The Water-Babies

How to Read It

The first two chapters move fast and are best read at a sitting. They hold a dawn walk, a chase across the park of a great house, a flight over the moor and a descent into a hidden valley, and they bring the change on which the rest depends. Chapter II also brings the first long digressions, on fairies and on the rash word “cannot,” and these show at once what kind of book this is. Chapters III and IV slow down. They follow Tom through the life of the stream and the sea with a naturalist’s eye, and they carry the satire on scientists and quack cures. Chapters V and VI turn to conduct, as the fairies take a hand in Tom’s education, and Chapters VII and VIII become a voyage into the far north and a tour of satirical lands, where the jokes come thickest. The Moral is short.

The digressions are not interruptions of the story but half of the book, the place where Kingsley argues, confesses and plays, and they reward a second reading more than any other part of it. If one loses you, read on. Take the catalogues fast, and aloud if you can, as heaps of words piled up for the sound of them, and do not stop on a first reading to identify every quack or scholar in them. The notes are there for that. They explain names, words, places, creatures, allusions and the targets of the satire, and they never look ahead, so that a reader can take a chapter straight through and then go back to the notes, or consult them as they come.

The first questions concern the book’s two audiences. What does the narrator want the child to believe, and what does he want the grown-up to notice, and are they ever the same thing? Others concern its laws. What does the Irishwoman’s warning about wishing to be clean mean for each person Tom meets, and is cleanliness in this book ever only a matter of the body? When the narrator says that the soul makes the body, how far does the story bear him out? Others again concern its science and its satire. What does the book think a good education is, and who in it is truly taught? Does Kingsley’s faith pull against his science, or does each hold the other up, and where does his satire serve the story and where does it swallow it? The last concern the reader. How should anyone today weigh a book so tender towards a beaten child and so contemptuous of whole peoples? And what does it mean that a tale written for one small boy asks so much of the adults who read it?