The Water-Babies

Notes on Sources

How this edition was made. The text was downloaded from Standard Ebooks and converted mechanically, never retyped, and then frozen with a checksum so that no later step could alter it. The corrections listed in the Textual Notes are applied to it by a script. The whole book was then read in full, chapter by chapter, and the reading gave a synopsis, a list of what must not be revealed before its time, and a list of key words. Research followed in five parts, on Kingsley’s life, the historical and scientific context, the book’s metaphysics, its critical reception and its textual history, and the notes were written from the reading and the research. Then came the checks. A script confirms that removing the note markers gives back the frozen text exactly, and a second script tests every note anchor, and every quotation from the book in the front and back matter, against the text. Every note was fact-checked against its sources twice, independently. An audit searched the front matter and the notes for anything that reveals the plot too early and tested every statement about the book against the text, and an editorial review of the apparatus came last.

The notes. There are 348 footnotes. They identify every epigraph and song, explain allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, Plato and the classics, and name the real people behind the satire, from Owen and Huxley to the fraudulent beauty-seller Madame Rachel and the American spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie Seer. They also gloss places, laws, money, dress, dialect and the natural history of stream and shore, and they say plainly what the book’s slurs mean and what attitudes they reflect. They were researched from primary sources and standard reference works, and none was copied from a modern annotated edition. They never look forward in the story, so that a reader who uses them meets each turn of the plot where Kingsley placed it.

Open questions. Some things could not be settled, and they are left open rather than guessed. The Saturday Review noticed the book on 23 May 1863, but its text could not be read, nor could the reviews in the New York Times of December 1863 and The Times of January 1864. Herrwiggius, whose incomparable drink for madmen appears among the professor’s remedies, is unidentified and may be Kingsley’s invention, and the frogs on “the Great-A” in Chapter II are unexplained. Gisarines, among the weapons of Chapter V, reads the same in every edition checked, but only in scanned text, and may be a misreading of gisarmes, a kind of pole-arm. Grenville Kingsley’s later life, including the report that he died in Queensland in 1898, is unconfirmed. It is unproven that Easthampstead Plain in Chapter IV names the heath where Broadmoor asylum was built, or that the passage was written before the asylum opened. It is not established that the book caused the Act of 1864 rather than coinciding with it, nor who wrote the notice in The Anthropological Review, nor in what spirit. The date of the letter to Maurice, and the number of copies that carried the L’Envoi, are known only approximately.