The
Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby
The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children's novel by Charles
Kingsley. Written in 1862–63 as a serial for
Macmillan's Magazine, it was first published in its entirety in 1863. It was
written as part satire in support of Charles
Darwin's The Origin of Species. The book was extremely popular in England, and was a
mainstay of British children's literature for many decades, but eventually fell
out of favour in part due to its prejudices (common at the time) against Irish,
Jews, Catholics and Americans.[2]
Story
The
protagonist is Tom, a young chimney
sweep, who falls into a river after
encountering an upper-class girl named Ellie and being chased out of her house.
There he appears to drown and is transformed into a "water-baby",[3]
as he is told by a caddisfly—an
insect that sheds its skin—and begins his moral
education. The story is thematically
concerned with Christian redemption,
though Kingsley also uses the book to argue that England treats its poor badly,
and to question child labour,
among other themes.
Tom
embarks on a series of adventures and lessons, and enjoys the community of
other water-babies on Saint Brendan's Island once he proves himself a moral creature. The major
spiritual leaders in his new world are the fairies Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby (a
reference to the Golden Rule),
Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, and Mother Carey. Weekly, Tom is allowed the company of
Ellie, who became a water-baby after he did.
Grimes,
his old master, drowns as well, and in his final adventure, Tom travels to the
end of the world to attempt to help the man where he is being punished for his
misdeeds. Tom helps Grimes to find repentance, and Grimes will be given a
second chance if he can successfully perform a final penance. By proving his
willingness to do things he does not like, if they are the right things to do,
Tom earns himself a return to human form, and becomes "a great man of
science" who "can plan railways, and steam-engines, and electric
telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth". He and Ellie are united,
although the book states (perhaps jokingly) that they never marry, claiming
that in fairy tales, no one beneath the rank of prince and princess ever
marries.
The
book ends with the caveat that it is only a fairy tale, and the reader is to
believe none of it, "even if it is true."
Interpretation
In
the style of Victorian-era
novels, The Water-Babies is a didactic moral fable.
In it, Kingsley expresses many of the common prejudices of that time period,
and the book includes dismissive or insulting references to Americans,[4] Jews,[5] blacks,[6] and Catholics,[7] particularly the Irish.[8][9] These views may have played a role in the book's gradual
fall from popularity.
The
book had been intended in part as a satire, a tract against child
labour,[10] as well as a serious critique of the closed-minded approaches
of many scientists of the day[11] in their response to Charles
Darwin's ideas on evolution, which Kingsley had been one of the first to praise. He had
been sent an advance review copy of On the
Origin of Species, and wrote in his response of 18
November 1859 (four days before the book went on sale) that he had "long
since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to
disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species," and had "gradually
learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that
He created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful pro tempore
and pro loco, as to believe that He required a
fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He Himself had made", asking "whether the
former be not the loftier thought."[12]
In
the book, for example, Kingsley argues that no person is qualified to say that
something that they have never seen (like a human soul or a water baby) does not exist.
How do you know that? Have you been there to see?
And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that
there were none ... And no one has a right to say that no water babies
exist till they have seen no water babies existing, which is quite a different
thing, mind, from not seeing water babies.
In
his Origin of Species, Darwin
mentions that, like many others at the time, he thought that changed habits
produce an inherited effect, a concept now known as Lamarckism.[13] In The Water
Babies, Kingsley tells of a group of humans called the Doasyoulikes who
are allowed to do "whatever they like" so gradually lose the power of
speech, degenerate into gorillas,
and are shot by the African explorer Paul
Du Chaillu. He refers to the movement
to end slavery in mentioning that one of the
gorillas shot by Du Chaillu "remembered that his ancestors had once been
men, and tried to say, 'Am I Not A Man And A Brother?', but had forgotten how to use his tongue."[14]
The Water Babies
alludes to debates among biologists of its day, satirising what Kingsley had
previously dubbed the Great Hippocampus Question as the "Great hippopotamus test." At various
times the text refers to "Sir Roderick Murchison,
Professor (Richard) Owen,
Professor (Thomas Henry) Huxley, (and) Mr. Darwin", and thus they become explicitly
part of the story. In the accompanying illustrations by Linley
Sambourne, Huxley and Owen are caricatured,
studying a captured water baby. In 1892 Thomas Henry Huxley's five-year-old
grandson Julian
saw this engraving and wrote his grandfather a letter asking:
Dear Grandpater – Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did
you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Could I see it some
day? – Your loving Julian.[15]
Huxley
wrote back a letter (later evoked by the New York Sun's "Yes, Virginia, there
is a Santa Claus" in 1897):
My dear Julian – I could never make sure about that
Water Baby.
I have seen Babies in water and Babies in bottles;
the Baby in the water was not in a bottle and the Baby in the bottle was not in
water. My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby was a very kind man and
very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did –
There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the
same things.
When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the
great-deal seers, and see things more wonderful than the Water Babies where
other folks can see nothing.[15]
Adaptations
The
book was adapted into an animated film The Water Babies in 1978 starring James
Mason, Bernard
Cribbins and Billie
Whitelaw. Though many of the main elements
are there, the movie's storyline differs substantially from the book, with a
new sub-plot involving Tom saving the Water-Babies from imprisonment by a
kingdom of sharks.
It
was also adapted into a musical theatre version produced at the Garrick
Theatre in London, in 1902. The adaptation
was described as a "fairy play", by Rutland Barrington,
with music by Frederick Rosse,
Albert Fox, and Alfred Cellier.[16] The book was also produced as a play by Jason Carr and Gary
Yershon, mounted at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2003, directed by Jeremy
Sams, starring Louise
Gold, Joe
McGann, Katherine O'Shea, and Neil
McDermott.[citation needed]
The
story was also adapted into a radio series (BBC Audiobooks Ltd, 1998)[17]
featuring Timothy West,
Julia McKenzie,
and Oliver Peace as Tom.
A
2013 update for BBC Radio 4
written by Paul Farley
and directed by Emma Harding brought the tale to a newer age, with Tomi having
been trafficked
from Nigeria as a child
labourer.[18]
In
2014 it was adapted into a musical by Fiona Ross and Sue Colverd, with music by
David Last. A shortened version premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in
2014[19], with the full version being produced at the Playhouse
Theatre, Cheltenham in 2015 by performing arts students of the University of Gloucestershire. It is due to be performed, again by students, in the same
venue in June 2019.[20]
Notes
· Hale,
Piers J. (November 2013). "Monkeys into Men and Men into Monkeys: Chance
and Contingency in the Evolution of Man, Mind and Morals in Charles Kingsley's
Water Babies". Journal of the History of Biology. 46 (4): 551–597. doi:10.1007/s10739-012-9345-5.
· · Donoghue,
Denis (17
October 2013). "The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby,
by Charles Kingsley. The classic children's story is 150 years old". The Irish Times. Retrieved 25 September 2016.
· · Hoagwood, Terrence (Summer 1988).
"Kingsley's Young and Old". Explicator. 46 (4): 18. doi:10.1080/00144940.1988.9933841.
· · When Tom has
"everything that he could want or wish," the reader is warned that
sometimes this does bad things to people: "Indeed, it sometimes makes them
naughty, as it has made the people in America." Murderous crows that do
whatever they like are described as being like "American citizens of the
new school."
· · Jews are referred to
twice in the text, first as archetypal rich people ("as rich as a
Jew"), and then as a joking reference to dishonest merchants who sell fake
religious icons – "young ladies walk about with lockets of Charles the First's
hair (or of somebody else's, when the Jews' genuine stock is used up)".
· · The Powwow man is
said to have "yelled, shouted, raved, roared, stamped, and danced
corrobory like any black fellow," and a seal is described as looking like
a "fat old greasy negro."
· · "Popes"
are listed among Measles,
Famines, Despots,
and other "children of the four great bogies."
· · Ugly people are
described as "like the poor Paddies who eat potatoes"; an extended
passage discusses St. Brandan
among the Irish who liked "to brew potheen, and dance the pater o'pee, and knock each other over the head with shillelaghs,
and shoot each other from behind turf-dykes, and steal each other's cattle, and
burn each other's homes." One character (Dennis) lies and says whatever he
thinks others want to hear because "he is a poor Paddy, and knows no better."
The statement that Irishmen always lie is used to explain why "poor ould
Ireland does not prosper like England and Scotland."
· · Sandner, David (2004). Fantastic Literature:
A Critical Reader. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 328. ISBN 0-275-98053-7.
·
Holt, Jenny (September 2011).
"'A Partisan Defence of Children'? Kingsley's The Water-Babies
Re-Contextualized". Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 33 (4): 353–370. doi:10.1080/08905495.2011.598672.
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