The Water-Babies

Critical Reception

On First Publication

The Water-Babies came out as a book in May 1863, after its run in Macmillan’s Magazine, and the weekly Spectator reviewed it on 23 May in an unsigned notice that began by praising the opening chapters warmly. It said that “none could be more spirited or vigorous than this” until Tom reaches the mouth of the salmon river, and it admired the storm in Chapter III. Then it turned. The reviewer thought that Kingsley had “spoiled a good story by his undisciplined and ill-concentrated imagination”, and that his satire sounded like “one of those insane extravaganzas at the minor theatres”.

The review rested on a shrewd view of the author, whose genius, the reviewer wrote, had a rare sympathy with animal life, but whose reasoning side too often sank into “a sort of noble but furious bark at what he dislikes”. He predicted that the book would win Kingsley “a very mutilated and unsatisfactory fame”. The division the review draws, between the story of the stream and the sermons of the later chapters, is still the commonest judgement of the book.

A stranger notice appeared in November 1863 in The Anthropological Review, the journal of the Anthropological Society of London, whose heading gave Kingsley’s title as an honorary fellow of the society. The unsigned reviewer declared that the book’s publication “marks the period of an epoch in our biological literature”, and he praised its English as “clear, manly, and to the point”. The praise may be a joke. Kingsley had mocked the anthropologists and their quarrels over the brains of apes, so the solemnity may well be his satire returned in kind, but the tone is hard to judge and this edition does not press either reading.

The scientists whom the book teased left almost no comment. The biologist T. H. Huxley wrote to Kingsley three times in the spring of 1863, just as the book appeared, without mentioning it, and only thirty years later did he answer a question about it from his grandson Julian, aged four. The boy had seen a picture of his grandfather examining a water-baby, and on 24 March 1892 Huxley replied “I never could make out about that Water Baby”. The author, he added, was “a very kind man and very clever”, and “Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did”. This edition follows the Clark University transcription; Huxley’s Life and Letters prints a slightly different wording.

Since

For three generations the book was a staple of British childhood, and in 1911 the Grolier Club, the New York society of book collectors, listed it among its One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature. Andrea Immel, curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton, calls it “one of the great children’s best-sellers of all time”, and also “one of the most peculiar children’s books ever written”. By 1973 the poet and novelist Robert Nye, reviewing an abridged paperback, could find it “dated, quaint, and deeply moral”, and yet still recommend it for reading aloud to the very young.

The modern history of children’s literature has given the book a founding place. The novelist Penelope Lively, reviewing Carpenter’s Secret Gardens in 1985, traced his theme of Arcadia and secret places “from Alice and The Water Babies through The Princess and the Goblin” to The Wind in the Willows and Winnie-the-Pooh. The critic Patricia Craig, reviewing the same book, found Kingsley odder than Carpenter allowed, a man of “Cold water, lukewarm socialism and red-hot religious feeling”, and she reported Carpenter’s view that the book offers a parallel religion, drawn “with comic and sexual overtones”.

Objections to the form have hardened. Rita Smith, in a radio script of 2001 for the University of Florida’s programme Recess!, wrote that once Tom enters the river “the lively narrative ends and the lecturing begins”, and the biographer J. M. I. Klaver calls it a “Victorian fantasy crowded with Kingsley’s hobby-horses”. Deborah Stevenson, editor of the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, explained the book’s fall from the popular canon in 1997 by the preference of the adults who choose which books to pass on for “books that comfort over books that challenge”.

The book’s prejudices are now at the centre of discussion. The critic John Goldthwaite wrote in 1996 that Kingsley’s slights against Americans, Catholics, Jews and others pile up until “it becomes almost pointless to take offense”, and the Irish critic Denis Donoghue, reviewing a new edition in 2013, was blunter. “He despised the races and tribes that did not participate in British destiny”, Donoghue wrote. Catherine Judd, a historian of Victorian literature, calls the book “a politically anxious text”, shaped by Kingsley’s unease over the Irish Famine, American slavery and the condition of the English poor.