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The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children's novel by Charles Kingsley. Written in –63 as a serial for Macmillan's Magazine, it was first.
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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.

Fairy Tale Fridays: The Water-Babies

Doasyouwouldbedoneby a reference to the Golden Rule , Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, and Mother Carey.


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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.

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.

Reverend Richard Coles on The Water Babies: how a vicar saved a chimney sweep

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 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.

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. 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? He was a 19th Century English version of a renaissance man: a novelist, professor, poet, historian, political activist, and devout clergyman who saw no philosophical dilemma in terms of balancing his faith with his equally enthusiastic embrace of evolutionary science.

Crucially, however, Kingsley was no quack. Paul Farley, who adapted the book for the BBC in , sees it as a proto-conservationist tract. The great 19th Century scientific debates over the Hippocampus as a possible evolutionary missing link, in which Kingsley participated, are playfully re-christened in the pages of The Water-Babies as the Hippopotamus Debate, and explained in thorough but good-humored detail, breaking down sophisticated scientific terms in a language fun to read and accessible to eager youngsters and curious adults alike.

The vividness with which Kingsley imagines the world of the water babies he describes makes it as real as it can ever be, and spiritedly calls into question why people find it so necessary to strictly separate the fictional from the real, the child from the adult, and the land from the water.

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