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Charles Kingsley

The Water-Babies

Name: The Water-Babies
Author: Charles Kingsley

A Critical Edition of the 1863 Novel

The Water-BabiesChapter IV · Part 10

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English Edition · Branch 52 of 111

Chapter IV · Part 10

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The Water-Babies

p. 52

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, being a scholar and a man of sense, jumped at the notion; for he saw in it the one and only plan for abolishing Schedule D: but when he brought in his bill, most of the Irish members, and (I am sorry to say) some of the Scotch likewise, opposed it most strongly, on the ground that in a free country no man was bound either to understand himself or to let others understand him. So the bill fell through on the first reading; and the Chancellor, being a philosopher, comforted himself with the thought that it was not the first time that a woman had hit off a grand idea and the men turned up their stupid noses thereat.

Now the doctors had it all their own way; and to work they went in earnest, and they gave the poor professor divers and sundry medicines, as prescribed by the ancients and moderns, from Hippocrates to Feuchtersleben, as below, viz.—

1. Hellebore, to wit— Hellebore of Aeta. Hellebore of Galatia. Hellebore of Sicily. And all other Hellebores, after the method of the Helleborising Helleborists of the Helleboric era. But that would not do. Bumpsterhausen’s blue follicles would not stir an inch out of his encephalo digital region. 2. Trying to find out what was the matter with him, after the method of Hippocrates, Aretaeus, Celsus, Caelius Aurelianus, And Galen.

But they found that a great deal too much trouble, as most people have since; and so had recourse to—

3. Borage. Cauteries.

Boring a hole in his head to let out fumes, which (says Gordonius) “will, without doubt, do much good.” But it didn’t.

Bezoar stone. Diamargaritum. A ram’s brain boiled in spice. Oil of wormwood. Water of Nile. Capers. Good wine (but there was none to be got). The water of a smith’s forge. Hops. Ambergris. Mandrake pillows. Dormouse fat. Hares’ ears. Starvation. Camphor. Salts and senna. Musk. Opium. Strait-waistcoats. Bullyings. Bumpings. Blisterings. Bleedings. Bucketings with cold water. Knockings down. Kneeling on his chest till they broke it in, etc. etc.; after the medieval or monkish method: but that would not do. Bumpsterhausen’s blue follicles stuck there still.

Then—

4. Coaxing. Kissing. Champagne and turtle. Red herrings and soda water. Good advice. Gardening. Croquet. Musical soirées. Aunt Sally. Mild tobacco. The Saturday Review. A carriage with outriders, etc. etc.

After the modern method. But that would not do.

And if he had but been a convict lunatic, and had shot at the Queen, killed all his creditors to avoid paying them, or indulged in any other little amiable eccentricity of that kind, they would have given him in addition—

The healthiest situation in England, on Easthampstead Plain.

Free run of Windsor Forest.

The Times every morning.

A double-barrelled gun and pointers, and leave to shoot three Wellington College boys a week (not more) in case black game was scarce.

But as he was neither mad enough nor bad enough to be allowed such luxuries, they grew desperate, and fell into bad ways, viz.—

5. Suffumigations of sulphur. Herrwiggius his “Incomparable drink for madmen”:

Only they could not find out what it was.

Suffumigation of the liver of the fish …

Only they had forgotten its name, so Dr. Gray could not well procure them a specimen.

Metallic tractors. Holloway’s Ointment. Electro-biology. Valentine Greatrakes his Stroking Cure. Spirit-rapping. Holloway’s Pills. Table-turning. Morison’s Pills. Homoeopathy. Parr’s Life Pills. Mesmerism. Pure Bosh. Exorcisms, for which they read Maleus Maleficarum, Nideri Formicarium, Delrio, Wierus, etc.

But could not get one that mentioned water-babies.

Hydropathy. Madame Rachel’s Elixir of Youth. The Poughkeepsie Seer his Prophecies. The distilled liquor of addle eggs. Pyropathy.

As successfully employed by the old inquisitors to cure the malady of thought, and now by the Persian Mullahs to cure that of rheumatism.

Geopathy, or burying him. Atmopathy, or steaming him. Sympathy, after the method of Basil Valentine his Triumph of Antimony, and Kenelm Digby his Weapon-salve, which some call a hair of the dog that bit him. Hermopathy, or pouring mercury down his throat to move the animal spirits. Meteoropathy, or going up to the moon to look for his lost wits, as Ruggiero did for Orlando Furioso’s: only, having no hippogriff, they were forced to use a balloon; and, falling into the North Sea, were picked up by a Yarmouth herring-boat, and came home much the wiser, and all over scales. Antipathy, or using him like “a man and a brother.” Apathy, or doing nothing at all. With all other ipathies and opathies which Noodle has invented, and Foodle tried, since black-fellows chipped flints at Abbeville—which is a considerable time ago, to judge by the Great Exhibition.

152.Source editor’s annotationIncome tax, revived by Peel in 1842, was levied under schedules, and Schedule D, on the profits of trades and professions, was much resented. The Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1859 to 1866 was W. E. Gladstone, a classical scholar (Studies on Homer, 1858). The jibe at Irish and Scottish members plays on the stock images of Irish blarney and Scottish metaphysics.

153.Source editor’s annotationFrom the first physician to the latest. Hippocrates of Cos (fifth century BC) is the father of Greek medicine; Ernst von Feuchtersleben (1806-1849) was a Viennese physician and poet whose textbook of mental illness (1845) appeared in English in 1847 as The Principles of Medical Psychology, then the most modern authority on madness.

154.Source editor’s annotationHellebore was the classical cure for madness. The seer Melampus was said to have cured the mad daughters of Proetus with it, and the mad were sent to Anticyra on the Gulf of Corinth, famous for the plant. Pliny (Natural History XXV.21) grades hellebores by where they grow and puts the white hellebore of Mount Oeta first; Kingsley’s “Aeta” (1922 “Æta”) is Oeta. Much of the older half of this catalogue comes from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), whose second part collects the cures of melancholy.

155.Source editor’s annotationAretaeus of Cappadocia (probably second century AD) wrote classic Greek descriptions of mania and melancholia. Aulus Cornelius Celsus (first century AD) wrote the Latin De Medicina, whose third book treats insanity. Caelius Aurelianus (probably fifth century), from Sicca in North Africa, put the lost works of the Greek physician Soranus into Latin and condemned harsh treatment of the insane; the 1922 printing spells him Cœlius. Galen of Pergamum (AD 129-c. 216) laid down the medicine of the four humours that ruled for fourteen centuries. Burton names Galen, Caelius, Aretaeus and Celsus among the ancients who “extol and admire” black hellebore, and says Hippocrates wrote a book on it.

156.Source editor’s annotationBernard de Gordon, who taught medicine at Montpellier about 1300 and wrote the Lilium medicinae. Kingsley takes the phrase from Burton, who cites “Gordonius” for trying cauteries (burns made with hot irons to drain the humours) as a last resort, with the head “bored to let out fumes, which without doubt will do much good”. The boring is trepanning.

157.Source editor’s annotationBorage, bezoar stone, diamargaritum and ambergris all stand among Burton’s cordials for melancholy. A bezoar is a stony ball from the stomach of a goat or antelope, prized as an antidote; diamargaritum is an old medicinal confection of powdered pearls (Greek margarites, pearl). The ram’s brain is Burton’s recipe too, a ram’s head boiled and the brains taken out and spiced with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, mace and cloves.

158.Source editor’s annotationThese come from Burton’s cure of “hypochondriacal” melancholy, which was thought to rise from the spleen and belly. He cites Codronchus for oil of wormwood and Prosper Alpinus for the water of the Nile, and tells how Antonio Benivieni cured a man who had been splenetic for seven years with capers and the water of a smith’s forge. Burton knew no “more present remedy, than a cup of wine”.

159.Source editor’s annotationBurton’s remedies to procure sleep include pillows stuffed with wormwood, mandrake, henbane and roses, and anointing the soles of the feet with the fat of a dormouse, along with swine’s gall and hare’s ears. Hops, camphor, musk and opium were the everyday sedatives of Kingsley’s own time.

160.Source editor’s annotationFrom here to the kneeling on his chest the list is the old treatment of the insane by force, restraint, blistering, bleeding, cold-water shocks and beating by keepers. The abuses at Bethlem and the York Asylum came before a committee of the House of Commons in 1815-16, and the “non-restraint” system of Robert Gardiner Hill at Lincoln (1838) and John Conolly at Hanwell (from 1839) discredited the strait-waistcoat. Calling all this “the medieval or monkish method” is an anti-Catholic touch, since the worst recorded abuses were recent.

161.Source editor’s annotation“The modern method” is the moral treatment pioneered by William Tuke at the York Retreat (1796) and Philippe Pinel in Paris, which put kindness, occupation, gardening and amusement in place of chains; Kingsley stretches it to every genteel diversion. Croquet was the lawn game of the 1860s, and Aunt Sally a fairground game in which sticks are thrown to knock a clay pipe from a wooden old woman’s mouth.

162.Source editor’s annotationThe clever, sneering weekly founded in 1855 and nicknamed the “Saturday Reviler”. Reviewing Kingsley’s novel Two Years Ago in 1857, it coined the phrase “muscular Christianity”, which he disliked; prescribing it as a sedative is his revenge.

163.Source editor’s annotationEdward Oxford, who fired at Queen Victoria in 1840, was found insane and confined in Bethlem. Such “criminal lunatics” were to go to Broadmoor, the new asylum on the Berkshire heaths near Crowthorne, beside Windsor Forest and a few miles from Kingsley’s parish of Eversley; it received its first patients in 1863, and Kingsley mocks its healthy site and comforts. Wellington College, the public school opened in 1859 as a memorial to the Duke, stands close by; Kingsley corresponded with its first Master, E. W. Benson. Black game is the black grouse.

164.Source editor’s annotationFrom the Book of Tobit, in the Apocrypha (chapters 6-8). On the angel Raphael’s advice Tobias burns the heart and liver of a fish from the Tigris, and the smoke drives away the demon Asmodeus. Tobit never names the fish, hence the joke; the 1922 printing marks the gap with asterisks. Dr Gray is probably John Edward Gray (1800-1875), Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum and a tireless namer of species.

165.Source editor’s annotationElisha Perkins’s patent “tractors” (1796), two pointed metal rods drawn over the body to draw off disease, sold at five guineas. In 1799 John Haygarth of Bath got the same cures with dummy tractors of wood, an early demonstration of what is now called the placebo effect.

166.Source editor’s annotationPatent medicines, the most advertised goods of the age. Thomas Holloway (1800-1883) sold his ointment from 1837 and his pills from 1839 and spent fortunes on advertising. James Morison, “the Hygeist”, sold purging vegetable pills from about 1825, and one of his agents was indicted for manslaughter in 1836 after a fatal overdose. Parr’s Life Pills (1841), named after “Old Parr”, who was said to have lived to 152, paid for the founding of the Illustrated London News (see the note in ch. II).

167.Source editor’s annotationA craze of 1850-51, brought to Britain by the American lecturer G. W. Stone. It was a stage form of mesmerism in which subjects stared at a metal disc and were then made to lose speech or sight, or to take a walking-stick for a snake. Mesmerism, below, is the “animal magnetism” of F. A. Mesmer (1734-1815), which a French royal commission found in 1784 to work by imagination alone; in England John Elliotson championed it.

168.Source editor’s annotationValentine Greatrakes, the Irish “Stroker”, who from 1662 claimed to cure scrofula and other ills by stroking with his hands, and addressed his Brief Account (1666) of his cures to Robert Boyle. “Greatrakes his” is the old way of writing the possessive (Greatrakes’s), used again in this list with Herrwiggius, Basil Valentine, Kenelm Digby and the Poughkeepsie Seer.

169.Source editor’s annotationMessages rapped out by spirits, the American craze begun by the Fox sisters in 1848 (see the note on Boston in ch. II). Table-turning, further down the list, was explained by Michael Faraday in a letter to The Times (30 June 1853); the tables, he showed, were moved by the sitters’ own unconscious pressure. Compare the spirits thumping on the table in ch. II.

170.Source editor’s annotationSamuel Hahnemann’s system (Organon, 1810), in which like cures like and remedies are given in infinitesimal doses. It was fashionable in England, where the London Homoeopathic Hospital was founded in 1849.

171.Source editor’s annotationThe unbelieving professor is treated as possessed. The Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”, 1486), chiefly by the Dominican Heinrich Kramer, was the notorious witch-hunter’s manual (the text misspells Malleus). Johannes Nider’s Formicarius (“The Ant-Heap”, c. 1437) contains an early treatise on witchcraft; Nideri Formicarium is Latin for Nider’s Formicarius. The Jesuit Martin Delrio’s Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (1599-1600) was the standard Catholic demonology. Johann Weyer (Wierus), whose De praestigiis daemonum (1563) argued that most accused witches were deluded and melancholy, is an ironical addition.

172.Source editor’s annotationThe water-cure of Vincenz Priessnitz of Gräfenberg in Silesia, with wet sheets, cold douches and much water-drinking. James Wilson and James Manby Gully opened establishments at Malvern in 1842, and Darwin took the cure there in 1849.

173.Source editor’s annotationSarah Rachel Russell, also called Leverson (c. 1814-1880), known as Madame Rachel, who sold costly cosmetics and Arabian baths at 47a New Bond Street under the slogan “Beautiful for Ever”. She was already notorious from lawsuits and was convicted of fraud in 1868. The “Elixir of Youth” seems to be Kingsley’s own name for her wares.

174.Source editor’s annotationAndrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910), the American “Poughkeepsie Seer”, whose trance-lectures, dictated under mesmerism, were published as The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (1847). He was a forerunner of Spiritualism.

175.Source editor’s annotationKingsley’s mock -pathies (Greek pathos, suffering), on the model of homoeopathy and hydropathy. Pyropathy is cure by fire (pyr), with a hit at the Inquisition’s burning of heretics; geopathy by earth; atmopathy by vapour (atmos), glancing at the Turkish-bath craze of the early 1860s; hermopathy by quicksilver, the metal of Hermes or Mercury; meteoropathy by going aloft. The “animal spirits” were the subtle fluid once thought to run in the nerves. The 1922 printing has Mollahs for Mullahs.

176.Source editor’s annotationTwo writers on cure by sympathy. “Basil Valentine”, supposedly a fifteenth-century Benedictine alchemist and probably a pseudonym, is the author of The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (published 1604), which praised antimony as a universal medicine. Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) claimed in 1658 to heal wounds by applying his “powder of sympathy” to a bloodied bandage; the older weapon-salve was spread on the weapon that made the wound. The hair of the dog that bit you is the proverbial cure by like.

177.Source editor’s annotationKingsley’s slip. In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516-32) it is Astolfo, not Ruggiero, who rides the hippogriff, a winged horse with a griffin’s head, to the Earthly Paradise and goes on to the moon, where he finds Orlando’s lost wits in a flask (canto XXXIV). The balloon is topical; in September 1862 James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell nearly died on a record ascent for the British Association. Yarmouth was the herring port of the North Sea, hence the scales.

178.Source editor’s annotationThe anti-slavery motto “Am I not a man and a brother?”, from Josiah Wedgwood’s medallion of 1787 for the campaign against the slave trade. Antipathy is dislike, the opposite of the sympathy tried above, so pairing it with the motto is ironic.

179.Source editor’s annotationJacques Boucher de Perthes found worked flint hand-axes with the bones of extinct animals in the gravels of the Somme at Abbeville. British geologists accepted them in 1859, and Lyell’s Antiquity of Man (February 1863) made the great age of mankind common knowledge. “Black-fellows”, the settlers’ name for Aboriginal Australians, carries Kingsley’s assumption that the first men were like the “savages” of his own day. The Great Exhibition is that of 1851 in Hyde Park, or perhaps the International Exhibition held at South Kensington from May to November 1862, while Kingsley was writing.

About This Reading Edition

Charles Kingsley’s fairy tale follows Tom, a mistreated chimney-sweep, into a new life in river and sea. The complete story combines adventure, natural history, moral education, and Victorian satire. This annotated English edition includes the dedication, all eight chapters, the Moral, an introduction and reading guide, 348 explanatory notes, and the full commentary and textual apparatus.

Historical Text

The story first appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1862–63 and as a Macmillan book in 1863. This edition follows Standard Ebooks’ transcription of the 1922 printing, with six readings restored from the first edition. The Note on the Text explains its spelling, punctuation, and corrections. Chapters, poems, songs, and indented catalogues retain their supplied arrangement; page numbers belong to the Diotimos reader.

About This Edition

Diotimos Editions prepared the introduction, reading guide, key words, character descriptions, notes, and commentary for this English edition. The explanatory notes accompany the passages they illuminate. Later sections include an Afterword, a chapter outline, critical reception, further reading, and textual and source notes. The complete supplied text is preserved, with reader branches ending at paragraph boundaries and the original chapter sequence intact.

Rights

Charles Kingsley’s historical text is in the public domain. The introduction, notes, and apparatus are © 2026 Diotimos Editions. Standard Ebooks supplies the copy-text transcription under CC0, and the linked historical printings identify its witnesses. The six restored readings and other editorial decisions are documented in the Note on the Text and Textual Notes. This edition is published with the site owner’s authorization.