The Water-Babies

Forgiveness is instant and complete, but it does not undo what has been done. The fairy forgives Tom the moment he confesses of his own accord, and when he asks her to take away the prickles as well she answers “You put them there yourself, and only you can take them away” (ch. VI). The same rule holds for Grimes. He is stuck in his chimney in “the place where everybody must help themselves” (ch. VIII), where Tom cannot shift a single brick and his mother’s tears only beat on him as hail, and his release comes by his own tears. It is conditional, and it sends him to Etna among men “working out their time” (ch. VIII).

Law has a sister. Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, the Golden Rule in person, comes on Sundays with love and stories, and her ugly sister says of her that “she begins where I end” (ch. V), yet both give Tom the same hard answer about Ellie’s home (ch. VI). At the end they prove to be one fairy. The book’s moral order is neither sentimental nor vindictive, for justice and love are two faces of one law, and that law seeks the cure of the offender as well as justice for the child he hurt.

Science and Wonder

The book mocks scientists more than science, as the Introduction explains, and its later chapters show what Kingsley thought a man of science ought to be, drawing the portrait in two men and a boy. The professor is the warning. He tells a child that there are no water-babies “Because there ain’t”, nets one a moment later, and then denies it to her face, telling her she “must have dreamt of water-babies” (ch. IV). The narrator names his real disease as “pride and vainglory” (ch. IV), and the professor is cured only when he writes a book against his own opinions.

The giant of the land of Hearsay is the professor redeemed. Lean, seedy and hard-worked, laden with nets and bottles, he runs backward after his specimens because he is “one of the sons of Epimetheus” (ch. VIII), the Titan of Greek myth whose name means afterthought. He brings down the roof of an idol temple without even noticing, having sat on it to study his insects, while the priests fly out of the doors and windows like rabbits before a ferret. Honest looking destroys idols. Mother Carey makes creatures by letting them make themselves, and the sons of Epimetheus do lasting work because they look back at what has already happened. Tom learns their way by walking backward to the Other-end-of-Nowhere, and he ends as “a great man of science” (ch. VIII).

Wonder is not credulity. Spirit-rapping and table-turning are mocked from the second chapter to the last, where the wise men at “the hub”, as Bostonians called their city, teach spirit-rapping while their house burns over their heads (ch. VIII). Even Tom, grown into a man of science, cannot tell why a hen’s egg does not turn into a crocodile, nor two or three other little things that no one will know till the coming of the Cocqcigrues, which is to say never. The joke carries the doctrine. Knowledge may grow without limit and still leave untouched the mystery on which it rests.

Education and Its Discontents

Tom begins with no schooling at all, and the book is full of bad teachers. The Government pupil-teacher of Chapter III derives amphibious, confidently and wrongly, from “amphi, a fish, and bios, a beast”, cruel schoolmasters are birched on the fairy’s Fridays (ch. V), and those who frighten children into confession are set beside inquisitors (ch. VI). The water-fairies of the stream are forbidden to teach Tom (ch. III). He must learn by experience, and the narrator will not even say why Tom meets the water-babies only after freeing the lobster, because “It is not good for little boys to be told everything” (ch. V).

The Isle of Tomtoddies is the satire at full stretch. There, on the island that Gulliver knew as Laputa, children crammed for the examinations that the Introduction describes have turned into turnips and radishes, and one of them bursts with general information (ch. VIII). Kingsley sets two better teachers against the crammers. On the island lies the “respectable old stick” of Roger Ascham, the Tudor schoolmaster who pleaded for gentleness, and it explains to Tom what has gone wrong (ch. VIII). Ellie teaches him by love, with lessons that rise clear, “like the Test out of Overton Pool” (ch. VI). Opposite both stands the Powwow man of Oldwivesfabledom, who frightens a small boy into a fit until Tom and his dog rout him (ch. VIII).

The book’s own teaching is sly. It mocks the improving books of Cousin Cramchild and Aunt Agitate, praises one of its own anecdotes for having “no moral whatsoever” (ch. V), and then ends with a Moral, and the contradiction is deliberate. Kingsley wanted a book that teaches as nature teaches, by letting the reader find things out for himself, and he could not quite resist telling the reader what to find.

Nature, Class and Race

The social world of the book is ranked, and Kingsley sees its cruelties clearly. The river’s song follows the water from the hills to “the smoky town in its murky cowl” (ch. I), and Tom’s list of bad masters is a list of trades, from the butties who beat collier-boys to the nailers and the master sweeps (ch. V). Cruelty is handed down from master to boy. Yet the order itself goes unquestioned, since Sir John is a good squire, Ellie remains “a lady born” (ch. VI), and no one in a fairy tale marries below the rank of a prince, which keeps the sweep and the squire’s daughter apart.