The Water-Babies

Shiny Wall The great wall of Arctic ice that rings the northern sea, named in Chapter VII as the first stage of a long journey, with a white gate that, the fairy says, has never yet been opened.

Peacepool The calm polar sea beyond Shiny Wall, “where the good whales go when they die” (ch. VII).

Mother Carey A great being of the northern sea, first named in Chapter VII and later seen as a peaked iceberg that becomes “a white marble lady.” Sailors called storm petrels Mother Carey’s chickens, and the petrels of the book are her own (ch. VII).

Tomtoddies The people of the island that the satirist Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver knew as Laputa, renamed “the Isle of Tomtoddies, all heads and no bodies,” children crammed for the idol Examination until they have turned into turnips and radishes (ch. VIII).

backstairs The fairy’s private stairs, which nobody may see. Men, the book says, have always paid and worshipped quacks who claimed to have their key (ch. VIII).

Characters

The sweep and his master. Tom, a sweep of ten in a northern coal town, can neither read nor write, has never washed, knows no prayers, and cries half the day and laughs the other half; he wants nothing more than to grow up a master sweep (ch. I). Mr. Grimes, his master, drinks, poaches and beats him every day. On the road he dips his head in a spring only to cool it, and then beats Tom for wanting to wash (ch. I).

Harthover. Sir John Harthover is the squire of Harthover Place, a hunting man of fifteen stone and the magistrate who has twice sent Tom to gaol, “a jolly, honest, sensible squire” (ch. I). My Lady, his wife, keeps to her window during the chase because her night-wig has fallen into the garden (ch. I). Their small daughter, the “little white lady” asleep in the white bedroom, first appears in Chapter I and is named Ellie in Chapter II.

The household. The great house has its own small crowd, among them a neat groom whom Tom despises, a keeper who jokes with Grimes about poaching, a housekeeper in a flowered dressing-gown and a stout old nurse who takes Tom for a thief (ch. I). An under gardener, a dairymaid, a groom from the stables, the old steward, a ploughman and the keeper join the chase.

On the road and in the dale. The Irishwoman walks beside Tom on the road and speaks with strange authority to Grimes (ch. I). In Vendale an old dame in a red petticoat keeps a little school, and though she will have no sweeps about her, she feeds a sick child when she sees one (ch. II).

Voices in the digressions. Cousin Cramchild and Aunt Agitate, the authors of books that deny fairies, are the first of many figures who exist only to be argued with (ch. II). The narrator himself is a character as well. Real people are named too, among them Owen, Huxley and Darwin, and the explorer Paul Du Chaillu, whose tales of the gorilla had been disbelieved (ch. II).

Creatures of stream and sea. Tom’s first neighbours are animals with minds of their own, among them caddis-worms, trout, a dragonfly and a boastful otter (ch. III), a courteous salmon and his wife (ch. III), and a very distinguished and very conceited lobster (ch. IV).

The man of science. Professor Ptthmllnsprts is first met on the seashore (ch. IV).

The fairies. Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, the stern fairy with the birch-rod, and her sister Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, the loveliest of fairies, appear in Chapter V. Mother Carey, a great presence of the Arctic sea, is named in Chapter VII.

Met on the voyage. The later chapters bring new figures thick and fast. Among them are the courtly King of the Herrings and the last of the Gairfowl, the great auk, a proud and snobbish old bird on a lonely rock (ch. VII), and a hard-worked giant of science in a land of satire (ch. VIII).

Places

The North. The story opens in “a great town in the North country,” a place of pits and courts, and moves to Harthover Place, Sir John’s great house, a jumble of every style of building, above whose park rises the grouse-moor of Harthover Fell (ch. I).

Vendale. Vendale is a deep green limestone dale with a stream, a cottage and a school, and the narrator refuses to say where it is (ch. II). Tom reaches it down Lewthwaite Crag, a limestone cliff (ch. II). The High Craven, the real limestone country of the West Riding, is where the narrator tells the reader to begin looking (ch. II).

The water. From the stream in Vendale the story follows the water down to a salmon river (ch. III), and then to the estuary, the bay and the open sea (ch. IV). St. Brandan’s Isle, the sunken land of the water-babies, lies far out in the western ocean (ch. V).

The far north. The later voyage runs by the Allalonestone, the Gairfowl’s lonely rock, and the Arctic island of Jan Mayen, towards Shiny Wall and the still water of Peacepool that lies beyond it (ch. VII).