The Water-Babies

Rabelais and Wordsworth. The French comic writer François Rabelais, whose gifts to the book the Introduction notes, earned a stern verdict in a Cambridge lecture of 1869, where Kingsley judged that in Rabelais the ape had beaten the man. That is the Doasyoulikes’ story in a sentence. The poet William Wordsworth gives the book four of its eight epigraphs, and Chapter III quotes the stanza of his Intimations Ode on the soul’s life before birth, which Wordsworth later said he had used as a poet, not as a doctrine. Kingsley’s narrator takes the same line, holding only that “we shall live again” (ch. III).

MacDonald. The Scottish novelist George MacDonald is Kingsley’s nearest contemporary in Christian fantasy. The critic Colin Manlove argues that the influence ran both ways, since The Water-Babies “probably owed something to MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858)”, while At the Back of the North Wind (1871) is “clearly indebted in certain features to The Water-Babies”. The debt is easy to see. MacDonald’s hero Diamond, a coachman’s son, meets a great female spirit who changes size and shape at will, and he reaches the land at the back of the north wind by passing through her where she sits in the ice of the far north. He dies into a life the book does not describe, and Mother Carey on her iceberg stands behind the scene.

Carroll and Grahame. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) came two years later from the same publisher, Macmillan, and Kingsley’s book already has an otter “grinning like a Cheshire cat” (ch. III) and a Frenchman “as mad as a March hare” (ch. V). Both phrases were already proverbial. Lewis Carroll, the Oxford mathematician who wrote Alice, shares Kingsley’s contempt for lessons learned by rote, but not his wish to preach. The Wind in the Willows (1908), by the Scottish-born writer Kenneth Grahame, is the river book of the next generation, and the biographer and critic Humphrey Carpenter heard in Mole’s first joy at the river “a phrase strikingly reminiscent of The Water-Babies”. Grahame’s god Pan, seen and then mercifully forgotten, is a cousin of Kingsley’s fairy with the unreadable name.

Darwin and Huxley. The book borrows Darwin’s words, though the story it tells with them is not always his. The fairy speaks of “circumstance, and selection, and competition” (ch. VI), but the story told in those words, of a people who lose their skills and speech by disuse, is closer to the theory of the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck held that creatures change by using or neglecting their organs and pass the change on to their young, and the historian of science Piers Hale has shown how Lamarckian Kingsley’s fable is. Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature came out in February 1863, as the serial was ending, and summed up the quarrel over the brain, while Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) later dismayed Kingsley, though he remained an evolutionist. He stood between the men of science and the churchmen, a clergyman who welcomed evolution and insisted that it was God’s way of making.

The riddle turned round. The book began at a breakfast table in the spring of 1862, as a book owed to the youngest child in the house, and it pays that debt and then turns it round. Its Dedication hands the child a dare, “Come read me my riddle, each good little man”, and adds a line that is not really addressed to him at all, “if you cannot read it, no grown-up folk can”. The riddle is for the child to hold up to his elders, who sent boys up the chimneys, set the examinations, paid quacks for keys to the backstairs and told children that there were no fairies, and the Moral ends the same way. After the efts and the cold water it warns, with a straight face, that “you are not to believe a word of it, even if it is true”. A child hears a joke. A grown reader hears in it the professor who would not believe what lay in his own net, for the tale’s truth never depended on whether water-babies exist, and only a grown-up would have thought that it did. So the baby who was owed a book at breakfast ends as its best reader, and the grown-ups who read it aloud to him are the ones it was written to teach.