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Lessons from a Lobster, or, A Preface to a Somewhat Abridged, Slightly Annotated Version of The Water-Babies
by Anne White
What is The Water-Babies?
The Water-Babies is a moralistic-yet-fun fairy tale from the mind of the English minister-professor-naturalist-poet Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875). Its style and themes are planted solidly in the mid-Victorian world, but reflect Kingsley's sense of humour and slightly unorthodox Christian beliefs. AmblesideOnline Curriculum students using The Water-Babies in Year Three will also be reading Kingsley’s version of several Greek myths, The Heroes (The Water-Babies also contains references to Epimetheus, Prometheus, and Pandora). Those who continue with AO’s Year 4 will find the style of Madam How and Lady Why very familiar, as Kingsley continues the conversation with the young boy whom he addresses as “my little man” in The Water-Babies. (The last Kingsley book used in the AO/HEO curriculum is Westward Ho! in Year 8.)
The Water-Babies contains so many descriptions of river and ocean creatures, and puts so much emphasis on kindness to animals and respect for nature, that some people think of it as a natural-history rather than a literature choice. However, it is more of a didactic (learn-your-lesson) story, on two levels: first, aimed at getting children to do-as-they-would-be-done-by; but also as a platform for Kingsley to air his views on social reform, the issue of science (and pseudo-science) vs. faith, and a few other things that were aimed at parents and the general public rather than the child reader. Kingsley had more than a few opinions about various cultural, religious and ethnic groups, as well as quack medicine, bad children’s books, junk food, and too-tight boots, and did not hesitate to include those in his books.
And first he went through Waste-paper-land, where all the stupid books lie in heaps, up hill and down dale, like leaves in a winter wood; and there he saw people digging and grubbing among them, to make worse books out of bad ones, and thrashing chaff to save the dust of it; and a very good trade they drove thereby, especially among children.
The Water-Babies was published around the same time as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and, like Alice, contains a bit more nonsense (and also interest in things like numbers and looking-glass reversals) than earlier children’s books. It predates The Adventures of Pinocchio and George MacDonald’s children’s fantasies, but shares some themes and imagery with those books (Tom’s prickles can be compared to Pinocchio’s long nose).
Why an abridged/annotated version?
1) To avoid Kingsley’s ethnic and religious slurs.
2) To avoid the longest of his off-topic rambles, and some of his more baffling Victorian references.
3) Or to give a bit of advance warning when a ramble is coming up—you then have the choice of jumping over the rabbit trail or plowing through it.
4) To add a few vocabulary notes.
What is it about? (Spoilers included)
The main character, Tom, starts out as a mistreated apprentice chimney-sweep. During a job at a country estate, he accidentally goes down a chimney into a little girl’s bedroom, which causes uproar in the house and causes him to be chased off as a thief. After a mad dash across the moors and down a cliff, he ends up in a river where he is turned into a “water-baby” and begins a new life (although his human body is discovered floating in the river and he is assumed to be dead).
Tom-the-water-baby lives in the river for some time, but eventually becomes lonely for others like himself and finds his way out to sea. At first he cannot find any water-babies there either, but after showing kindness to a trapped lobster, his eyes and ears are opened and he suddenly sees them swimming and hears them singing. The water-babies take him to their home under the sea, where they are visited on Fridays by ugly Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, and on Sundays by her beautiful sister Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby.
Although Tom misbehaves by stealing sea-candy, he does learn his lesson and is joined by Ellie, the little girl whose room he had stumbled into. Ellie had been hurt (we assume fatally) in an accident, but does not seem to be exactly a water baby; she “goes home” every Sunday, which makes Tom both curious and jealous. When he asks how he can earn the same privilege, the fairy sisters explain that he needs to do something he would not naturally like to do—in Tom’s case, helping his hated former master Grimes. Mr. Grimes had also fallen in the river (while poaching) and had since been taken to The Other-end-of-Nowhere.
From this point on the plot becomes Tom’s quest to find Grimes and achieve the water-baby equivalent of earning an angel’s wings. After journeying to the Shiny Wall and meeting “Mother Carey” (who seems to be somewhere between Mother Nature and God; her name may be derived from Mater Cara, “dear mother,” which also refers to the Virgin Mary), he continues through various allegorical “lands.” (This part of the story owes something to Gulliver’s Travels, and may have inspired parts of Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz).
Eventually Tom finds Mr. Grimes, imprisoned in a chimney (the theme of suitable punishment comes up throughout the book). Tom succeeds in his mission and is rewarded as promised, returning to the water-babies’ home and Ellie—and discovers that he and Ellie have become adults.
Down Kingsley’s Rabbit-hole
Sorting out how Kingsley’s fairy-tale world works is somewhat confusing (and he would remind us that it’s only a fairy tale). Nobody seems to actually die (and stay dead) in this story; even the blubber-eating birds are old whalers being punished for their greed. This rather loose arrangement is similar to that in “The Little Mermaid,” with different kinds of beings in different stages of existence, and sometimes in different physical places as well (such as The Other-end-of-Nowhere). Time also shifts in a confusing way: Ellie’s accident happens some time after Tom’s, but when he needs a “teacher,” she arrives in the form of a girl rather than a baby, and seems to have already gone beyond Tom’s level of progress. (You might say that Tom was just a much slower student than Ellie, but the time element does seem confusing.)
Do people like this book?
A lot of people have heard of The Water-Babies and may be aware of a few images and scenes from it; however, few have actually read it. My own early exposure to it consisted of borrowing a cousin’s copy, thinking it looked way too long, not understanding it at all, and giving it back again fairly quickly. (I’m not sure why I had the impression then that it was so long; it has only eight chapters, and the copy I have now is less than 200 pages.) I read it with my oldest daughter when she was about nine, but it was one of her less-enjoyed Ambleside books (although I do remember her giving a good narration of Mr. Grimes in the chimney).
British writer J.G. Ballard echoed a common reaction to The Water-Babies when he called it “a masterpiece in its bizarre way, but one of the most unpleasant works of fiction I have ever read..." (from an essay included in The Pleasure of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser, Bloomsbury, 1992)
Why bother reading it then?
Awhile ago, our family acquired a set of My Book House volumes, one of which contains a very short version of The Water-Babies. I read it to my book-loving first-grader, and told her that there really was more to the story than that; so she asked to be read The Real Thing. I hesitated, remember my older daughter’s dislike of the story; but we started off, skipping things here and there but otherwise enjoying the story more than I remembered from that earlier reading. My first-grader says, “It’s a really nice fairy tale, and it’s about exploring and everything.” She didn’t like “the old dame’s death,” but I don’t think she worries much about the questions of death/existence/metaphysics as an older child might; she accepts the book on a simpler, fairy tale level (which is one reason I skipped things that had no relevance for her).
So some of the “why read this?” will depend on your child’s age. For a young child, it’s simply Tom’s marvelous adventures, and his struggle not to be greedy and to become better than he has been. When the book says that the fairies came and took Ellie away after her accident, a young child may take that fairly literally; and although that’s not theologically correct, in Kingsley’s fairy-tale it is exactly what he means, just as in a Narnia story there can be centaurs and dryads, and Deep Magic that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the way things operate in our world.
However, the story is suggested for AmblesideOnline students who would probably be about eight to ten years old, and somewhat beyond my first-grader’s experience. They could easily find the story either somewhat disturbing, much like Andersen’s fairy tales (with all this emphasis on death, including a scene where a young mother seems to be expecting or planning her own death) , or somewhat boring (the moral aspects). Teenagers and up are probably the only ones who would fully appreciate Kingsley’s satire, make sense of his name-dropping, and care to wade through a soliloquy about why there might or might not be water-babies.
So if the Year Three students are both too old and too young for The Water-Babies, why read it to them? Year Threes are at about the right age to enjoy Alice in Wonderland, and there are similarities between the two books (such as falling into a river and down a rabbit-hole), although Kingsley didn’t have Carroll/Dodgson’s gift for verbal nonsense and general lunacy. His more restrained but rambling style; his tendency to moralize, cheer for England, and put in more natural history than is popular today; and the problematic device of having human entrance into his “other world” come only through death, prevents the story from being as appealing as Alice. Still, there are strong characters that make up for the weaknesses in the plot: Tom himself, especially in his periods of mischief; the ugly-but-just Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid (who people usually remember, incorrectly, by her sister’s name); and some of the animal characters. There are memorable scenes, such as Tom and Grimes’ final reunion at the chimney. The writing is excellent and often gently humorous, sometimes even echoing Dickens’ style:
He cried half his time, and laughed the other half. 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…. As for chimney-sweeping, and being hungry, and being beaten, he took all that for the way of the world, like the rain and snow and thunder, and stood manfully with his back to it till it was over, as his old donkey did to a hail-storm; and then shook his ears and was as jolly as ever; and thought of the fine times coming, when he would be a man, and a master sweep, and sit in the public-house with a quart of beer and a long pipe, and play cards for silver money, and wear velveteens and ankle-jacks, and keep a white bull-dog with one gray ear, and carry her puppies in his pocket, just like a man.
And strangely enough, Kingsley himself didn’t seem to take his own moral fable too seriously. The last chapter starts: “Here 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.” The “moral,” tacked on at the end of the book, is simply “Don’t Hurt Efts,” and a reminder to “stick to hard work and cold water.” This suggests that, while Kingsley may have been less amusing (on picnics or in writing) than Lewis Carroll, and less successful in his attempt at fantasy, he didn’t necessarily see his as story as only something “improving.” I don’t think he aimed at being remembered as the author of “one of the most unpleasant works of fiction” for children. His funny bits, often at the expense of academics and other pompous types (such as the poor professor who was thrown into a state of mental anguish until he admitted that he did believe in water-babies) really are good, too, although they sometimes get off-track:
He was, as I said, a very great naturalist, and chief professor of Necrobioneopalaeonthydrochthonanthropopithekology in the new university which the king of the Cannibal Islands had founded; and, being a member of the Acclimatisation Society, he had 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.
[The DoAsYouLikes] were very fond of music, but it was too much trouble to learn the piano or the violin; and as for dancing, that would have been too great an exertion. So they sat on ant-hills all day long, and played on the Jews' harp; and, if the ants bit them, why they just got up and went to the next ant-hill, till they were bitten there likewise.
Next he saw all the little people in the world, writing all the little books in the world, about all the other little people in the world; probably because they had no great people to write about: and if the names of the books were not Squeeky, nor the Pump-lighter, nor the Narrow Narrow World, nor the Hills of the Chattermuch, nor the Children's Twaddeday, why then they were something else… But Tom thought he would sooner have a jolly good fairy tale, about Jack the Giant-killer or Beauty and the Beast, which taught him something that he didn't know already.