The Water-Babies

The Other-end-of-Nowhere proves very like home. Tom passes people who make worse books out of bad ones, wise men who teach spirit-rapping while their house burns, a giant naturalist who runs backward, and children crammed for examinations until they have turned into turnips. In a vast prison he finds Grimes stuck fast in a chimney and beaten every evening by a hail that is his mother’s tears, frozen by his cold heart, for she was the old dame of Vendale, and she is dead. Grimes weeps at last. His own tears wash away the soot and the mortar, and the fairy, speaking in the Irishwoman’s voice, sends him on ticket-of-leave to sweep out the crater of Etna and carries Tom up her secret backstairs to St. Brandan’s Isle. There Ellie, now a woman, has waited for him many hundred years. When the two look at the fairy she is both sisters, Mother Carey and the Irishwoman at once, but her name cannot yet be read. Because Tom has done the thing he did not like, he may go home with Ellie on Sundays. He grows into a man of science, nobody marries, and his dog becomes the dog-star. The Moral adds that efts are water-babies who would not wash or learn, but who may yet climb back.

Themes

Cleanliness and the Soul

Dirt in this book is always three things at once, and the story never lets them come apart. It is a fact of public health, for fever breeds in foul water, and the fairy states the rule as flatly as a medical officer, that “dirt breeds fever” whether one knows it or not (ch. V). It is a moral fact. Grimes wants to be foul, and at the spring on the Harthover road he cools his head in the clean water and then beats the boy who wants to wash in it (ch. I). And it is a spiritual fact, since Tom’s longing to be clean comes with the sound of church-bells and ends in a new birth (ch. II).

Dirt matters only once it is seen. Tom has lived in soot all his life, and he learns that he is dirty only in the white room at Harthover, where the sight of himself in the glass makes him “burst into tears with shame and anger” (ch. I). Shame is where cleanliness begins. Grimes, asked by the Irishwoman whether he is not ashamed of himself, answers “No, nor never was yet” (ch. I), and she tells him that if he had ever been ashamed he would long ago have gone over into Vendale. There, as the last chapter reveals, his mother kept her school and prayed for him.

Even so, washing the body is not enough. Tom in the stream is clean in body and still a tormentor of caddises, and he has to be made clean again in the sea, by the pebble, the prickles and Ellie’s lessons, until “his skin was smooth and clean again” (ch. VI). Grimes is cleaned last and hardest, by his own tears (ch. VIII). The Moral’s parting advice, to wash in cold water “like a true Englishman”, is half a joke and half a creed, for outward washing is the sign, and the inward washing it stands for has to be done by the soul itself.

Transformation

The book is a catalogue of changes. Caddis becomes caperer, an angler’s name for one of the larger caddis-flies, larva becomes dragonfly, chimney-sweep becomes water-baby, skippers become fulmars, and a terrier becomes first a water-dog and then a star. The narrator of Chapter II turns the catalogue into an argument. If nature turns water-creatures into land-creatures every day, he reasons, a land-baby might become a water-baby, and man, the crown of creation, might undergo a change more wonderful still. Reason and Scripture, he adds, tell us “that that transformation is not the last” (ch. II). This is the method of the theologian Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham, whose Analogy of Religion (1736) argued from the changes of insects to a life after death, and whom the Moral names with affection.

Every change in the book leads either up or down, and the same laws can carry a creature either way. The fairy warns of “a downhill as well as an uphill road” (ch. VI). The Doasyoulikes sink into apes by doing only what they like (ch. VI), and the proud professor goes mad before he comes back sadder and wiser (ch. IV). Since the soul makes the body, as the book says twice, every outward change records an inward one, whether down into the beast or up again into the man. Tom’s prickles are his greed made visible.

The deepest change is the plainest. Tom begins as a boy who dreams of growing up to bully apprentices, and he ends as “a tall man” (ch. VIII), fit at last to go home with Ellie, while the Moral leaves even the efts a road back to manhood. Their way back lies through becoming water-babies and then land-babies again, and by the narrator’s reckoning it takes 379,423 years, nine months and some days of very hard work and very hard washing, which is a long time but not for ever. The Doasyoulikes waited until they were “past all cure” (ch. VI), but Tom, the professor, the skippers and Grimes are all offered a way up again.

Law and Punishment

Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid is the law of consequences with a face. She cannot help punishing, she says, because she works by machinery, like an engine, wound up so long ago that she has forgotten when. Ignorance is no shield, for fire burns the child who does not know that fire burns (ch. V). Yet her law is not blind, since it weighs what each offender knew. Those who were only stupid and impatient she punishes until they learn patience, while the cruel masters who knew that they were doing wrong, Grimes among them, are kept in another place altogether (ch. V). Her punishments are medicine, and the professor’s madness comes from a fairy who is “most severe with the best people” because they are likeliest to be cured (ch. IV).