The Water-Babies

Parliament passed the Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act in 1864, with fines and prison for masters who broke it, but it too proved hard to enforce. The practice ended only with the Act of 1875, which made every sweep hold a licence from the police, and which followed the death in February of that year of George Brewster, a boy smothered in a flue near Cambridge. Kingsley had died a few weeks before. Parliament’s own history of the reform credits the book with doing much to raise public feeling, and it is often said to have helped the Act of 1864 to pass. Yet that Act grew out of Shaftesbury’s long campaign and the Commission’s findings, and the parliamentary records consulted for this edition do not mention the book. It is fairest to say that The Water-Babies put a climbing boy into every nursery in England at the moment when Parliament was taking up his cause.

The hippocampus debate. In 1857 Owen, then the leading anatomist in England, argued that the human brain had parts that no ape possessed, among them the hippocampus minor, a small ridge in one of the brain’s cavities. At the Oxford meeting of the British Association in June 1860 Huxley flatly contradicted him, and for two years the dispute ran on in lectures, journals and dissecting-rooms until Owen’s claim was generally given up. Kingsley thought Huxley right, but he laughed at both sides, turning the hippocampus minor into a hippopotamus major and mocking the notion that a single fold of the brain could decide who is human. What really divides us from the apes, the narrator lets the child suppose before calling it “a child’s fancy”, is being able “to speak, and make machines, and know right from wrong, and say your prayers.” Kingsley had also mocked the quarrel in a squib that he circulated privately, written in the mangled English of Lord Dundreary, the brainless lord of a popular stage comedy.

Darwin and change. On the Origin of Species appeared in November 1859, less than three years before Kingsley began, and its questions run all through the book. Can living things change their kind, can they change for the worse as well as for the better, and does a law of nature leave room for a Creator, or even require one? Kingsley answers as a naturalist and a priest at once. His narrator warns the child never to say that anything is against nature, since nobody yet knows what nature can do, and he names Darwin with respect among the great men of science. The book never lectures on natural selection. It shows a world full of creatures that change their skins and shapes, and it asks the reader to take that world as a parable.

Fairy tales and their enemies. Kingsley wrote at a moment when the fairy tale was being welcomed back into English nurseries, after decades in which improving writers had tried to banish fairies in favour of useful knowledge and plain moral lessons. The German folk-tales of the brothers Grimm had been translated in 1823, and by 1862 the critic John Ruskin and the Scottish novelist George MacDonald, among others, had written literary fairy tales of their own. The other side had not given up. Cousin Cramchild, who tells children that there are no fairies, and Aunt Agitate, who says the same in her tracts on political economy, stand for the whole school of instructive writing that had tried to put information in the place of wonder. The book’s answer is to be a fairy tale that holds more real information than any of theirs.

Schools and examinations. In 1862 the Revised Code of the education minister Robert Lowe tied the grants paid to schools for the poor to the results of an annual test in reading, writing and arithmetic, conducted by Her Majesty’s Inspectors. It was called payment by results. Teachers and children crammed for the inspector’s visit, while competitive examinations were opening the civil service and the Indian Civil Service and crammers grew rich coaching young men to pass them. Kingsley, who taught at Cambridge through these years, thought much of this drill a waste of children. The book mocks the “Government pupil-teacher” (an apprentice teacher in a state-aided school) and the rote books of Cousin Cramchild, and it keeps its fiercest satire on cramming for the last chapter.