The Water-Babies

Quack medicine. Victorian newspapers were full of advertisements for pills and ointments that promised to cure everything. The pill-maker Thomas Holloway spent a fortune advertising his, and rival makers sold vegetable pills as the one cure for every disease. Beside them flourished mesmerism, electro-biology (a stage form of mesmerism), homoeopathy and the water-cure, and from 1852 the drawing-room craze for table-turning, which the physicist Michael Faraday explained away in The Times in 1853 as the unconscious pushing of the sitters’ hands. The great catalogue of remedies in Chapter IV sets these new cures side by side with old ones that Kingsley found in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by the Oxford scholar Robert Burton, such as hellebore and boring a hole in the head. The joke is that the new quackery is no wiser than the old.

Sanitation and cold water. Victorian towns drew their water from the rivers into which they poured their sewage, and cholera and typhoid killed tens of thousands. Kingsley took up the cause of clean water and drains as a young parson, and his novel Two Years Ago turns on an outbreak of cholera in a West Country fishing village. Tom has never washed. There is no water to be had in the court where he lives, and the river’s song in Chapter I runs clean in the hills, foul “By wharf and sewer and slimy bank,” and clean again in the sea. For Kingsley, who believed all his life in cold baths, fresh air and hard exercise, bodily cleanliness and moral cleanliness were never far apart.

Kingsley’s prejudices. The book is also full of contempt for whole peoples, written in the easy tone of a man who expects his readers to share it. The Irish get the worst of it. Writing home from Ireland in 1860, in a letter that his widow later printed, Kingsley said he was “haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country.” He went on to say that “to see white chimpanzees is dreadful,” and then began a clause “if they were black,” which shows that his contempt was racial as well as national. In the book an Irish gillie, or fishing guide, is a charming liar who knows no better, and in a legend told in Chapter V the Irish who would not listen to a saint are turned into apes.

The same habits run through the rest of the story. Tom in his soot is likened to a gorilla fleeing into the forest, a seal is compared in a crude racial simile to a fat old Black man, and the anti-slavery motto “a man and a brother” is made into a joke. Jews appear in stock phrases about money and false relics. Catholics are mocked through monks, inquisitors and popes, and Americans through Boston pedants, spirit-rappers and politicians, in chapters written while the American Civil War was being fought, and this edition prints all of it as Kingsley wrote it. The notes mark each such passage briefly and plainly, and say what it meant in his day.

What to Look For

The narrator. The most constant presence in the book is not Tom but the man telling his story, who speaks straight to “my dear little boy,” argues with imagined critics, quotes poets and professors, and breaks off to talk about fishing. He is never silent for long. He turns every so often from play to sermon and back, and he even insists that the whole thing is “all fun and pretence,” at the end of an argument he has plainly meant. Watch where that voice teases, where it preaches, and where it drops both and simply describes, because much of the book’s meaning lies in the shifts between them.

Seeing. The first great moment of the story takes place in front of a looking-glass, when Tom sees a little black figure in a strange room and finds that it is himself. From then on the book keeps asking who can see what. Some of its grown men cannot see what is in front of their eyes, while its children, like the child of the poet Wordsworth’s great ode on immortality, sometimes see more than their elders. Notice who is blind in this book, and why.

Transformation. Tom’s change into a water-baby is only one of the book’s many changes, and the stream is full of creatures that split their skins and come out as something else, caddis-worms that become flies and larvae that become dragonflies. The narrator uses them to argue that a change which seems impossible may be only unfamiliar. Behind this lies the naturalist’s delight in metamorphosis, the Christian hope of a new birth, and perhaps also the Roman poet Ovid’s old poem of bodies changed into new forms. Ask, at each change, what has caused it and what it means.