The Water-Babies

Introduction

One spring morning in 1862, as Frances Kingsley told the story after her husband’s death, she sat with him at breakfast and reminded him of an old promise. “Rose, Maurice, and Mary have got their book, and baby must have his.” The three elder children had The Heroes (1856), the Greek myths that Kingsley had retold for them and dedicated to them by name, and the baby was the youngest child, born in 1858. Kingsley made no answer. He went into his study and locked the door, and within half an hour he came back with “the story of little Tom.” The rest followed through the spring and summer, and his wife thought that the whole book came to him more like an inspiration than a piece of work.

It is worth keeping that breakfast in mind, because the book never quite forgets it. It is dedicated to that baby, Grenville Arthur, and “to all other good little boys,” and its first page is a couplet that sets the child a riddle and warns that grown-ups will find it harder to read than he does. Yet it was far more than a nursery tale. Kingsley put into it nearly everything he was, the country parson and the Cambridge professor, the naturalist with his dredge and microscope, the sanitary reformer and the controversialist who could not leave an enemy alone. He put in his prejudices too. The sections below describe the man, the making of the book and the world it answers, including those prejudices, some of them ugly, and then suggest what to watch for without saying what happens.

The Author

Charles Kingsley was born on 12 June 1819 at Holne vicarage in Devon, the son of a clergyman, and he knew the coasts of North Devon from boyhood. He studied at King’s College London and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1838 and left with his degree in 1842. That summer he was ordained and became curate of Eversley, a parish of heath and fir-woods in the north of Hampshire, and in 1844, newly married to Frances Grenfell, he came back to it as rector and held the living until he died. Their four children were born between 1845 and 1858.

The year 1848, when revolution broke out across Europe and the Chartists (the movement for votes for working men) gathered for their last great petition in London, made Kingsley a public figure. With the theologian F. D. Maurice, whom he revered as his master, and the lawyer J. M. Ludlow, he helped to found the movement known as Christian Socialism, which set up co-operative workshops for tailors and other tradesmen. It held that the Church owed the poor justice as well as charity. Writing as Parson Lot, Kingsley addressed tracts and letters to working men, and in Cheap Clothes and Nasty (1850) he exposed the sweated clothing trade, in which tailors worked endless hours at home for starvation pay. He was never a revolutionary. He loved the Crown, the Church and the country gentry, and in two angry novels of the poor, Yeast and Alton Locke, he called on them to do their duty.

Fame of a steadier kind followed with Hypatia (1853), a novel of early Christian Alexandria, and in 1855 with a sea-romance of Elizabethan Devon, Westward Ho! Together they made him one of the most widely read novelists of the day, and in 1857 a reviewer in the Saturday Review coined the phrase muscular Christianity for the manly, outdoor religion of his novel Two Years Ago. The label stuck, though he disliked it. He became a chaplain to Queen Victoria in 1859, and in 1860 Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, a chair in the gift of the Crown; in 1861 he taught history to the Prince of Wales. So the man who locked himself in his study in 1862 was a royal chaplain and a professor, as well as a country parson with a houseful of children.

He was also a naturalist of real skill, and this matters more for the present book than any of his honours. His Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore (1855) taught a generation of holiday-makers to look into rock-pools, and he later wrote Madam How and Lady Why (1870) to teach children geology. When the naturalist Charles Darwin sent him On the Origin of Species in November 1859, Kingsley wrote to say that watching the crossing of animals and plants had long since taught him “to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species.” It was, he added, “just as noble a conception of Deity” to believe in a God who made creatures able to develop as in one who had to keep stepping in to mend His work. Darwin borrowed the thought, without naming him, for his second edition.

Kingsley did not think that such science threatened faith, for to him the laws of nature were the laws of a living God, and the naturalist who studied a caddis-worm was reading part of the same book as the preacher. In a letter of the early 1860s he wrote that “Darwin is conquering everywhere.” He counted T. H. Huxley, the biologist and Darwin’s fiercest defender, among his friends and correspondents, which did not stop him from laughing at Huxley and at almost every other scientist he knew.