The Water-Babies

Nature, like the poor, suffers from human greed. The great auk has been hunted out of existence (ch. VII), the whalers are turned into fulmars as their punishment, and Tom’s moral progress consists largely in learning not to torment creatures who cannot answer back. Some modern readers have found in this an early environmental conscience.

The Introduction sets out the book’s contempt for the Irish, for Black people, for Jews, Catholics and Americans, and it quotes the letter from Ireland in which Kingsley showed the same mind, so the point need not be laboured here. What the whole book shows, read to its end, is how deeply that contempt is bound into its central doctrine. If the soul makes the body, then a coarse face is the sign of a coarse soul, and the ape becomes the picture of every people Kingsley despised. So the Irish who would not hear St. Brandan “were changed into gorillas” (ch. V). The efts of the Moral are marked in the very features that the racial anthropology of the day measured, since their “skulls grow flat, their jaws grow out” (Moral). The same doctrine that makes the book hopeful makes it cruel, because it reads character in the body. Yet the fairy who guards Tom walks the road as a poor Irishwoman, and the book’s highest power turns out to wear the face of the people it mocks most, though whether Kingsley saw the irony is not recorded.

Symbolism

Water and washing. Water takes every form in the book, and each form has its meaning. There is the spring that Grimes fouls, the stream of the new birth, the river that runs through the town, the sea, the polar ice, the hail of frozen tears, and at last the efts’ dirty pond. The river’s song gives the plan, for it ends with the river losing itself in the sea “Like a soul that has sinned and is pardoned again” (ch. I). The whole book follows the water down to that sea, which, as the narrator reports, some wise men call “the mother of all living things” (ch. IV).

The looking-glass. The great mirror at Harthover is where Tom’s history begins, because it is where he first sees himself. The book is full of seeing and not seeing, for the fairies may not let Tom see them, the steamer’s passengers cannot see him because “their eyes were not opened” (ch. VII), and he sees no water-babies until he has done a kindness. Mother Carey turns the mirror into a method. By looking behind him Tom will know what is coming, “as plainly as if you saw it in a looking-glass” (ch. VII), and at the end the fairy’s own eyes become the glass in which her name is written.

The chimney and soot. The chimney is the narrow dark way of Tom’s labour and the soot the outward sign of an inner state, so when Tom comes down a chimney into a white room, the fall begins his self-knowledge. His smudge stays on Lewthwaite Crag (ch. II). Grimes’s punishment is his own trade turned on him, for he is stuck in a chimney and complains of the lighted straw that he himself once put under Tom (ch. VIII). His sentence to sweep out Etna makes a volcano the chimney of the world, and sets a sweep to clean it.

The Irishwoman’s changing forms. The figure who warns Grimes at the spring is a tramp in a grey shawl, the lowest person on an English road. She is also the Queen of the fairies of the stream, the voice that speaks to Grimes in the prison, the ugly sister and the lovely one, and Mother Carey on her throne of ice. Wherever Tom goes, she is there first. Her many forms say that providence is not seen whole in this life, and that it wears the faces people least expect, the barefoot tramp by the roadside spring and the ugly old woman with the birch-rod.

Shiny Wall. The polar ice-barrier is the book’s image of a limit that cannot be passed. Its foot is strewn with the wrecks of brave men who died searching for a gate that was never opened, and readers in 1863 would have thought of the explorer Sir John Franklin, whose lost expedition’s fate had been confirmed only in 1859. There is no gate. Tom goes under, not through, swimming seven days and nights in darkness at the bottom of the sea before he comes up into light and clear water, and the way on lies down and through the dark.

Mother Carey making things make themselves. At the still centre of Peacepool sits the grandest old lady Tom has ever seen, a peaked iceberg that turns into a marble queen, and creatures stream away from her by millions, yet she does nothing that looks like work. “I sit here and make them make themselves,” she says (ch. VII). She is older than anything except the difference between right and wrong, and she is the picture of a creation that goes on growing from within. At the end Ellie sits in her very pose, with her chin upon her hand (ch. VIII), and the echo prepares the revelation.