The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby
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- For the 1978 animated film, see The Water Babies (film).
The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children's novel by the Reverend Charles Kingsley. Written in 1862-1863 as a serial for Macmillan's Magazine, it was first published in its entirety in 1863. The book was extremely popular during its day, and was a mainstay of children's literature through the 1920s.
It was adapted into a movie The Water Babies in 1978 starring James Mason, Bernard Cribbins and Billie Whitelaw. The movie's story line is very unlike the book's story line.
In the style of Victorian-era novels, The Water-Babies is a didactic moral fable. The protagonist is Tom, a young chimney sweep, who falls into a river after encountering an upper-class girl named Ellie and being chased out of her house. There he dies and is transformed into a "water baby", as he is told by a caddis fly — an insect that sheds its skin — and begins his moral education. The story is largely concerned with Christian redemption, though it also suggests that England treats its poor badly, and questions enforced child labor.
Tom embarks on a series of adventures and lessons, and enjoys the community of other water babies once he proves himself a moral creature. The major spiritual leaders in his new world are the fairies Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, and Mother Carey. Weekly, Tom is allowed the company of Ellie, who had fallen into the river after he did, but who was not subjected to re-education as a water baby herself.
Grimes, his old master, drowns as well, and in his final adventure, Tom travels to the end of the world to attempt to help the man where he is being punished for his misdeeds. By proving his willingness to do things he does not like, if they are the right things to do, Tom earns himself a return to human form, and becomes "a great man of science" who "can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth". He and Ellie are united (though the book makes clear that they never marry).
Among the views that Kingsley expresses in the book on religious and political matters, he refers to Americans as chaotic and lazy, to Jews as greedy, and he insults Catholics generally, the French in particular. These views may have played a role in the book's gradual fall from popularity.
Neither at the time it was published, nor certainly in the present day, have most readers realized that the book had been intended in part as a satire of Darwinian science and as a serious critique of the closed-minded approaches of many scientists.
In the book, for example, Kingsley argues that no person is qualified to say that something that they have never seen (like a human soul or a water baby) does not exist.
How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none . . . And no one has a right to say that no water babies exist till they have seen no water babies existing, which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water babies.
Kingsley was a proponent of the theory of degeneration, the notion that evolution does not necessarily imply progress. (He is entirely correct about this, no modern scholar of the subject would suggest that new species are better than old ones, merely that they were able to out-compete them under prevailing conditions.) In The Water Babies, Kingsley tells of a group of humans called the Doasyoulikes who are allowed to do "whatever they like" and gradually lose the power of speech and degenerate into gorillas and are shot by the African explorer Paul de Chaillu.
The Water Babies at various times refers to "Sir Roderick Murchison, Professor (Richard) Owen, Professor (Thomas Henry) Huxley, (and) Mr. Darwin", and thus they become explicitly part of the story. In the accompanying illustrations by Linley Sambourne, Huxley and Owen are caricatured, studying a captured water baby.
Delightfully, in 1892 Thomas Henry Huxley's five-year-old grandson Julian saw this engraving and wrote his grandfather a letter asking
Dear Grandpater -- Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Could I see it some day? -- Your loving Julian.
Huxley wrote back a letter that evokes the New York Sun's "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" letter. It is a blessing from a great scientist to a young boy whom he hopes will some day be a scientist too.
My dear Julian -- I could never make sure about that Water Baby.
I have seen Babies in water and Babies in bottles; the Baby in the water was not in a bottle and the Baby in the bottle was not in water. My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby was a very kind man and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did -- There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things.
When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers, and see things more wonderful than the Water Babies where other folks can see nothing.
Julian Huxley did go on to be a scientist. In the 1940s, he was a driving force behind the development of the synthetic theory of evolution.
Richard Milner points out that Julian's early scientific work involved the axolotl, an animal that never matures past its gilled stage. It is therefore a real-life vision of Kingsley's imagined Water Babies.
[edit] External links
- The Water-Babies, available freely at Project Gutenberg
- A German article on the Water Babies
[edit] References
- Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (1863), Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press, 1995 ISBN 0-19-282238-1
- The Encyclopedia of Evolution, 1990, R. Milner, ed.
