The Water-Babies

The efts. The eft haunts Tom from the start. The otter insists that he is one (ch. III), the fairy warns him that he might have ended as one (ch. VI), and the Moral explains that efts are water-babies gone wrong, who “hang about in dirty ponds, and live in the mud” (Moral). The eft is the self Tom might have become, and Kingsley still asks the child to pity efts and not to throw stones at them.

The backstairs. The fairy’s secret stairs lead from the prison to the island, from purgation to paradise, and no one may see them. People have always paid quacks who claimed to hold the key, and in Chapter VIII the fairy parodies their prayer, a litany of adjectives that begs to be saved “from the consequences of our own actions, and from the cruel fairy, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid!” The stairs are real, but not for sale. They save no one from what he has done, and Tom is carried up them in an instant, blindfold, only after his work in the prison is finished.

The Metaphysical Layer

This section keeps apart two things that are easily confused, Kingsley’s own doctrine and this edition’s reflection on it. The first two paragraphs set out the doctrine, in the words of his letters, his sermons and the book itself. The parallels that follow, from Plato, Plotinus and Apuleius, are analogies rather than known sources, and the closing paragraphs read the story’s water and fairies by the Bible and by the baptismal faith that Kingsley preached.

Kingsley’s own doctrine. In a letter to his teacher, the theologian F. D. Maurice, Kingsley said that he had tried to show children and grown folks “a quite miraculous and divine element underlying all physical nature”. He called the book a parable, wrapped in foolery so that an unbelieving generation might swallow the pill. Chapter III announces the book’s doctrine, that the soul makes the body, and Chapter VI repeats it for Tom’s prickles with the words “I am in serious, solemn earnest”, which no reader should miss. On punishment, story and preacher agree. In a sermon on salvation printed in 1855 Kingsley said that eternal death was not merely a torture of fire and worms beyond the grave, but a state of the soul, to love no one and to be shut in one’s own spite. That is Grimes in his chimney, whose heart “freezes everything that comes near him” (ch. VIII). In a sermon of 1867 he gave a sympathetic hearing to educated men who could not believe that punishment was endless, though he did not declare himself one of them.

Making and transmigration. The letter to the naturalist Charles Darwin quoted in the Introduction shows Kingsley ready from the first to see evolution as God’s way of making, and in a sermon for Trinity Sunday in 1868 he praised the wisdom that can make things make themselves. Mother Carey had already put that sermon into a fairy’s mouth. The fulmars are the book’s one plain case of transmigration, the passing of souls into animal bodies, for they are “the spirits of the old Greenland skippers” (ch. VII), turned into birds for their greed and cruelty. Their king, the explorer Hendrick Hudson, will serve “till I’ve worked out my time” (ch. VII), and here transmigration is a sentence to be served out, a fable of moral cause and effect.

Souls that take the bodies their habits earn. The philosopher Plato gives the nearest ancient parallel for these changes. In the Phaedo (81d-82b) Plato’s Socrates says that souls weighed down by the body wander among tombs, and are then bound into natures that match the habits of their former life, gluttons and drunkards into asses, and the violent into wolves and hawks. Decent citizens who were good only by habit, without philosophy, become bees, wasps or ants. The Timaeus (91d-92c) gives the same law a cosmic scale. Light-minded men become birds, those who ignored philosophy become four-footed beasts with their heads drawn down to the earth, and the most stupid and unclean of all become creatures of the water. Creatures pass into one another, the dialogue concludes, by the loss or the gain of reason (92c). The fairy’s warning that she can “turn men into beasts” by the laws that turn beasts into men (ch. VI) is Plato’s sentence restated in the language of evolution.

The inversion of water. Kingsley turns one part of this upside down. For the Timaeus (92b) water is the lowest dwelling of the most unclean souls, and in the Phaedo (69c) the uninitiated lie in the mire, but Kingsley keeps the mire for his efts and makes running water the place of cleansing. The sea becomes the nursery where cleansed souls grow. He also changes the way back, for Plato’s souls rise again only by regaining reason, while Kingsley’s efts may climb back by work and washing. And where Plato’s purification parts the soul from the body (Phaedo 67c-d), Kingsley’s remakes the body.