The Water-Babies; Publication; Macmillan’s Magazine; Reception of Kingsley's Works.
 

Avery, Gillian (with the assistance of Angela Bull). Nineteenth Century Children: Heroes and Heroines in English Children’s Stories 1780-1900 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965).
Though Kingsley in real life did not like the punishing of children, believing that misbehavior often has a physical cause and that punishment can undermine a child’s relationship with his parents, punishment is a major theme in The Water-Babies.  Avery declares that Kingsley wishes to point the moral that punishment is the natural consequence of sin.  She also states that education is the primary purpose of The Water-Babies, “the education of the child to become the honest English gentleman that was Kingsley’s ideal” (49).  Holding that education and teaching are quite distinct, Kingsley depicts Tom’s trials and subsequent learning and the final attainment of grace as constituting his true education.

The Water-Babies; Punishment; Children; Education.
 

Banerjee, Jacqueline. Through the Northern Gate: Childhood and Growing Up in British Fiction, 1719-1901 (New York: Lang, 1996).
Banerjee commends Kingsley’s unsentimental, positive, and far from frightening portrayal of child death in The Water-Babies. However, she considers the end when Tom and Ellie are brought back to land “a let-down” (104).

The Water-Babies; Child Death.
 

Beer, Gillian.  Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).
Beer considers Kingsley's debt to Darwin and the evolutionary theories in his works, particularly The Water-Babies.  The latter novel, Beer points out, echoes how Darwin's natural order reflects such features of Victorian society as division of labor, competition, and family structures.  Kingsley also follows to a certain degree Darwin's challenge to Malthusian theories.  Like Darwin, Kingsley disputes Malthus by regarding profusion and hyper-productivity as good and in his account of the evolutionary process of the once excluded Tom he challenges Malthusian social theory.  "In its unguarded and unanalytic response to Darwin's ideas and rhetoric, Kingsley's work represents the first phase of assimilation.  He grasped much of what was fresh in Darwin's ideas while at the same time retaining a creationist view of experience" (138).

Darwin; Evolution; Malthus; The Water-Babies.
 

Beer, Gillian.  “Kingsley: 'pebbles on the shore',” The Listener Vol. 93 (17 April, 1975): 506-7.
Beer briefly considers Kingsley’s views on the importance of catering to children’s imaginative needs.  She reviews certain attributes of The Water-Babies.  It is distressful, very funny, and full of social and political digressions; some of its episodes are cruel and make us wince; it is very sensual and crammed with physical experiences.  She discusses the important role aspects of evolutionary theory play throughout the work.  “It is hard, I think, to over-emphasise the richness of Kingsley’s recognition of mythic elements in the ideas of development and mutation, of ‘metamorphosis’ as Darwin sometimes calls it . . .”  In addition, complementing physical transformation, moral transformation, the responsibility of the individual himself, is a very significant theme in the work.  Beer also stresses that Mother Carey is a female principle of creativity, as opposed to the more usual male God.  Because of the occurrences of child death in The Water-Babies Beer views it as a kindertotenlied, “another of those attempts to give meaning to the death of children, so deeply and terribly needed by the Victorians” (507).

The Water-Babies; Evolution; Females; Child Death; Science.
 

Carnell, Corbin Scott. "Charles Kingsley," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 178: British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Before World War I.  Ed. by Darren Harris-Fain (Detroit: Gale, 1997): 132-138.
Carnell provides a bibliography of Kingsley’s own works, a brief bibliography of secondary material, an overview of his life and works with a focus on his fantasy work The Water-Babies.  His assessment: “Charles Kingsley can be considered a competent novelist, an engaging writer of sermons, and the author of a significant work of fantasy.  His lively engagement with the issues of his day will make his life and ideas of interest even as his writings are read with declining frequency” (138).

Overview; The Water-Babies.
 

Carpenter, Humphrey.  “Parson Lot Takes a Cold Bath: Charles Kingsley and The Water-Babies,” in his Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985): 23-43.
In this chapter Carpenter provides an overview of Kingsley’s life and works.  He suggests that Kingsley’s overt heterosexuality may not have been so real as he indicates in his letters to his wife.  He praises The Water-Babies for its innovation and readability but considers that it is also greatly muddled by its multitudinous social and political commentaries.  Quite different from anything else in the history of children’s literature, declares Carpenter, “it was both brilliant and a failure, self-contradictory, muddled, inspiring, sentimental, powerfully argumentative, irrationally prejudiced, superbly readable” (24).

Overview; Children; Sexuality; The Water-Babies.
 

Chapman, Raymond.  The Victorian Debate: English Literature and Society 1832-1901 (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
Chapman briefly discusses Kingsley’s major social and political novels, Yeast (1848), Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850), Hypatia (1853), and Two Years Ago (1857).  He also mentions The Water Babies (1863) for its treatment of child labor and social justice.  Chapman declares that Kingsley wrote in fiction about some of the topics with which Maurice was dealing in more theological terms.  “From Maurice he learned that the needs of the time could be a pragmatic sanction for Christianity; from Carlyle, how to subordinate reason to emotion.  The combination was, to say the least, a lively one.  Like Samuel Butler, so different in other ways, Kingsley wrote best about those things which he had made into a personal grievance” (135).

Social and Political Novel; Yeast; Alton Locke; Hypatia; Two Years Ago; The Water Babies.
 

Charques, R. D., Mrs.  “Kingsley as Children’s Writer,” Times Literary Supplement Vol. 2576 (15 June, 1951): i
In this short article, Charques discusses Kingsley's writings for children as well as his attitudes towards and his understanding of children.  She also touches briefly on his educational views.

Children; The Water-Babies; Education.
 

Chitty, Susan.  Charles Kingsley’s Landscape (Newton Abbot; North Pomfret, Vt.: David and Charles, 1976).
The first part of this work is essentially a biography of Kingsley with particular focus on the places he lived and visited, especially those in Devon. Most of the second part is an examination of the places, again mainly in Devon, mentioned in his works, particularly Westward Ho!, Two Years Ago, and The Water-Babies.
Overview; Devon; Westward Ho!; Two Years Ago; The Water-Babies.
 

Coleman, Dorothy.  “Rabelais and The Water-Babies,” Modern Language Review Vol. 66, No. 3 (July 1971): 511-21.
Coleman examines the influence of Rabelais on Kingsley and, more specifically, discusses Rabelaisian themes, echoes, and style in The Water-Babies.

Rabelais; The Water-Babies.
 

Cripps, Elizabeth A.  “Lewis Carroll, and Charles and Henry Kingsley,” Jabberwocky: The Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer 1980): 59-66.
Cripps considers data relating to three topics in this article: Carroll's knowledge of and interest in Kingsley and his works; Carroll's friendship with Henry Kingsley; and the parallels between The Water-Babies and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. With respect to the parallels, Cripps cautions about talking of influences, declaring that it is quite likely that two authors, themselves the product of similar backgrounds, should sometimes use the same ideas when composing a children's story.

Carroll, Lewis; The Water-Babies; Kingsley, Henry.
 

Cunningham, Valentine. "Soiled Fairy: The Water-Babies in its Time," Essays in Criticism Vol. XXXV, No. 2 (April 1985): 121-48.
Cunningham analyzes many of the causes and issues Kingsley treats with heat and hysteria in The Water-Babies declaring that they frequently coincide with the age’s heatedness and hysterias for these causes and issues.  Cunningham also discusses The Water-Babies’ various affinities to other classic fairy-story motifs.

The Water-Babies; Social and Political Views; Fairy-Story Motifs; Sanitation; Cheap Clothes and Nasty; Glaucus; Religion.
 

Darton, F. J. Harvey.  Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. 3rd ed. (London: British Library, 1999): 252-255.
Darton considers that The Water-Babies and other of Kingsley’s writings were flawed because of the author’s tendency to preach and to aim at a moral purpose.  However, he also praises Kingsley’s fine imagination and pure simplicity.

The Water-Babies; Children; Didacticism.
 

Fasick, Laura.  “The Failure of Fatherhood: Maleness and Its Discontents in Charles Kingsley,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3 (Fall 1993): 106-111.
Fasick declares that Kingsley's ideal of hyper-masculinity coexisted with his recognition of the need of such moral qualities of humility, gentleness, and patience.  However, she contends that Kingsley, who tended to prize the former ideal more highly, found it difficult to combine these two distinct spectra and certainly failed to illustrate their union in his novels.  "Despite his homage to gentleness and patience, Kingley's real attraction is apparently to the displays of power and aggression with which he adorns his novels" (109).

Muscular Christianity; Manliness; Fatherhood; The Water-Babies; Westward-Ho!.
 

Hawley, John C., S.J.  “The Water Babies as Catechetical Paradigm,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 1989): 19-21.
Hawley declares that The Water-Babies has two principle functions, to entertain and to teach.  The goal of education for Kingsley was ultimately a religious one.  Little Tom’s adventures, his evolutionary progress, the lessons learned all end in religious salvation.  Kingsley also uses The Water-Babies to show that science and evolution can co-exist with religion.  “With the publication of this novel he offers his most attractive, deceptively simple presentation of the argument that all purely scientific explanations of reality would benefit by being placed in the larger context of Christian revelation” (20).

The Water-Babies; Religion; Education; Science; Evolution.
 

Hoagwood, Terence. “Kingsley's ‘Young and Old',” Explicator Vol. 46, No. 4 (Summer 1988): 18-21.
Hoagwood analyzes Kingsley’s ‘Young and Old,” the short poem sung by the kind schoolmistress at Vendale in The Water-Babies.  He shows that it is impossible for the song to be fully understood when first encountered in the book.  It is only later in the story that we recognize that the song is the old dame’s lament for her son Grimes who left her.  The realization at the end of the novel that Grimes is her son “enables us to revisit the lyric and to revise our understanding of its latent, private, and even secret significance for the grieving old dame” (19).

‘Young and Old’; Poetry; The Water-Babies.
 

Hodgson, Amanda.  "Defining the Species: Apes, Savages and Humans in Scientific and Literary Writing of the 1860s," Journal of Victorian Culture Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 1999): 228-251.
Hodgson examines The Water-Babies, and particularly the characterization of Tom, in the context of the contemporary desire to distinguish humans from animals, especially apes, and the complementary efforts to define the distinctions between white civilized Europeans and "savages".  Her principal aim is to examine the relationship of this children's story to contemporary scientific theories on the nature of species as well as to compare the novel to Browning's 'Caliban upon Setebos'.

The Water-Babies; Science; Evolution; Huxley; Characterization in Novels.
 

Horsman, Alan.  “Elizabeth Gaskell and the Kingsleys,” in his The Victorian Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990): 256-294.
In his brief examination of Yeast, Alton Locke, Two Years Ago, and The Water-Babies Horsman praises the clarity, the felicity and the exactitude of Kingsley's descriptive passages, qualities that make him "stand out among the minor novelists" (256).  However, he also faults Kingsley for neglecting his novel writing in favor of the pursuit of his religious and educational aims that led him to take "the short cuts of melodrama and allegory" (256).  Horsman also criticizes the didacticism pervading Kingsley's novels though he acknowledges that despite its strong didactic elements The Water-Babies comes closest to a work of the imagination.


Yeast; Alton Locke; Two Years Ago; The Water-Babies; Novels; Didacticism.
 

Ison, Mary M.  “Things Nobody Ever Heard Of: Jessie Willcox Smith Draws the Water-Babies,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress Vol. 39, No. 2 (1982): 90-101.
In this illustrated article Ison discusses the thirteen color drawings in oil, charcoal, and pastel made by Jessie Willcox Smith for a 1916 edition of The Water-Babies.  She praises the illustrations declaring that they “invest the water-babies with such reality as to provide credence to Kingsley’s story” (101).

The Water-Babies; Illustrations; Smith, Jessie Willcox.
 

Johnston, Arthur.  "The Water-Babies: Kingsley's Debt to Darwin,” English Vol. 12 (Autumn 1959): 215-19.
Johnston reviews the scientific content in a number of Kingsley’s works, in particular the novels Yeast, Alton Locke, and Two Years Ago.  He considers that the influence of Darwinian thought and the theory of evolution is particularly evident throughout The Water-Babies.  In fact, “The metamorphosis of Tom into a water-baby is not more wonderful than the metamorphosis of the Origin of Species into The Water-Babies” (219).

Science; Darwin; The Water-Babies.
 

Labbe, Jacqueline M.  “The Godhead Regendered in Victorian Children’s Literature,” in Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (eds.) Rereading Victorian Fiction (UK: Macmillan, 2000): 96-114.
Labbe argues that many texts of Victorian children’s literature substituted the Wise Woman, the Fairy Godmother, for God the Father as the sage of choice.  Christianity, in short, was being feminized.  In The Water-Babies such “female deities” as Mother Carey, Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby, and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid with their female virtues of love, compassion and inherent knowledge are more important than the more manly qualities in the divine order.  “In Kingsley’s version of the female Christ, he realigns Christ’s gender, or rather his sex; this female Christ poses no threat to established gender roles, but rather makes plain the femininity of Christ’s character” (104).

Females; Religion; Manliness; The Water-Babies.
 

Leavis, Q. D. “The Water Babies,” Children's Literature in Education Vol. 23 (Winter 1976): 155-163.
Leavis regrets that the “excitingly written and splendidly imaginative Victorian classic” The Water-Babies is no longer read by children (155).  She argues that its literary merits justify that it be kept in circulation and suggests various ways it might be used in modern children’s education.  “The combination of drama, saga, nonsense, science, magic, poetry and comedy Kingsley invented is irresistible and became a mode adopted by writers for children in the later 19th and the 20th centuries with great success” (163).

The Water-Babies; Sambourne, Linley; Illustrations; Children; Education.
 

MacNeice, Louis. Varieties of Parable (Cambridge: Cambridge at the University Press, 1965).
MacNeice discusses The Water-Babies, “one of the most uneven and ragbaggy books in the language” (83).  Though he enjoys the fantasy and escapism, he is greatly critical of the digressions about contemporary disputes and excessive moralizing.  While Lewis Carroll also introduces aspects of contemporary problems into his works, he does not allow them to interfere with the story.  However, Kingsley does, “and in a story which, potentially, had many of the virtues of a myth it is a very serious fault” (83).

The Water-Babies; Didacticism.
 

Makman, Lisa Hermine. “Child’s Work is Child’s Play: The Value of George MacDonald’s Diamond,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly Vol. 24, No. 3 (Fall 1999): 119-129.
Makman discusses Kingsley's treatment of the child in The Water-Babies, as well as that of Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in her examination of MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind.  While the latter work, she declares, presents the child as the new toy-child, depicting, after the cessation of child-labor, the gradual development of the notion that children are essentially toys, Kingsley's novel has a different orientation.  "But while Kingsley emphasizes the mysterious nature of the play-world and its inhabitants, MacDonald focuses more on the mysterious nature of the child who can enter that world" (122).

The Water-Babies; MacDonald, George; Children; Carroll, Lewis.
 

Manlove, C. N. “Charles Kingsley (1819-75) and The Water-Babies,” in his Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975): 13-54.
Manlove relates this examination of the major themes, theories, and stylistic devices of The Water-Babies to Kingsley's wider views.  He contends that we should be tentative about categorically assigning a specific idea to Kingsley.  The one constant is the protean nature, the multiplicity, the diversity, the volatility, and uncertainty of his thought. Kingsley's many contradictions have "a natural home" in The Water-Babies (17).  Manlove believes that the split in Kingsley's depiction of Tom's character not only lies at the root of the difficulties in The Water-Babies and Kingsley's other works but also mirrors the manifest divisions in Kingsley's own personality and thought, for example the divide between Kingsley the materialist and the mystic, between Kingsley as scientist and Christian. Manlove concludes that "Kingsley was not more of a materialist than a mystic: rather he was each with divided faculties. About the only thing that unites the dualism in himself and his work is his vigour" (53).

The Water-Babies; Dualism in Kingsley; Natural Theology.
 

Manlove, Colin.  “Charles Kingsley, H. G. Wells, and the Machine in Victorian Fiction,” Nineteenth-Century Literature Vol. 48, No. 2 (Sept. 1993): 212-239.
Manlove declares that apart from Samuel Butler in his Erehwon, the only important Victorian writers who focus on the central role the machine plays in life and nature are H. G. Wells, in The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and Kingsley, in The Water-Babies.  He argues that though The Water-Babies may appear to be a marine pastoral, machines and engines are mentioned over and over again and the animals themselves are treated as in part machines.  He considers that The Water-Babies reflects Kingsley's view that the whole order of nature functions as one great engine.  In fact, the content and the style of the novel renders it a type of organic engine itself.  "The Water-Babies is an amazing diversity of contexts, characters, and apparent irrelevancies, all bound together by secret principles that make it a machine without being a monolithic one -- indeed, it manages to fuse all the variety that Kingsley saw in nature with the purposiveness of the engine."

Dickens; Machine, The; The Water-Babies.
 

Manlove, Colin.  “MacDonald and Kingsley: A Victorian Contrast” in William Raeper (ed.) The Gold Thread: Essays on George MacDonald (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990): 140-162.
In this article Manlove compares and contrasts the characters, the views, and the writings of Kingsley and George MacDonald, who, he declares were arguably the only two significant writers of Christian fantasy in the Victorian period. Generally, Kingsley, whose belief and involvement in science were much greater than MacDonald's, places nature first while MacDonald chooses "supernature."  Kingsley's God is so identifiable with the works of His creation that He is only distinguishable from them by faith.  The God of MacDonald, who has a stronger sense of the supernatural and the mystical, is invariably a person, whereas for Kingsley He is a force.  Nevertheless, Manlove argues that the two writers for all their differences share a particular common bond, namely "that they chose, alone and at almost the same time in the nineteenth century, to put what they could of the divine presence in the fairy tale" (159).

MacDonald, George; Religion; Science; The Water-Babies.
 

Muller, Charles H.  “The Water Babies: Moral Lessons for Children.” UNISA English Studies Vol. 24, No. 1 (1986): 12-17.
Muller discusses the numerous biblical and moral lessons in The Water-Babies and the work’s patent allegorical and didactic significance. However, he stresses that the fable’s major aim is to assert God’s abiding love and the ever presence of divine providence.

The Water-Babies; Moral Lessons; Children; Religion.
 

Paget, Stephen.  “The Water-Babies,” in I Have Reason to Believe (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1968; first published 1921): 102-116.
This is a personal laudatory appreciation of The Water-Babies.  Though admitting that it is not a book for children because of its numerous digressions, Paget declares “I would not give my copy of the Water-Babies for a wilderness of mad hatters” (105).

The Water-Babies.
 

Paradis, James G.  “Satire and Science in Victorian Culture,” in Bernard Lightman (ed.) Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997): 143-175.
Paradis points out that though Kingsley was a strong advocate of the scientific efforts of the likes of Lyell, Darwin, and Huxley, he also eagerly sought a post-Darwinian equivalent to natural theology.  Kingsley considered that Victorian science was inadequate in itself as a philosophy of life and caricatured its one-sided scientific naturalist approach in The Water-Babies.

Science; Religion; Natural Theology; The Water-Babies.
 

Prickett, Stephen.  “Adults in Allegory Land: Kingsley and MacDonald,” in his Victorian Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979): 150-197.
Prickett provides a lengthy examination of The Water-Babies comparing and contrasting it with several allegorical fantasies of George MacDonald.  Among other topics, he discusses the extent to which Kingsley was influenced by Wordsworth regarding his view of nature and his attitude to childhood, as well as by Rabelais.  He also examines Platonism, religion, evolution, and the nature of allegory in The Water-Babies.  Prickett declares that Kingsley and MacDonald have quite distinct mental sets.  “Kingsley, the botanist, marine biologist and historian is fascinated by every minute detail of this world; ‘other’ worlds are constructs – telling us yet more about this.  MacDonald is a temperamental Platonist, only interested in the surface of this world for the news it gives him of another, hidden reality, perceived, as it were, through a glass darkly” (193).

The Water-Babies; MacDonald, George; Rabelais; Wordsworth; Nature; Children; Religion; Plato; Evolution.
 

Rapple, Brendan A. "Charles Kingsley," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 163: British Children's Writers, 1800-1880.  Edited by Meena Khorana (Detroit: Gale 1996): 136-147.
Following the usual format of the DLB, a bibliography of Kingsley’s own works is followed by an account of his life interspersed with an analysis of his writings, in this case his works for children.  A short secondary bibliography is appended.  Several illustrations are also provided.  Rapple’s assessment: “Tastes change, and it is not surprising that modern children eschew works intended for their Victorian ancestors.  The Heroes has been supplanted by other retellings of the Greek tales; the science of Glaucus and Madam How and Lady Why no longer has appeal, and today's youth would reject the books’ pervasive social commentary, sermonizing, and didacticism.  Nor is Westward Ho! read much by present-day youngsters, though it is still available in a children's edition.  The significant exception has been the consistently high readership, especially in the United Kingdom, for The Water-Babies, of which there are probably more editions, adaptations, and abridgements in print today than in Kingsley's own time.  The work’s simplicity, brilliant fantasy, and affection for the young, despite its frequent preaching, still capture the devotion of children.  It is The Water-Babies, though its author would never have foretold it, that will ensure Kingsley a high rank in the history of children's literature” (146).

Overview; Children; Glaucus; Westward Ho!; Heroes, The; The Water-Babies; Hereward the Wake; Madam How and Lady Why.
 

Rapple, Brendan.  “The Motif of Water in Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies,” University of Mississippi Studies in English Vol. XI-XII (1993-1995): 259-71.
Kingsley uses the motif of water in The Water-Babies to preach the virtues of bathing and washing.  Cleaning the body and the inculcation of good sanitary habits is also an effective method of preventing disease.  In addition, washing with water, preferably cold water, helps the attainment of moral rectitude.  “However, the depiction of water as a cleansing agent may also be viewed in an allegorical sense, namely as purifying morally and spiritually both the individual Tom as well as the collective society. Only after Tom's baptismal washing and consequent Christian rebirth does his deeply felt wish ‘I must be clean, I must be clean’ begin to be truly satisfied.  Only after an analogous allegorical cleansing can any genuine regeneration of England occur” (269).

The Water-Babies; Water Motif; Cleanliness; Sanitation; Religion; Social and Political Views.
 

Stevenson, Deborah.  “Sentiment and Significance: The Impossibility of Recovery in the Children's Literature Canon or, The Drowning of The Water Babies,” The Lion and the Unicorn Vol. 21, No. 1 (1997): 112-130.
Stevenson attempts to define the nature of the canon in children’s literature and posits two distinct canons.  The most important one is the canon of sentiment, i.e. the popular canon.  On the other hand, there is the academic canon of significance which may rediscover an older work of children’s literature for academic purposes but which will not give it back its place in the canon of sentiment.  The Water-Babies, Stevenson argues, certainly resides in the canon of significance but has less and less place in the popular canon of sentiment.  “Within The Water-Babies, Tom found redemption and new life, but he must content himself with that internal promise; no matter what efforts scholars may make to rescue it, the book itself is sliding irrevocably below the waves" (128).

The Water-Babies; Children.
 

Stolzenback, Mary M. “The Water Babies: An Appreciation,” Mythlore Vol. 8, No. 2 (1981): 20
Praises the story of The Water-Babies and declares that it still holds interest for students of mythopoeic fiction.

The Water-Babies.
 

Tanner, Tony.  “Mountains and Depths---An Approach to Nineteenth-century Dualism.” Review of English Literature Vol. III (October 1962): 51-61. ??????
Tanner examines the significance of the roles of cleanliness and dirt in The Water-Babies.  This work has dual spheres of truth.  “On the one hand a life debased, dirty and corrupting, on the other hand a slightly fantastic realm in which many of the values cherished by the Victorian mind are operative – and the two worlds are separate and in a state of hostile tension” (55).

The Water-Babies; Cleanliness.
 

Townsend, John Rowe.  Written for Children: An Outline of English-language Children's Literature (New York: Lippincott, 1983; first published 1965): 94-100.
Townsend discusses Kingsley as a writer of children’s literature, paying particular attention to The Water-Babies.  This work, especially the earlier chapters, though powerful was imperfect mainly due to its plentiful “dross”. Townsend considers this “marred masterpiece” (100) one of the uncommon instances of children’s books when an edited version is preferable to the original.

The Water-Babies; Children.
 

Uffelman, Larry, and Patrick Scott.  “Kingsley's Serial Novels, II: The Water-Babies,” Victorian Periodicals Review Vol. XIX, No. 4 (Winter 1986): 122-131.
Uffelman and Scott, utilizing the Macmillan archive in the British Library, examine the revision into book form of The Water-Babies, first published serially from August 1862 to March 1863 in eight monthly episodes in Macmillan’s Magazine.  The revisions were extensive and included a softening of style and mood from the adult oriented text in Macmillan’s Magazine to one more suitable for children, a tempering of the serial version’s anti-Americanism, and, most important, “the systematic introduction of a new character, the old Irishwoman, to link together the real world of the opening with the spiritual and fantasy world of the Water-Babies” (122).

The Water-Babies; Publication; Macmillan’s Magazine; Anti-Americanism.
 

Wallace, Jo-Ann “De-Scribing The Water-Babies: ‘The Child’ in Post-Colonial Theory,” in Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (eds.) De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1994): 171-184.
Wallace argues that whereas the child in The Water-Babies is the center of educational, social reform and imperialist debate, he is depoliticized in the 1984 abridged Puffin Classics edition and repoliticized in Jamaica Kincaid’s 1983 short story ‘Wingless’.  The Puffin edition, mirroring post-colonialist guilt, “is paradigmatic of ‘the West’s’ continuing and contradictory investment in a vision of childhood as a universal unmarked by class, place, or history”.  However, ‘Wingless’, “disallows such a disavowal of historical and geographical specificity by returning both the text of The Water-Babies and the child reader to colonialist history” (182).

The Water-Babies; Kincaid, Jamaica; Imperialism; Colonialism; Children.
 

Walsh, Susan A.  “Darling Mothers, Devilish Queens: The Divided Woman in Victorian Fantasy,” The Victorian Newsletter No. 72 (Fall 1987): 32-36.
Walsh discusses the treatment of women in The Water-Babies.  Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby, a nurturing spirit, is kindness and gentleness personified and loved by all babies.  She even “suffers the little children to come to her in a somewhat cloying version of the New Testament invitation” (33).  On the other hand, Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, though compassionate, has the task of being strict and tough.  She enforces morals and provides retribution to those who don’t measure up to proper high standards.  The enigmatic Mother Carey combines the soft kindness of Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and the ancient austerity of Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid.  Though amazingly fertile and fecund, she “suggests a kind of spontaneous, ceaseless birth that is also removed and static” (33).  Accordingly, declares Walsh, one may easily discern “in these dual personifications the division perceived by countless Romantic and Victorian writers within the female figure itself, as gentle monitress on the one hand, and sleepless moral enforcer on the other” (33).

The Water-Babies; Females.
 

Wood, Naomi.  “A (Sea) Green Victorian: Charles Kingsley and the The Water-Babies,”  Lion and the Unicorn Vol. 19, No. 2 (1995): 233-52.
Wood argues that Kingsley's naturalism, especially as depicted in The Water-Babies, may be considered as proto-environmentalism.  Kingsley throughout this tale blames his contemporaries' too ready and uncritical embracing of machinery and industry as responsible for Victorian England's pervasive pollution.  He contrasts this man-made wastefulness with nature's productive ways which are invariably economical, pleasurable, and clean.  Wood considers that The Water-Babies anticipates certain contemporary environmentalist agendas and, remaining "a rich and many-layered commentary on the biological and metaphorical relationship between humans and their environment," may still be a relevant environmentalist tract (249).

The Water-Babies; Environmentalism; Malthus.