The Water Babies: A Fairytale for a Land Baby (2011 Collins Classics
version, originally published in 1863) is the strange adventures of Tom, set in
the North country of England – the unofficial geographical regions of England
that border Scotland.
Tom, an orphan chimney sweep, is treated badly by his boss, Mr. Grimes, yet
he was ‘the jolliest boy in the whole town.’ One day they go to the prestigious
Harthover House – ‘built at ninety different times, and in nineteen different
styles.’ Thinking he was a robber, the nanny grabbed him. He ran for the woods,
climbed a wall, ran over the moorlands and heather, where he fell into a stream
and drowned.
The fairies turned him into a water baby … ‘being about four inches
long … and having round the parotid region of his fauces a set of external
gills.’ Tom was now ‘quite amphibious’ enabling him, like a frog, to live in
and out of the water. The book is about his adventures as a water baby.
This year will be 152 years of publication. The Victorian English language,
philosophies, and culture imbue the text, with its morals, flights of fantasy,
self-righteous attitudes, racism, and superiority of the upper class. Despite
the book being unpopular over the years, it has also had several resurgences:
in the 1920s; with the 1978 film starring James Mason; and with the 2014 BBC
Radio 4 drama to mark 150 years in print – with modifications.
It was a book I was familiar with in my childhood, and re-reading it brings
back some of the original reasons why I enjoyed the story, and some additional
nuances. First, all eight chapters commence with a poem: four by British poet
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), two by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1807-1882), one by British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and one
by British poet Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) – author of the epic poem The Faerie
Queen. There are additional poems and songs throughout the novel.
The second reason is the rich language that describes Nature – before Tom
drowns as he is running through the moorlands, and also underwater (in the
stream and when he reaches the sea). What sort of river did Tom drown in – like
an Irish river, or Welsh salmon river, or a Scottish stream. ‘No. It was none
of these. It was such a stream as you see in dear old Bewick.’ This places the
stream in Yorkshire or Northumberland.
Starwort, milfoil, and water-crowfoot are some of the water plants
mentioned. In terms of creatures, Kingsley writes of flies, beetles, gnats,
midges, bees, frogs, dragonflies, birds, fish, otters, eels, sea snails,
prawns, lobsters, shells, anemones, whales, sea-serpents, and everything in
between. Tom, as a water baby, feeds on ‘alder flies, and the caperers, and the
cock-tailed duns and spinners, yellow, and brown, and claret, and grey … worms,
addle-eggs, and wood-lice, and leeches, and omnium-gatherums.’
When Tom dives into the sea of ‘a thousand fathoms’ he is among ‘clouds of
sea-moths’ where he meets a whale. It ‘yawned so wide … that there swam into
his mouth 943 sea-moths, 13,846 jelly-fish no bigger than pins’ heads, a string
of salphae nine yards long, and forty-three little ice-crabs …’
The third reason is the running debates throughout the novel. These include
the writings of prominent naturalists, as well as the theory of evolution –
Kingsley had recently read Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) theory, On the Origin
of Species (1859). One character is chief professor of
Necrobioneopalaeonthydrochthonanthropopithekology who does not believe in
fairies. Nor does Aunt Agitate’s Argument on political economy. That’s because
naturalists haven’t seen fairies or water babies.
The fourth reason is the adventurous places Tom sees. The last chapter
‘begins the never-to-be-too-much-studied account of the
nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth part of the wonderful things which Tom saw, on
his journey to the Other-end-of-Nowhere.’ On his journey Tom travels from the
‘sea of slops to the mountain of messes, and the territory of tuck, where the
ground was very sticky, for it was all made of bad toffee (not Everton toffee,
of course), and full of deep cracks and holes choked with wind-fallen fruit,
and green gooseberries, and sloes, and crabs, and whinberries, and hips and
haws …’ He travels to Peacepool, the Centre of Creation, the Island of
Polupragmosyne, and the Pantheon of the great Unsuccessful, to name a few
locations.
The fifth reason is the twice-mentioned German children’s book on morals,
Struwwelpeter (Shockheaded Peter). Heinrich Hoffmann published his book in
1845, which has ten rhyming tales that depict bad behaviour and their
consequences. It was a story book I grew up with – and I still have copies
written in both English and German. This is the reason why I don’t play with
matches or chew my fingernails! Kingsley uses this example to add to his moral
for children. At the end of the last chapter the author says to his reader: ‘And
now, my little man, what should we learn from this parable? We should learn
thirty-seven or thirty-nine things … but one thing, at least … when we see efts
in the ponds, never to throw stones at them, or catch them with crooked pins,
or put them into vivariums with stickle-backs, that the stickle-backs may prick
them in their poor little stomachs, and make them jump out of the glass into
somebody’s work-box, and so come to a bad end.’
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of
Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet
(2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
Comments
Post a Comment