The Water-Babies

Key Words, Characters and Places

Key Words

Kingsley coins words freely, borrows others from old books and gives ordinary words odd new jobs, and the twenty headwords below are the ones that matter most, grouped by the chapter in which the book first uses them. Each entry says how the word is first used and in which chapter. It leaves later meanings for the reader to discover, and the footnotes refer back to these entries with the words see Key Words.

chimney-sweep A small boy sent up inside the flues of chimneys to brush out the soot for his master, as Tom is on the first page, “a little chimney-sweep, and his name was Tom.” He is dirty, beaten, unschooled and unpaid, and he dreams of becoming a “master sweep” with boys of his own to bully (ch. I). The historical term climbing boy never appears in the book.

Irishwoman The “poor Irishwoman” whom Tom and Grimes overtake on the road to Harthover, tall, handsome and barefoot, in a grey shawl and a crimson petticoat, who walks with Tom and tells him about the sea (ch. I). She seems to know far too much about Grimes, and after warning them both she vanishes.

water-baby A tiny human child who lives in the water. When the fairies make Tom one, after he goes into the stream to wash, he is about four inches long and breathes through a frill of gills, and the narrator defends the idea by setting it beside the land-babies that everyone knows (ch. II).

eft An old word for a newt. The young newt, still living in the water, has feathery external gills, and the book first uses the word to picture Tom’s new gills, “just like those of a sucking eft,” that is, of an infant newt (ch. II).

Cocqcigrues Imaginary creatures whose coming means never. Things will stay unknown “until the coming of the Cocqcigrues,” when, the narrator adds, “man shall be the measure of all things,” a joke on the Greek sophist Protagoras, who said so in earnest (ch. II). The creatures and the joke come from the coquecigrues of Rabelais.

Cousin Cramchild The author of question-and-answer books for children called Conversations, who teaches that there are no fairies and was raised in Boston (ch. II). His name says what he does to children. He may glance at the American writer Samuel Griswold Goodrich, known as Peter Parley, whose improving books set out to replace fairy tales.

Aunt Agitate A lady author of improving Arguments on political economy, who also says that there are no fairies, and who stands for all the earnest writers of the day who turned economics into moral tales for the young (ch. II).

your soul makes your body The one teaching that the narrator states in so many words (ch. III). It means that a creature’s inner life shapes its outward form, so that character shows in the body.

Professor Ptthmllnsprts A kindly naturalist, “a very wise man indeed,” with an absurd pedigree and a longer title, who holds that no one need believe in anything that he cannot see or touch (ch. IV). He denies that water-babies exist. His name is usually read as Put-them-all-in-spirits, the collector’s way of preserving specimens in alcohol.

hippopotamus major Kingsley’s pun on the hippocampus minor, the small part of the brain that Owen said only man possesses. The professor has declared “that apes had hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have,” and the narrator mocks the notion of a hippopotamus test that could settle what makes us human (ch. IV). The animal itself first strays in during a pupil-teacher’s comic definition in Chapter III.

Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid A great fairy, first named in Chapter V as one who “reads the news very carefully every morning, and especially the police cases,” and soon seen in person, in black bonnet and green spectacles, with a hooked nose and a birch-rod. She calls herself “the ugliest fairy in the world,” and she repays like with like (ch. V).

Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby The sister of Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, “the loveliest fairy in the world,” who comes on Sundays and whose name is the Golden Rule (ch. V).

St. Brandan’s Isle The home of the water-babies, “St. Brandan’s fairy isle,” a sunken land in the western ocean which Kingsley identifies with the philosopher Plato’s Atlantis, and where, the book says, the Irish saint Brandan taught the water-babies before falling asleep under its cedars (ch. V). Brandan was a sixth-century abbot, famous for a legendary voyage.

Doasyoulikes The idle nation of a picture-book that the fairy shows Tom, who leave the land of Hardwork for the land of Readymade so that they need never work again (ch. VI). Their name is the whole of their philosophy.

Other-end-of-Nowhere A far-off place, “nine hundred and ninety-nine million miles away”, whose people “pretend to know” what no one can describe; the narrator adds, in passing, that Tom “went afterwards” there (ch. VI).