A weird hybrid of reality, surreal satire and science.
The tale begins more or less realistically, and then Tom plunges into the water to begin his aquatic adventure and we’re in a different kind of world. He was now drawn to another scandal of Victorian life, the plight of the young sweeps, whose brutal masters condemned them to lives of misery and, often, early deaths, if not from falls or suffocation, then from lung disease or cancer. Kingsley was appalled by the social conditions of the time, and in previous novels had dealt with the rural poor and sweated labour. The story was initially written for Kingsley’s four-year-old son, Grenville Arthur.
Not only did it have a huge effect on young readers, it also helped to reform legislation that relieved the suffering of innumerable young people such as Tom, who had been forced to crawl inside chimneys to keep them clean. It emerged from a sense of social outrage, took on the big questions of belief and biology, and is eye-catching for a work by a 19th-century vicar in that reveals a world created and ruled not by gods, but by goddesses. In parts political tract, scientific satire, Christian parable as well as children’s fantasy, it is a moving and uncomfortable book when read as child, and is even more unsettling when read as an adult. The Water Babies, the Reverend Charles Kingsley’s 1862 novel about the young chimney sweep, Tom, who finds redemption from the horrors of his work by means of becoming an aquatic creature, is one of those perennial children’s classics that is not so perennial any more.
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