The Water-Babies

Chapter Outline

The entries below follow the book section by section. Each gives the source of the chapter’s epigraph in a phrase, what happens in the chapter, how it ends, and what it adds to the whole. They include every turn of the plot, and are meant for readers who have finished the book or who want to find their way back to a passage.

Dedication. The book is dedicated to Kingsley’s youngest son, Grenville Arthur, and to all other good little boys, with a two-line riddle that the child is dared to read, announcing both a double audience of child and adult and a hidden meaning. The young, it implies, will see it first.

Chapter I. The epigraph is Wordsworth’s lament over what man has made of man. Tom, a ten-year-old sweep, sets out with his brutal master Grimes to sweep the chimneys of Harthover Place, and on the road they meet a barefoot Irishwoman who knows Grimes’s past and warns them both before she vanishes. Lost in the flues, Tom comes down into a white bedroom, sees his black face in a mirror, and runs as a thief. The chapter ends with Tom climbing down towards the valley, while the river sings its song and the Irishwoman follows him down unseen. It lays down the social facts, the law of choice and the moment of self-knowledge.

Chapter II. The epigraph is from the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, on the angels God sends to serve wicked man. In Vendale a school-dame takes Tom in, and, feverish that morning, he goes to the stream to be clean, where the fairies take him and the Irishwoman is revealed as their Queen. The narrator defends fairies. Ellie clears Tom’s name, a bloodhound tracks him to the water, and when he wakes as a water-baby the narrator argues at length that nothing in nature is too strange to be true. The searchers take Tom’s shell for his drowned body, My Lady puts a tombstone over it in Vendale churchyard, and the dame dies. The chapter ends with Tom “as clean as a fresh-run salmon” and any reader who dislikes the story sent to learn the multiplication-table, and it gives the book its central change.

Chapter III. The epigraph is from the end of the poet S. T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, on loving all creatures great and small, and Tom now lives in the stream, clean and forgetful of his past. The narrator states the book’s doctrine, that the soul makes the body, while Tom torments the stream’s creatures until none will play with him, befriends a newly hatched dragonfly, is scorned by an otter, and rides a flood down to the salmon river. A long digression follows on gillies and poachers. The chapter ends with a pair of salmon who tell him of creatures like him in the sea and despise the trout as degenerate cousins. It adds the doctrine, the first sins and the pull of the sea.

Chapter IV. The epigraph is Wordsworth on the meddling intellect that murders to dissect, and the chapter opens with a night of salmon-poaching in which Grimes falls into the river and drowns. At the sea Tom befriends a lobster, and when Ellie and Professor Ptthmllnsprts come to the rocks the professor nets him, denies him to spare his pride, and is bitten, while Ellie falls and flies away on fairy wings. A terrible old fairy sends the professor mad, and his doctors try every remedy, ancient and modern. The chapter ends with his cure, which comes when he writes a book against himself, and it adds the book’s satire of science and medicine.

Chapter V. The epigraph is Wordsworth’s Ode to Duty, addressed to the stern lawgiver whose face yet smiles. The lobster-pot catches the lobster, Tom and the otter, who drowns, and when Tom frees the lobster he sees his first water-baby, and learns of their home at St. Brandan’s Isle and of who they are. On Friday Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid gives Tom a pebble for the pebbles he gave the anemones and punishes the cruel with their own cruelties, and on Sunday her sister becomes his mother. The chapter ends with Tom tormenting no more. It sets out the two laws, of consequence and of love, that govern the rest of the book.

Chapter VI. The epigraph is Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, on the child who hurries towards the yoke of custom. Tom steals the fairy’s sweets, grows prickles, confesses and is forgiven, and is taught for seven years by a little girl who proves to be Ellie, until he asks to follow her home on Sundays. Both fairies say that he must first go where he does not like and help somebody he does not like, and he sees, to his dismay, that they mean his old master Grimes. He quarrels with Ellie, who vanishes and is allowed back for one farewell, and the fairy shows them both the history of the Doasyoulikes, who dwindled into apes. The chapter ends with Tom resolved to go to the world’s end, and it adds consequence after forgiveness and the downhill road.