The Water-Babies

The goddess of many names. The nearest parallel to the final unveiling is the eleventh book of the Metamorphoses, better known as The Golden Ass, by the second-century Latin novelist Apuleius, whose hero Lucius, turned into an ass for meddling with magic, prays by the sea at night. The Egyptian goddess Isis appears to him and speaks (XI.5). She declares herself the mother of nature and mistress of the elements, the single form of all the gods and goddesses, one power worshipped by the whole world under many shapes, rites and names. Lucius is restored to human form by eating roses in her procession (XI.13), and Kingsley names him a few pages before the end, among the asses who must wait till the thistles turn into roses (ch. VIII). When his own fairy is unveiled at the close, the children see her as both sisters, then as Mother Carey and the Irishwoman, and at last as “neither of them, and yet all of them at once” (ch. VIII). The difference is telling. Isis speaks her name, but Kingsley’s fairy withholds hers with “Not yet” (ch. VIII), and while Lucius ends as an initiate, Tom and Ellie end at the threshold, dazzled, as in the verse “now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

The scriptural thread. The Bible runs under the whole story, and its verses are given here in the King James Version. The water-birth of Chapter II answers Christ’s warning to the Pharisee Nicodemus that “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit” (John 3:5), he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Ellie’s Sunday home is closed to Tom until he has been born of water and has done the hard thing too (ch. VI). The Epistle to Titus speaks of salvation “by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5), not by works, and the book keeps that order, since Tom does nothing to earn his rebirth. The renewing is slow, and costs him his prickles.

The two sisters and the child. The fairy sisters are two verses. Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby is the Golden Rule, “whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12). Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid is the law that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Galatians 6:7). The book’s constant address to a little man rests on a third saying, that one must “become as little children” to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3), and its giant naturalist laments that he can never be a child again (ch. VIII). He is the grown-up the book was written to reach.

Water as a sacrament. The book never names baptism, yet the scene in Chapter II has its whole shape. There are bells, a longing to be clean, the stripping of old clothes, immersion, sleep and a waking into new life, and afterwards a tombstone over the old shell, as in the apostle Paul’s “buried with him by baptism into death” (Romans 6:4). Kingsley’s seashore book calls nature a witness and a sacrament of the God in whom we live, and his essay of 1856 on the mystics argued that physical laws are the lower likeness of spiritual ones. His early sermons defended baptism in Maurice’s sense, as the declaration of a sonship already given, which every child must then grow into by his own obedience, as a son grows into his father’s house. That is Tom’s case exactly. The water makes him new, yet he is still “poor little heathen Tom” (ch. III), and at the end the water that frees Grimes comes from inside him, as tears, so that the outward sign has become the inward change.

Relation to Other Works

Kingsley’s own books. Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore (1855) is the book’s elder brother, a handbook to seashore life for amateur naturalists, and many of the shore creatures of Chapters IV and V appear first in its pages. Hypatia (1853), his novel of fifth-century Alexandria, sets Christians against the last Neoplatonist philosophers, and in it the pagan heroine charges Christians with worshipping the maker of a dead machine. Mother Carey is his later answer. The Heroes (1856), the Greek myths retold for his elder children, stands closest to The Water-Babies in purpose, and in Chapter VII Kingsley turns to Greek myth again, but with the moral reversed and the credit given to Epimetheus, the slow brother. Madam How and Lady Why, first published as a serial in 1868, makes Madam How, the working of nature, the servant of Lady Why, its purpose, and speaks of a Master over them whose name Kingsley leaves the child to guess. Chapter VIII’s unreadable name is the same.