The Water-Babies

Cleanliness and the soul. The Irishwoman’s warning on the road, “Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be,” is the book’s first law, and washing in it is never only a matter of soap. In Chapter III the narrator states his doctrine plainly, that “your soul makes your body, just as a snail makes his shell.” He sets it against two errors, the materialist’s belief that the body makes the soul “as if a steam-engine could make its own coke,” and the belief that the soul is stuck in the body like a pin in a pincushion. It is an old Platonic idea. The Elizabethan poet Spenser put it into verse, and Kingsley calls it the “doctrine of this wonderful fairy tale.”

Nature and the moral law. Two fairy sisters, who appear in Chapter V, govern much of the middle of the book, and their names are moral laws. Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, whose name means be done by as you did, repays every creature exactly as it has treated others. Her sister, Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, carries the Golden Rule in hers. The first says that she works like a machine and cannot help punishing, as a law of nature cannot help working, and in this Kingsley states his belief that the laws of nature and the laws of conscience are one. Watch how the two sisters share their work, and what the book thinks punishment is for.

Science and its satire. Kingsley mocks scientists far more than he mocks science, and his narrator calls Science a great fairy, likely to be “queen of all the fairies for many a year to come.” The book is full of accurate natural history. His targets are the scientist who will believe only what he can see and handle, the lecturer who says “cannot,” the anatomist who thinks a fold of the brain can settle what a man is, and the teacher who crams children with facts. Ask of each satirical passage whether it attacks knowledge or the vanity of those who have it.

The catalogues. Again and again the narrator breaks into a list, and Harthover, built “in nineteen different styles,” has its floors, wings and staircases given their styles one by one, from Anglo-Saxon attics to offices copied from the Pavilion at Brighton. A doctrine is called orthodox, rational, nominalistic, realistic, seductive and productive, and Chapter IV runs through dozens of cures. The manner is that of the French comic writer Rabelais, whose name Kingsley drops in Chapter III and from whom he took the Cocqcigrues, and like Rabelais’s lists these are jokes of heaping up. They are meant to be heard.

The songs and epigraphs. Each chapter opens with an epigraph, four of them from Wordsworth, one each from Spenser and the poet Coleridge, and two from the American poet Longfellow, and together they sketch the book’s faith. Nature teaches, children see truly, and duty is stern but kind. Kingsley’s own songs are set into the story, beginning with the river’s song that closes Chapter I, and they often say in a few lines what the chapter around them says at length. Read each epigraph before its chapter and again after it.