At a Glance

A ten-year-old chimney-sweep who has never washed runs from the great house he was sent to sweep and, longing to be clean, slips into a river, where the fairies turn him into a water-baby. What follows is his education, told by a clergyman and naturalist who teases, preaches, lectures and jokes on almost every page.

Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, serialised in Macmillan’s Magazine from August 1862 to March 1863 and published by Macmillan in 1863; a dedication, eight chapters and a Moral, in about 68,000 words.

The book. The Water-Babies is a Victorian fairy tale written for a small boy and for the grown-ups who read to him, and it is at once an adventure, a sermon, a nature book and a satire. It opens on a midsummer morning in a coal town of the North of England and moves from moor and dale to stream, river and sea, and in its last chapters much farther still. Tom, the sweep, cannot read or pray, and his master, Mr. Grimes, beats him daily. On the road to Harthover Place, the house of the squire Sir John Harthover, the two of them fall in with a mysterious Irishwoman who seems to know far too much about Grimes. Lost in the flues of the great house, Tom comes down into the bedroom of the squire’s little daughter, sees in a mirror for the first time that he is dirty, is chased as a thief, and escapes over the fells. In the valley of Vendale a kind old dame takes him in. Feverish and longing to be clean, he goes down into the stream, and the fairies turn him into a water-baby a few inches long, with gills, whose new life in the river and the sea is an education. He has a great deal to learn.

The author. Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was for more than thirty years the rector of Eversley in Hampshire, and he was also a novelist, a Christian Socialist, a keen naturalist and, when he wrote this book, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. He wrote it in 1862 for his youngest son, Grenville, born in 1858.

The reader. The book suits anyone who enjoys Alice, Gulliver’s Travels or the old natural histories, and anyone curious about how the Victorians quarrelled over science, faith and the poor. The story itself is simple and the prose is quick, but the narrator stops again and again to digress, to mock his enemies and to pile up long lists of names. Those digressions are half the fun. The satire belongs to one particular decade, with its jokes and its prejudices, and it is best read as a record of that decade rather than as a puzzle to be solved. When a name or an allusion stops you, the notes at the foot of the page explain it.

The edition. The text is Macmillan’s, as transcribed by Standard Ebooks from a late printing and corrected in six places from the first edition of 1863, and nearly 350 footnotes explain its words, places, people, science, satire and allusions. None of them looks ahead. The Introduction, the Key Words and How to Read It are free of spoilers, but everything after the text, the Afterword, the Chapter Outline and the rest, gives away the plot and is best kept until the book is finished.