Water Babies

This tale is about a young chimneysweep named Tom, who as he ages begins to act more like an ape than a man because he is ignorant of cleanliness, virtue and God. One day while working with his master Mr. Grimes, Tom meets a young girl named Ellie that causes him to be ashamed of his filth. This leads to Tom jumping into a nearby stream to clean himself, where exhausted, he falls into a deep peaceful sleep. Kingsley explains “the reason for his falling into such a delightful sleep is very simple; and yet hardly anyone has found it out. It was merely that the fairies took him”¹. As Tom entered the underwater world he underwent an extraordinary transformation into a salamander like creature thanks to the three fairies.

 By transforming Tom into a lowly salamander-like creature the fairies have given him a chance to change his ways and become the kind of person that can make a difference in the world. In order to do this he must learn the difference between wrong and right, as well as gain an understanding of the laws of nature that God put into the world. As his character progresses so does his form from resembling a salamander to gradually becoming more and more human-like. This progression Kingsley has Tom undergo is an evolutionary play on the “law of embryological recapitulation”. This law states how the embryological development of an organism follows a specific ordered sequence, starting with stages representing its most remote ancestor, and continuing through stages of its closer and highest relatives. In order to make this transformation and learn all he needs to learn, Tom is guided by three different fairies: Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, who speaks for God’s purposes, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, who teaches Tom about the inflexible laws of nature that were built into the world in order to fill God’s purposes, and Mother Carey, who represents God.

Tomas Huxley, often referred to as Darwin’s Bulldog, appears in this story as Professor Ptthmllsprts (Put them all in spirits). who only believes in what he can see, hear, taste or touch. In the story Professor Ptthmllsprts, who only believes in what he can see, hear, taste or touch, accompanies Ellie on a netting expedition when she asks him about the existence of water babies (they do not know of Tom’s fate):

              

  Forgetting that he was a scientific man, and therefore ought to have known that he couldn’t know; and that he was a logician, and therefore ought to have known that he could not prove an universal negative…the professor answered quite sharply—
             
  “Because there ain’t.”¹

          

Just as he said that the Professory caught Tom in his net, evidence that water babies do exist, he allowed Tom to escape his net rather than admitting that his previous claims had been wrong. 

During his journey Tom comes across the Dosasyoulikes where he learns how evolution takes place. The Doasyoulikes left the Land of Hard Work and settled in the Land of Readymade where there was, for some time, an abundance of resources.  Over generations the Doasyoulikes became lazier and lazier so much so that they did not bother to learn about the volcanoes that would occasionally erupt nearby. Because they were unprepared when the volcano did erupt they were not able to cope with the resulting scarcity of resources and natural selection took its course turning them into hairy tree-dwelling apes. This showed Tom that understanding the laws of nature alone was not enough but that people must place themselves in the right circumstances so that the laws of nature will create the right results.

 Kingsley believed that by leaving so much up to circumstance and law that God not along encourages but rewards moral development, hard work and the study of nature. Tom learns this lesson when he encounters Mother Carey sitting on her throne:

And from the foot of the throne there swum away, out and into the sea, millions of new-born creatures, of more shapes and colours than man ever dreamed. And they were Mother Carey’s children, whom she makes out of the sea-water all day long.

He expected, of course – like some grown people who ought to know better – to find her snipping, piecing, fitting, stitching, cobbling, basting, filing, planning, hammering, turning, polishing, mounding, measuring, chiseling, clipping, and so forth as men do when they go to work to make anything. 

But instead of that, she sat quite still with her chin upon her hand, looking down into the sea with two great grand blue eyes, as blue as the sea itself. Her hair was as white as the snow – for she was very old – in fact as old as anything which you are likely to come across, except the difference between right and wrong.

Tom said: 

“I hear you are very busy.” 

“I am never more busy than I am now,” she said without stirring a finger. 

“I hear, ma’am, that you were always making new beasts out of old.” 

“So people fancy. But I am not going to trouble myself to make things, my little dear. I sit here and make them make themselves.”¹ 

This final scene is reminiscent of the final lines of the Origin:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exhalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breather into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.²

¹ Kingsley, Charles, and Linley Sambourne. 1966. The water-babies. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.

² Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life, London: John Murray, 1859, p. 490, available through the Darwin Online Project at http://darwin-online.org.uk/