The Water-Babies

Things You May Not Know

The book lost a poem in the press. The first edition was printed with a six-line verse L’Envoi on the leaf before Chapter I, but Kingsley had it cut out during the print-run, and booksellers put the copies that carry it at about two hundred. Collectors call the rest the second state, and the lost poem is printed in the Textual Notes.

A queen remembered the book being read to a prince who can hardly have heard it. In the autumn of 1865 Queen Emma of Hawaii stayed at Eversley, and Kingsley’s wife Frances recorded her saying that her husband had read The Water-Babies to their little prince. The prince had died on 27 August 1862, when only the first monthly part had appeared in London, so the memory must have been affectionate rather than exact.

Kingsley’s joke about shooting schoolboys was aimed next door. Among the luxuries that Chapter IV says the professor might have enjoyed, had he only been a convict lunatic, is leave to shoot three Wellington College boys a week, in case black game should be scarce. Wellington College, the public school founded in memory of the Duke of Wellington and opened in 1859, stood a few miles from Kingsley’s parish, and in 1860 he gave it the prize for a steeplechase that still bears his name. He was joking about neighbours.

The Spectator’s obituary of Kingsley did not mention the book. When he died in January 1875 the paper’s long essay on him judged that no one ever rose from his books without feeling stronger, more natural and more sympathetic, yet it did not name The Water-Babies at all. The fairy tale that has outlived almost everything else he wrote was not yet his monument.

Children who loved the book came to kneel at his grave. Frances Kingsley recorded that after his death little children who had loved The Water-Babies and The Heroes came to his grave in Eversley churchyard and knelt there. The dedication had found its readers.

Many twentieth-century children read the book cut. Abridged editions were common, among them a Gollancz abridgement of 1961, whose reviewer in the Spectator, the weekly that had first reviewed the book in 1863, saw no harm in cutting if it was done with discretion. Another, a Pan paperback, appeared in 1973.

The book became a film in which James Mason played Grimes. In 1978 the actor and director Lionel Jeffries filmed it, with live action on land and animation, made in Poland, under the water, and the film added a kingdom of sharks that Kingsley never imagined. A stage musical followed at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2003.

Tom has been rewritten as a trafficked child. In 2013 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a version by the poet Paul Farley, in which Tom has been trafficked from Nigeria to work as a child labourer, and the change keeps faith with the anger at cruelty to children that drove the original. The sweep is gone; the child remains.