Flying Dragons and Water Babies
Or how Thomas Huxley and Charles Kingsley bonded over an unlikely subject
Once upon a time there was a little chimney-sweep, and his name was Tom.
Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, in November 1859, and it is often assumed that from that day forward a battle raged between the scientists and the men of religion. Surely the logical conclusion of everything that Darwin and his associates, Lyall, Wallace, Huxley and others wrote about was in direct contradiction with the teachings of the Bible. The days when clergymen could collect and catalogue butterflies and fossils in their spare time, and still preach Sunday sermons on the wonders of God’s seven-day creation, were gone: the scientists had pronounced the alternative gospel of EVOLUTION!
For devout Christians such as the publisher Alexander Macmillan, a determination to trust in the discoveries of these men of science, and to be open-minded to the theories that resulted, made life difficult. However, the stance taken in Macmillan’s Magazine, unlike much of the Victorian literary press, was to be supportive of scientific enquiry, hostile to the Establishment where it held back intellectual and democratic progress, and optimistic about the powers of co-operation and brotherhood. The Magazine was launched the same month as Origin was published, and the second issue contained, in a timely coup, Thomas Huxley’s first written response to Darwin’s work.
Thomas Huxley, born in 1825, was like Macmillan in that he did not have the advantages of a university education. He underwent medical training in London, and then joined HMS Rattlesnake for a voyage round the world. In 1850 he arrived back in London determined to make a career for himself as a scientist, and desperate to earn enough money to bring his fiancée home from Australia. In 1854 he was introduced to FD Maurice, Charles Kingsley and the Christian Socialist set, and they encouraged him to try his hand at teaching the working man. As he wrote to a friend ‘I am sick of the dilettante middle class and mean to try what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among facts.’ In 1857 he gave his first lecture at the Working Men’s College to an audience of fifty, including Maurice himself. Alexander Macmillan heard him speak and was impressed by his easy style and delivery.
Huxley’s article for Macmillan, ‘Time and Life: Mr Darwin’s Origin of Species’, summarised the key points of Darwin’s thesis. He had not yet committed himself to being Darwin’s Bulldog, as he later called himself, and only argued that Darwin’s theory appeared to be the best available explanation given to date of a question that was puzzling scientists:
If it can be proved that the process of natural selection, operating upon any species, can give rise to varieties of species so different from one another that none of our tests will distinguish them from true species, Mr Darwin’s hypothesis of the origin of species will take its place among the established theories of science, be its consequences whatever they may.
He went on to confront those who would criticise from ignorance or theological panic.
In either case the question is one to be settled only by the painstaking, truth-loving investigation of skilled naturalists. It is the duty of the general public to await the result in patience; and above all things, to discourage, as they would any other crimes, the attempt to enlist the prejudices of the ignorant, or the uncharitableness of the bigoted, on either side of the controversy.
As the immediate furore over Origins began to die away, scientists around the world busied themselves gathering evidence either to support or to disprove the Darwin hypothesis. But one of Macmillan’s closest friends continued to work through the implications for his Christian faith: this was the Reverend Charles Kingsley, recently appointed Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. Kingsley, a notable amateur naturalist, had been pulled into the debate when Darwin sent him an advanced copy of his book in November 1859. He responded offering enthusiastic support and quoting St Paul:
‘‘Let God be true and every man a liar”... I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self-development into all forms needful…as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which he himself had made. I question whether the former be not the loftier thought.
Darwin would paraphrase this sentence in the second edition of Origins, published in 1860, delighted to have such an eminent cleric on his side. Generally speaking, Kingsley was happy to accept that Darwin might have disproved many theories on which he himself had previously relied, but to his way of thinking, the discoveries of science could only be to the glory of God, not a challenge.
Kingsley’s relationship with Darwin was the nodding acquaintance of two eminent Victorian men of letters: but he formed an even closer relationship with Thomas Huxley. They bonded over their shared passion for natural history and met several times at Macmillan’s Tobacco Parliament evenings. Huxley was becoming ever more fervent in his rejection of Christian certainties and liked nothing better than a good fight with a clergyman. But if he expected to find a conventional sparring partner in this man who was now also ‘Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen’, he found instead an open-minded yet deeply spiritual friend. Having read Huxley’s review of Darwin in Macmillan’s Magazine, Kingsley wrote to congratulate him, it ‘said what ought to be said’ and would ‘keep the curs from barking’. Kingsley, the keen huntsman, promised that he would continue to follow Darwin’s ‘villainous shifty fox of an argument into whatsoever unexpected bog and brakes he may lead us.’
The letters the two men exchanged later in 1860, after the death of Huxley’s little boy, Noel, are masterpieces of tolerance and respect for each other’s views. Kingsley tried to offer consolation that Huxley would meet his son again. Huxley replied that as he could not see any proof of eternal life, he could not accept it as fact. He went on ‘I don’t profess to understand the logic of yourself, Maurice and the rest of your school, but I have always said I would swear by your truthfulness and sincerity, and that good must come of your efforts.’ Their correspondence continued and their friendship deepened.
Meanwhile, Kingsley had become increasingly dismayed that the leaders of the Church of England appeared so eager to deny Darwin’s theories. For him, the idea that he was descended from an ape held no shame: ‘If so, I compliment my ancestors on having had wits enough to produce me, while my cousins have gone and irremediably disgraced themselves.’
He had experience of writing campaigning fiction, and understood that he was at his most persuasive when he took up his pen to tell a story. While Huxley could produce learned texts to support Darwin’s theory, Kingsley would attack the problem at the grass roots level. He wrote to his friend Frederick Maurice that he wanted:
…to make children and grown folks understand that there is a quite miraculous and divine element underlying all physical nature…And if I have wrapped up my parable in seeming Tomfooleries, it is because so only could I get the pill swallowed by a generation who are not believing with anything like their whole heart in the Living God.
In June 1862 Alexander Macmillan went to stay at Eversley, Charles Kingsley’s parsonage in Hampshire, and wrote to his old friend James MacLehose: ‘We are to have such a story from him for the Magazine…It is to be called ‘The Water Babies’. I have read a great deal of it, and it is the most charming piece of grotesquery, with flashes of tenderness and poetry playing over all, that I have ever seen.’
The timing of the novel’s composition was closely tied to the debates on evolution: when the British Association met in Cambridge in October 1862, Kingsley held open house for Huxley and his associates, and wrote the final instalments of the tale in the evenings after they had gone. The serial ran for eight months from August 1862 and was then published as a book for children in 1863.
By now, the Macmillan children were old enough to be guinea pig listeners. Daniel’s oldest boy, Fred, was ten years old, and Alexander’s youngest daughter little Olive, had just turned three; the eight children listened entranced as Alexander read them the story. Many years later his daughter Margaret set down her private reminiscences of her childhood and this is the one book she particularly mentions:
The greatest excitement in the nursery world that I remember in the Cambridge days was caused by my father reading us The Water Babies...the fresh wonder of those opening chapters, surely the most charming part of the book…how we all sat spellbound…That nursery scene is still vivid, and the keen joyousness of my father’s face and voice as he read. It is typical of the delight that lay for him in his work and which was imparted to the atmosphere of his home.
Margaret also describes Kingsley at this time:
The keen eagle-like face lighted up by those wonderful blue eyes, the elaborate courtliness of his manner, his boyish spirits, his delightful talk of outdoor things, the impetuosity of his utterance, which was emphasised by his stammer; all deeply impressed the childish mind. 1
The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby was an immediate success, quite unlike anything Kingsley had written before, or indeed, with its excursions into fantasy, any previous children’s literature. As Humphrey Carpenter wrote:
Like all Kingsley’s work it was both brilliant and a failure, self-contradictory, muddled, inspiring, sentimental, powerfully argumentative, irrationally prejudiced, superbly readable. In a small space it managed to discover and explore almost all the directions that children’s books would take over the next hundred years. And in exploring them it usually fell flat on its face.2
Ostensibly, it is a fairy tale of how a poor little chimney sweep’s boy, Tom, runs away from a cruel master, falls into the river and is transformed into a ‘water baby’, then has the sort of adventures that would be familiar to anyone who knows the later tales of Alice Through the Looking Glass or even The Sword in the Stone: in other words, the novel created a whole new genre of children’s fantasy that continues to this day. Clearly, Kingsley hoped that he was popularising, and simplifying, the theories behind evolution, but in a way that reflected his belief in an all-powerful, Living God. He was also poking fun at the clerics and men of letters who could not see that our understanding of the world had changed for ever:
Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.
Tucked within these theological messages were more topical concerns: specifically, his horror at the working conditions of chimney sweep boys. This certainly had the desired effect on the voting public, as the Chimney Sweepers’ Regulation Act, forbidding the use of children under the age of sixteen in sweeping chimneys, was passed in Parliament the following year. The book has been in print ever since publication, and for two years would be the best-selling British children’s book, until Macmillan published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Charles Kingsley probably deserves a whole Substack to himself, a mass of contradictions, some of them not very pleasant to today’s audience. And there is no doubt that The Water Babies makes for strange reading. Far more people have heard of it than have ever actually read it, start to finish. When I was little, my parents had a copy on the shelf, and I read the beginning and looked at the pictures, but never got to the end. Here it is for you now!
But remember always, as I told you at first, that this is all a fairy tale, and only fun and pretence; and therefore, you are not to believe a word of it, even if it is true.
Taken from private family papers
Humphrey Carpenter, ‘Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature’
This is so fascinating! I love the description of it as a 'piece of grotesquery', very apt. Interesting to think about it as a forerunner to modern fantasy too.
Fascinating account of Kingsley’s fantasy! Glad to know about it. I still recall when someone asked me, in 2009, what I knew about Kingsley, and I had a one-word answer. Sigh. Thanks for sharing.