The Water-Babies The Secret Life of Books

At last he saw the light and clear, clear water overhead.

And up he came a thousand fathoms

among clouds of sea moths which fluttered round his head.

There were moths with pink heads and wings and opal bodies,

and jellies of all the colours in the world.

Written in 1862 by the Reverend Charles Kingsley,

The Water-Babies tells the story of a young chimney sweep called Tom.

Transformed into an aquatic creature,

he eventually finds redemption in the pulsing life of the open ocean.

The novel tumbles you along in a torrent of words and ideas.

It's a magical, mystifying and, just occasionally, maddening book.

In this film I'm going to explore how a children's fable by a

country parson took on big questions of belief and biology.

The Water-Babies is a slightly distorted mirror image of The Origin Of Species.

I'm going to find out how the book was born

from a sense of social outrage.

So the chimney sweep's boy would have gone up here.

That's right. And you can see the handholds for the children to climb.

And discover how a Victorian vicar conjured up a world

ruled by feminine spirits.

She's this beautiful old woman,

and by her very presence seems to provide creation,

the very source of creation.

Charles Kingsley was a man of endless contradictions,

as changeable as the tide.

He was an electrifying speaker who suffered from a stammer,

a radical reformer who distrusted democracy,

a sensitive scholar with the instincts of a street fighter.

And this, his most famous work,

is every bit as paradoxical and compelling as he was.

The Water-Babies is a hymn to the natural world,

a book baptism in the holy water of sea, stream and river.

But the story begins in a very different kind of place.

Once upon a time there was a little chimney sweep, and his name was Tom.

That is a short name, and you have heard it before,

so you will not have much trouble in remembering it.

He lived in a great town in the north country,

where they were plenty of chimneys to sweep,

and plenty of money for Tom to earn, and his master to spend.

Charles Kingsley's children's classic was born about as far away

from the soot-stained mills of the North as you could imagine.

Kingsley first came here to the Hampshire village of Eversley

as a young curate in 1842,

and he served this parish for the rest of his life.

Just through the gate from Saint Mary's Church

is Kingsley's rectory.

I'm meeting the current owner, Ian Sutherland, for a look inside.

Here we are, Richard. This is the study.

This is where he wrote The Water-Babies.

So this was Kingsley's...

-This is where it all happened.

-Yep.

-Amazing.

-This is the fireplace which he wrote about.

Oh, look. Obviously much older than the mid-1800s

when Kingsley was here.

Yes. And the chimney's so wide, in fact it goes right out -

you can look right the way up to the sky above.

And you can see the handholds for the children to climb.

Really? So the chimney sweep's boy would have gone up here.

-That's right.

-So hardship was not unknown, even here?

-No.

-Are there other things in the study of Kingsley's time?

Well, the most important thing is these hammock hooks -

he had a hammock to sleep in after good meals.

-How wonderful.

-There's one hook up there, and the other hook's up here,

-you see.

-I love that.

That's so... The next thing I'm going to do in my simple vicarage

is sling a hammock up.

It's only a few weeks ago we've actually found one of the old pipes.

I believe he used to drop them around and get another one,

-cos Fanny, his wife, didn't like him smoking.

-Oh.

-Sounds familiar.

-Sounds very familiar to me.

-So he went outside to have a smoke.

Yeah. I can't help noticing there's this kind of roller shutter.

This is a barricade, a metal screen, because there were gangs of robbers

going round the local area.

-Really?

-And the local vicar at Frimley, I think it was Frimley,

-was actually murdered in his garden.

-Really?

-Yes.

-By a band of desperados?

-By a band of desperados, yes.

And he put locks on all the doors,

and they all slept with pistols beside their bed.

-A fortified rectory.

-Absolutely.

The life of a Victorian country parson

wasn't as cosy as we might think.

But for an enthusiastic sportsman like Kingsley,

there were compensations.

The nearby River Blackwater was an angler's paradise,

and there Kingsley spent many long and absorbing hours.

Then, a vicar's duties allowed time to write -

in his case, newspaper articles, scientific works, historical novels

and, of course, children's stories.

In her memoirs his wife, Fanny,

recorded how The Water-Babies came about

after the arrival of their fourth child, Grenville Arthur.

One spring morning while sitting at breakfast, his wife reminded him

of an old promise - Rose, Maurice and Mary have got their book,

and baby must have his.

He made no answer, but got up at once and went into his study,

locking the door. In half an hour,

he returned with the story of little Tom.

It's often the case with writers that tales written to amuse a child

open up a way of exploring bigger issues.

It's certainly true of the story he spun

for four-year-old Grenville Arthur.

Charles Kingsley was a man outraged by the injustices of his time.

Previous novels such as Yeast and Alton Locke had dealt with

the plight of the rural poor and the scandal of sweated labour.

Now his attention was drawn to another horror of Victorian life...

The young sweeps who crawled up inside chimneys

to scrape them clean.

The life expectancy of these climbing boys was pitifully short.

If they didn't die from falls or suffocation,

lung disease or skin cancer eventually claimed them.

He cried when he had to climb the dark flues,

rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw.

And when the soot got into his eyes, which it did, every day in the week.

And when his master beat him, which he did, every day in the week.

And when he had not enough to eat,

which happened every day in the week, likewise.

But if Kingsley set out to write a children's story which turned into

a social campaign, he was quickly diverted yet again.

Just like his hero, Tom,

who gets lost in a labyrinth of chimneys

and emerges in the bedroom of the little girl, Ellie.

Looking round he suddenly saw, standing close to him,

a little ugly, black, ragged figure with bleared eyes

and grinning white teeth.

He turned on it angrily. What did such a little black ape

want in that sweet young lady's room?

And, behold, it was himself, reflected in a great mirror,

the like of which Tom had never seen before.

The Water-Babies is obsessed with ideas of dirt and cleanliness.

When the little sweep suddenly sees himself and realises he's filthy,

he lashes out angrily, waking up Ellie.

Her screams spark a furious hunt.

Exhausted and delirious,

Tom finally reaches the bank of a mountain stream.

He dipped his hand in and found it so cool, cool, cool and he said,

"I will be a fish.

"I will swim in the water.

"I must be clean. I must be clean."

For Kingsley, cleanliness really was next to godliness -

he hated getting his clothes dirty,

he was a tireless campaigner for better sanitation.

But this shouldn't give us the idea that he was

a cold water and carbolic puritan.

No, for Kingsley, water was something life-affirming,

liberating, pulsing, full of life.

Something to encourage us to cast off our clothes,

spiritually and materially.

When Tom's pursuers find his grime-encrusted rags by the bank

of the river, they think that the little boy has drowned.

But Tom has just left the black husk of his physical self behind.

Ah, now comes the most wonderful part of this wonderful story.

Tom, when he woke, for of course he woke - children always wake after

they have slept exactly as long as is good for them -

found himself swimming about in the stream, being about four inches,

or, that I may be accurate, 3.87902 inches long and having round

the parotid region of his fauces, a set of external gills.

The Water-Babies begins more or less realistically,

but once Tom plunges into the water, and begins his journey to the ocean,

we're in a different kind of world altogether,

a weird hybrid of surreal fantasy, satire and science.

Charles Kingsley was an accomplished amateur naturalist.

In 1855 he published Glaucus, a popular field guide to rock pools.

Seven years later, in The Water-Babies,

he poked fun at scientific colleagues

with his eccentric collector, Professor Ptthmllnsprts.

He was a very great naturalist, and chief professor of

Necrobioneopalaeonthydrochthon - anthropopithekology

in the new university which the king of the Cannibal Islands had founded,

and, being a member of the Acclimatisation Society,

he'd come here to collect all the nasty things which he could find on

the coast of England, and turn them loose round the Cannibal Islands

because they had not nasty things enough there to eat what they left.

Here at the Natural History Museum in London,

they store thousands of specimens preserved in alcohol.

They include aquatic creatures collected by Charles Darwin

during the five-year Beagle voyage which informed his great work,

On The Origin Of Species.

Published in 1859,

The Origin Of Species detonated a bomb

under Victorian life and belief.

But what I find intriguing is how,

far from being threatened by Darwin's evolutionary ideas,

some churchmen rallied to his cause.

Charles Darwin and Charles Kingsley were old friends and correspondents,

sharing a fascination with the underwater world.

And their most famous books,

which appeared within a few years of each other,

also had remarkable parallels.

Steve, do you remember when you first came across The Water-Babies?

I first read The Water-Babies... I really, I was pretty young.

I'd been a nerd since my early years,

and I was enveloped by it

because I always wanted to be a scientist.

I wanted to understand the living world.

And luckily I've been able to do that

and I think I saw that quite strongly.

I think there are passages in The Water-Babies, particularly when he's

looking at the kind of life that you'd find in rivers or in ponds,

that seems incredibly vivid to me.

Oh, I think he was extremely knowledgeable about the natural world.

And it's a very clever literary move,

to put an innocent boy into such an alien environment and see this new,

and at first sight, baffling world through an innocent's eyes.

And the irony is, although I read The Water-Babies

when I was around ten, I'm ashamed to say I didn't read

The Origin Of Species until I was almost 30.

-Professor!

-That's a terrible thing for an evolutionary biologist

to say, but it was almost as exciting as The Water-Babies.

When you went back to The Water-Babies recently,

did you see the influence of Darwin on the text?

Oh, I think if you read The Water-Babies as an adult,

it's clear that The Water-Babies is a slightly distorted mirror image

of The Origin Of Species. Darwin described The Origin Of Species

as one long argument, and although Kingsley doesn't use that phrase,

The Water-Babies is a long argument about progress,

necessary progress, in biology and about the compatibility

of evolutionary theory with Christian belief.

And, in fact, Kingsley had received a prepublication copy of The Origin

and saw that it could be used as a theological document.

And of course, Darwin enlisted Kingsley's support

in the second edition of Origin.

Yes. Within the preface he thanks an unnamed theologian

and believer, Charles Kingsley, who persuaded him, Darwin,

that there was no necessary conflict between biology and belief.

We just happen to have a second edition of Origin in front of us.

Let me read... I won't call it the offending paragraph,

let me read the relevant paragraph.

A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually

learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to

believe that he created few original forms capable of self-development

into other and needful forms,

as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply

the voids caused by the action of his laws.

So, in other words, what Darwin is saying there, is that, possibly,

God had set evolution into motion.

And that, of course, is absolutely the last paragraph almost of

Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies.

Evolutionary ideas are everywhere in The Water-Babies.

And although it's a children's book, like On The Origin Of Species,

its unflinchingly matter-of-fact about violence and death.

But there was one aspect of Darwin's theory that troubled Kingsley -

if animals could evolve into human beings,

then human beings could evolve back into animals.

It was an anxiety that afflicted many Victorian thinkers

in the wake of Darwin.

In The Water-Babies, Tom and Ellie are told a cautionary tale

about a race of dim-witted slackers, the Doasyoulikes.

When a volcanic eruption wipes out two thirds of them and threatens

the rest with starvation, instead of moving on, they gradually take

to living in the tree-tops, avoiding lions prowling below.

Their feet had changed shape very oddly,

for they laid hold of the branches with their great toes as if they had

been thumbs, just as a Hindu tailor uses his toes to thread his needle.

"But there is a hairy one among them," said Ellie.

"Ah," said the fairy, "that will be a great man in his time,

"and chief of all the tribe."

For this hairy chief had had hairy children,

and they hairier children still, and everyone wished to marry

hairy husbands and have hairy children too.

For the climate was growing so damp

that none but the hairy ones could live.

"Why," cried Tom, "I declare, they are all apes."

There's a dark, even ugly, underside to The Water-Babies.

The idea of degeneracy seeps through the book.

Kingsley frequently breaks off his story to take sideswipes at anything

he thinks is alien, deviant or corrupt.

Americans get in the neck for their selfish individualism,

popes are listed among famine,

measles and despots as one of the ills of the flesh,

but the worst stick is reserved for the Irish.

Here's Kingsley warning his son about Dennis,

an Irish fishing guide.

You must not trust Dennis

because he's in the habit of giving pleasant answers.

But instead of being angry with him, you must remember

that he's a poor paddy and knows no better.

So you must just burst out laughing,

and then he will burst out laughing too,

and slave for you, and trot about after you and show you good sport,

if he can. For he is an affectionate fellow

and as fond of sport as you are.

And if he can't, tell you fibs instead, 100 an hour.

Kingsley's attitudes may have been fairly typical

of his countrymen at the time,

But the book's casual prejudice perhaps explains why

The Water-Babies is well-known, but not so well-read these days.

And yet, for every instance of bigotry and chauvinism,

there are many more moments of mystery and veneration.

When Tom stumbles down to the river, he's shadowed by the protective

presence of an Irish beggar woman.

In an extraordinarily beautiful passage,

her true identity is finally revealed.

And all the while, he never saw the Irishwoman,

not behind him this time, but before.

For just before he came to the riverside she had stepped down

into the cool, clear water,

and her shawl and her petticoat floated off her

and the green water-weeds floated round her sides

and the white water lilies floated round her head

and the fairies of the stream came up from the bottom and bore her away,

and down upon their arms, for she was the queen of them all,

and, perhaps, of more besides.

It's a startling revelation -

the world created by a Victorian vicar is ruled not by God,

but by goddesses.

The Fairy Queen, the twin spirits, Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid

and Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby,

and, near the end of Tom's quest,

Mother Carey, the source of all living things.

Towards the end of his career,

Kingsley was made a Canon of Westminster Abbey.

I'm meeting Marie-Elsa Bragg who also serves at the Abbey and is

fascinated by the connections between women, nature and religion.

One of the most striking things about the book is Kingsley's

intensity in writing about female characters, and female characters

invested with, sort of, special powers.

Yeah. There seems to be a sense of a real feminine deity or feminine

presence. And it's lovely that he wants to tell his son that.

Is that typical... I mean,

it doesn't seem typical of Victorian construction of feminine identity

at all, it seems quite radically different.

I think it is radically different.

I think Kingsley was really trying to bring in a positive idea of the

body, and he seemed to have a positive idea about sexuality,

certainly within the family unit.

And it's a really strong sense of...especially of women as well,

in that time.

That, to be pure, you needed to encounter life

and have life experience, not keep innocent.

I think that was very, very courageous for him.

That sense of the woman at the centre of teaming creativity,

Mother Carey, is the most memorable example of that.

Oh, she's beautiful, I love Mother Carey.

-Yeah, she's great.

-She's a wonderful elder in the book,

she's this beautiful old woman who's so caring,

and by her very presence seems to provide creation,

the very source of creation.

And he... There's this lovely Darwinian question that he comes up

to her with, where he says, "Are you making new animals out of old?"

She says, "No, I'm just watching them create themselves."

But there's something about her very witness and her love in

watching them that seems to allow everything to manifest.

It's a beautiful concept of the divine feminine, really.

-Can we hear some?

-Sure.

And then, when he came near it, Mother Carey,

it took the form of the grandest old lady he'd ever seen,

a white marble lady, sitting on a white marble throne,

and from the foot of the throne there swam away,

out and into the sea, millions of newborn creatures,

of more shapes and colours than man ever dreamed.

And they were Mother Carey's children

whom she makes out of seawater all day long.

The Water-Babies is an underwater Pilgrim's Progress.

Like John Bunyan's Christian allegory, it charts the fantastical

and testing journey of its hero from godlessness...

..to grace.

Abused by his master, Grimes, Tom abuses others in turn.

Under water, the street urchin is transformed

into a sea urchin for his misdeeds.

And while Tom eventually loses his prickles, he discovers that true

redemption can only come through struggle and self-sacrifice.

Journeying underwater to the other end of nowhere,

Tom makes a shocking discovery.

It turns out that his former master, Grimes, has also drowned,

and is now spending purgatory stuffed into a chimney pot.

Tom's terror of Grimes turns to tearful compassion,

and Grimes in turn has a moral insight.

As poor Grimes cried and blubbered on,

his own tears did what his mother's could not do,

and Tom's could not do, and nobody's on earth could do for him,

for they washed the soot off his face and off his clothes,

and then they washed the mortar away from between the bricks and the

chimney crumbled down and Grimes began to get out of it.

The release of his former tormentor is also a release for Tom.

Eventually the water baby grows up and returns to the real world

and becomes a great man of science.

The moral of the story seems clear.

Or is it?

The last chapter of The Water-Babies is simply entitled Moral.

And, like much of the book, is specifically addressed

to Grenville Arthur, Kingsley's young son.

Also, like much of the book, its tone is playful and ironic,

and almost impossible to pin down.

Do you learn your lessons and thank God that you have plenty of

cold water to wash in, and wash in it too like a true Englishman?

And then, if my story is not true, something better is.

And if I am not quite right, still,

you will be as long as you stick to hard work and cold water.

But remember, always, as I told you at first,

that this is all a fairy tale, and only fun and pretence,

and therefore, you're not to believe a word of it, even if it is true.

That might seem the last word on The Water-Babies.

But not quite.

The year after Kingsley's fairy tale was published in book form,

Parliament got down to some serious business.

The scandal of young sweeps had been debated before,

and laws had been passed.

But nothing had really deterred the real-life Grimeses...

..until now.

This is it, the 1864 Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act.

It didn't, in itself, put an end to the hellish practice of sending

children up chimneys, but it was really the beginning of the end.

Here's a relevant section from clause nine.

Where a chimney sweeper is convicted of the offence of compelling,

or knowingly allowing a person under the age of 21 years to ascend

or descend a chimney, or enter a flue for any purpose,

the justices may adjudge the offender to be imprisoned

in the common jail or house of correction for any term

not exceeding six months, with or without hard labour.

Now Kingsley in the book doesn't tell us very much about

the working conditions of chimney sweepers, but it was enough,

on the back of the book's success,

to oblige Parliament to pass the act.

It's an overused phrase, perhaps, to say that a book

can change the world, but The Water-Babies,

in its way, really did.

Charles Kingsley might have said his book was only fun and pretence,

but in real life it helped liberate countless children

from lives of unimaginable suffering.

Written by one of the most remarkable parsons to have ever served a parish,

I believe this book represents another kind of liberation too.

The Water-Babies is many things.

It's political tract. It's scientific satire.

It's Christian parable. It's children's fantasy.

In fact, it's almost impossible to categorise, let alone define,

this great, meandering, watery novel.

But that's the point.

Because what Kingsley has created is a hymn to the unknowable,

an anthem of the untrammelled imagination,

because it's about freedom, it's about creativity.

It's about life.

Why do magical creatures feature so much in children's stories?

Well, to find out more about fantasy and realism in children's literature

go to...

..and follow the link to the Open University.