Review: The Water-Babies
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 9, 2014
The Water-Babies is a fairy tale. As the author tells us, “There must be fairies; for this is a fairy tale: and how can one have a fairy tale if there are no fairies?” But the main character isn’t a fairy, he’s a young, ill-treated chimney sweep named Tom who falls into the river and becomes a water-baby.Being a water-baby, being exactly and only 3.87902 inches long, and being invisible to normal folk, Tom sees his new watery world in ways we can’t. There are observations on the evolution of sea life and on what people should do to protect the aquatic and marine environment. We are told to deplore those cases “where men are wasteful and dirty, and let sewers run into the sea instead of putting the stuff on the fields like thrifty reasonable souls.”Tom meets other water-babies and finds that, like him, they are children who have “come to grief by ill-usage or ignorance or neglect.” He continues his journey out into the ocean, meeting strange and wonderful denizens of the sea floor. His guides and mentors are two fairies, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, and Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby. Everywhere he gains new ideas about the land he left behind. He learns, sadly, that there are too many doctors “who still fancy that a baby’s inside is much like a Scotch grenadier’s.” He also discovers how much education has been improved, “for in the stupid old time, you must understand, children were taught to know one thing, and to know it well; but in these enlightened new times they are taught to know a little about everything, and to know it all ill; which is a great deal pleasanter and easier and therefore quite right.”The Water-Babies is a remarkable little novel, beautifully descriptive of the natural world, that speaks moral lessons to children and social reform to adults. Part fairy tale and part satire in the mold of Gulliver’s Travels, it is Christian but progressive, supporting Darwin and various social movements. Kingsley seems not to have had much faith in democracy, though, parodying American government as an assembly of crows, and there are other slurs of ethnic and national groups that may have cost this book its place among children’s classics. But it’s still a delight and a surprise to read.