The Water-Babies

Further Reading

The standard scholarly edition is Brian Alderson’s The Water-Babies in the Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford, 1995), with an introduction, notes and bibliography; its 2013 reissue adds a new introduction by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Richard Kelly’s Broadview edition (Peterborough, Ontario, 2008) reprints the text of the first edition and adds appendices of contemporary reviews from 1863 to 1885, including notices that this edition could not see. Richard D. Beards’s Penguin Classics edition (New York, 2008) gives the unabridged text with Victorian illustrations, an introduction and notes. None of these was consulted in preparing this edition’s notes.

For Kingsley’s life the first source is still the memoir his widow Frances compiled, Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life (2 vols, London, 1877), which prints the letter to Maurice about the book and her account of how it began. Susan Chitty’s The Beast and the Monk (London, 1974) draws on his private papers, including his letters to his wife, and Brenda Colloms’s Charles Kingsley: The Lion of Eversley (London, 1975) followed a year later. J. M. I. Klaver’s The Apostle of the Flesh (Leiden, 2006) is a critical life on a large scale.

The criticism begins in earnest with Valentine Cunningham’s long essay on the book in its own time, published in Essays in Criticism (Oxford, 1985). Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens (London, 1985) treats it, with Alice, as the beginning of a golden age of English children’s fantasy. Stephen Prickett’s Victorian Fantasy (Hassocks, 1979; second edition, Waco, Texas, 2005) prints the letter to Maurice as the key to the book, and Colin Manlove treats it in Modern Fantasy (Cambridge, 1975) and Christian Fantasy (London, 1992). On science, Jessica Straley’s Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature (Cambridge, 2016) is the best guide, with Piers Hale’s article on the book’s evolutionary ideas in the Journal of the History of Biology (2013). Catherine Judd’s article in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2017) reads the book against Ireland, slavery and labour, and Deborah Stevenson’s essay in The Lion and the Unicorn (Baltimore, 1997) asks why it is no longer read.