The Water-Babies

Eversley itself runs all through the book. It was a poor parish of farm labourers and heath-dwellers, with poachers among them, and Kingsley knew its cottages, its fox-hunts and its trout-streams as well as he knew his Bible. He fished, hunted and walked the heath, and the narrator of The Water-Babies does the same, breaking off to talk about a run with the hounds or a morning on a Hampshire chalk-stream. The book’s quick, confiding voice is the voice of a man talking to his own children in his own house.

A year after the book appeared, his temper drew him into the most damaging quarrel of his life. In January 1864, reviewing the historian J. A. Froude’s History of England in Macmillan’s Magazine, Kingsley wrote that “Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy,” and added that John Henry Newman taught as much. Newman, the Oxford convert and the most famous Catholic in England, asked for proof and printed their letters. When Kingsley answered with a pamphlet, What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?, Newman replied with the Apologia pro Vita Sua (a defence of his life), issued in weekly parts from April to June 1864. Most readers then and since have judged that Newman won. The quarrel has clung to Kingsley’s name ever since, and the anti-Catholic jibes of The Water-Babies, written a year before it, show the same temper at work in a book for a child.

His later years were busy and honoured. He gave up his Cambridge chair in 1869, took a canonry at Chester, sailed that winter to the West Indies (the voyage is told in At Last, 1871), became a canon of Westminster in 1873, and lectured in the United States in 1874. He died at Eversley on 23 January 1875, aged fifty-five. A grave in Westminster Abbey was offered and declined, and he lies in Eversley churchyard among his parishioners.

The Book and Its Making

The book bears the marks of a busy man in his early forties, at the height of his fame, who wrote it between lectures at Cambridge and the duties of his parish, with a great deal on his mind. It moves from an exact picture of a northern sweep’s morning into fantasy, natural history, sermon and satire, and back again without warning.

Macmillan’s Magazine, where the story first appeared in eight monthly instalments from August 1862 to March 1863, was a shilling monthly for educated adults, founded in 1859, which printed essays, poems and fiction side by side. Its first readers were grown-ups. They met Tom between articles on politics, religion and science, and many of the jokes, about anatomists and apes, about examinations and quack cures, were written over the child’s head for them. The book has spoken to both audiences ever since, sometimes in the same sentence.

Its northern landscape goes back to a visit of July 1858, when Kingsley spent some days in Craven, the limestone country of the West Riding of Yorkshire round Malham. His letters home, printed after his death by his widow in Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life (1877), describe the great cliff of Malham Cove, the gorge of Gordale Scar and the moorland tarn above them. Local tradition adds that he stayed with Walter Morrison, the young owner of Malham Tarn House, that the dark streaks on the Cove gave him Tom’s sooty descent of the crag, and that Vendale is Littondale, a few miles to the north. The book itself will not be pinned down. It sends the reader “up into the High Craven” to look for Vendale, then across the Lake mountains and over the Scottish Border, and it lets him find it nowhere in particular.

When the serial ended, Macmillan issued the story as a book, which they were advertising by the middle of May 1863 at seven shillings and sixpence, with two full-page illustrations by the Scottish painter J. Noel Paton, known for his canvases of fairyland. Each chapter opened with an engraved initial letter. Kingsley revised the instalments for the book, and among other changes he cut a passage from Chapter V and recast a list in the last chapter.

One change came late, after the printing of the first edition had begun. Kingsley had a leaf cut out that carried a six-line L’Envoi, or send-off, in which he bade the unbelieving and the self-righteous begone and asked that his country muse be left to play with children and with real things. The Textual Notes give the poem in full.

The book has never been long out of print, and after Kingsley’s death Macmillan reset it for a new edition of 1885 with a hundred drawings by Linley Sambourne, the Punch cartoonist, among them caricatures of Huxley and of the anatomist Richard Owen. The copyright ran out in 1905.

The illustrators Warwick Goble and W. Heath Robinson took the book up in 1909 and 1915, and in 1916 the American painter Jessie Willcox Smith made twelve pictures for it that now belong to the Library of Congress. Many readers have met Tom first through one of these artists, and each of them made him a little different.

Its World

Climbing boys. Tom’s trade was real and cruel. Master sweeps sent small boys, some as young as five or six, up the narrow flues of houses to brush out the soot, and the boys climbed with their knees and elbows until the skin was hardened or rubbed raw. Some were burned, some suffocated, and many were stunted or deformed. Acts of Parliament in 1788, 1834 and 1840 tried to curb the trade, and the last made it unlawful for anyone under twenty-one to be sent up a chimney at all. All three were widely ignored, since householders thought that boys cleaned better than the jointed brushes invented in 1803, so that any master who sent a boy of ten up a flue in 1862 was breaking a law that few enforced. In that year a Children’s Employment Commission, set up at the urging of Lord Shaftesbury, the great campaigner for working children, began to gather evidence, and it found thousands of children still working for sweeps.