier reading. My first-grader says, “It’s a really nice fairy tale, and it’s about exploring and everything.” She didn’t like “the old dame’s death,” but I don’t think she worries much about the questions of death/existence/metaphysics as an older child might; she accepts the book on a simpler, fairy tale level (which is one reason I skipped things that had no relevance for her).

So some of the “why read this?” will depend on your child’s age. For a young child, it’s simply Tom’s marvelous adventures, and his struggle not to be greedy and to become better than he has been. When the book says that the fairies came and took Ellie away after her accident, a young child may take that fairly literally; and although that’s not theologically correct, in Kingsley’s fairy-tale it is exactly what he means, just as in a Narnia story there can be centaurs and dryads, and Deep Magic that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the way things operate in our world.

However, the story is suggested for Year 3 Ambleside Online students, who would probably be about eight to ten years old, and somewhat beyond my first-grader’s experience. They could easily find the story either somewhat disturbing, much like Andersen’s fairy tales (with all this emphasis on death, including a scene where a young mother seems to be expecting or planning her own death) , or somewhat boring (the moral aspects). Teenagers and up are probably the only ones who would fully appreciate Kingsley’s satire, make sense of his name-dropping, and care to wade through a soliloquy about why there might or might not be water-babies.

So if the Year 3’s are both too old and too young for The Water-Babies, why read it to them? Year 3’s are at about the right age to enjoy Alice in Wonderland, and there are similarities between the two books (such as falling into a river and down a rabbit-hole), although Kingsley didn’t have Carroll/Dodgson’s gift for verbal nonsense and sheer lunacy. His more restrained but rambling style; his tendency to moralize, cheer for England, and put in more natural history than is popular today; and the problematic device of having human entrance into his “other world” come only through death, prevents the story from being as appealing as Alice. Still, there are strong characters that make up for the weaknesses in the plot: Tom himself, especially in his periods of mischief; the ugly-but-just Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid (who people usually remember, incorrectly, by her sister’s name); and some of the animal characters. There are memorable scenes, such as Tom and Grimes’ final reunion at the chimney. The writing is excellent and often gently humorous, sometimes even echoing Dickens’ style:

He cried half his time, and laughed the other half. He cried when hehad to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it did every day in the week; and when his master beat him, which he did every day in the week; and when he had not enough to eat, which happened every day in the week likewise…. As for chimney-sweeping, and being hungry, and being beaten, he took all that for the way of the world, like the rain and snow and thunder, and stood manfully with his back to it till it was over, as his old donkey did to a hail-storm; and then shook his ears and was as jolly as ever; and thought of the fine times coming, when he would be a man, and a master sweep, and sit in the public-house with a quart of beer and a long pipe, and play cards for silver money, and wear velveteensand ankle-jacks, and keep a white bull-dog with one gray ear, and carry her puppies in his pocket, just like a man.

And strangely enough, Kingsley himself didn’t seem to take his own moral fable too seriously. The last chapter starts: “Here begins the never-to-be-too-much-studied account of the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth part of the wonderful things which Tom saw

on his journey to the Other-end-of-Nowhere.” The “moral,” tacked on at the end of the book, is simply “Don’t Hurt Efts,” and a reminder to “stick to hard work and cold water.” This suggests that, while Kingsley may have been less amusing (on picnics or in writing) than Lewis Carroll, and less successful in his attempt at fantasy, he didn’t necessarily see his as story as only something “improving.” I don’t think he aimed at being remembered as the author of “one of the most unpleasant works of fiction” for children. His funny bits, often at the expense of academics and other pompous types (such as the poor professor who was thrown into a state of mental anguish until he admitted that he did believe in water-babies) really are good, too, although they sometimes get off-track:

He was, as I said, a very great naturalist, and chief professor ofNecrobioneopalaeonthydrochthonanthropopithekology in the newuniversity which the king of the Cannibal Islands had founded; and,being a member of the Acclimatisation Society, he had come here tocollect all the nasty things which he could find on the coast ofEngland, and turn them loose round the Cannibal Islands, becausethey had not nasty things enough there to eat what they left.

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[The DoAsYouLikes] were very fond of music, but it was too much trouble to learnthe piano or the violin; and as for dancing, that would have beentoo great an exertion. So they sat on ant-hills all day long, andplayed on the Jews' harp; and, if the ants bit them, why they justgot up and went to the next ant-hill, till they were bitten therelikewise.

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Next he saw all the little people in the world, writing all thelittle books in the world, about all the other little people in theworld; probably because they had no great people to write about:and if the names of the books were not Squeeky, nor the Pump-lighter, nor the Narrow Narrow World, nor the Hills of theChattermuch, nor the Children's Twaddeday, why then they weresomething else… But Tom thought he would sooner have a jolly goodfairy tale, about Jack the Giant-killer or Beauty and the Beast,which taught him something that he didn't know already.

And there’s no smoochy stuff.

Wouldn’t the original be a better choice then than even a well-intended abridgement?

I realize it is very presumptuous to try to improve on Kingsley, although certainly I am not the first or the only one to try to shorten the story somewhat. For an older child who can do his own skipping-where-necessary and who can handle Kingsley’s surprising rudeness toward most everything not of his country nor of his church, certainly it would be preferable to enjoy The Real Thing. But this version may stand in the gap for younger ones, or for parents who would prefer not to have to white things out.

Questions for Older People to Consider (the closest thing to study questions you’ll find here)

1. What does Tom want at different points in the story? His original “heart’s desire” is described on the first page, but it changes several times. Does he get everything he wants?

1. Many children’s books have a female numinous (God-like) figure in them; this one seems to have three or four (except that they are revealed at the end to be one). What similarities do you see between Kingsley’s fairy sisters/Mother Carey and, for instance, George MacDonald’s North Wind; Princess Irene’s great-great-grandmother in the Curdie books; and The Fairy with the Turquoise Hair (or The Blue Fairy) in Pinocchio?

1. One of the most frequently repeated metaphors in the book is water, and its relationship to dirt/cleansing and death/rebirth. Does Kingsley’s use of water tie in well with the (traditional) Christian uses of this image (cleansing, baptism), or is he doing something different with it?

1. Another frequent theme is that of physical transformation: boy into water-baby, insects shedding their skins, the DoAsYouLikes becoming apes, and the ugly fairy becoming beautiful. Why do you think this is such a common theme in fairy-tales and other children’s books?

1. Kingsley differentiates between those who abuse children out of malice, and those who neglect or mistreat them out of ignorance. Do you agree that there is a difference?

1. Finally: why does Kingsley undercut himself by reminding us that it’s “only” a fairytale and that we mustn’t believe it—even if it’s true?

THE WATER BABIES

by Charles Kingsley