"The Water Babies" by Charles Kingsley...reconsidered

A fairytale that requires a bit more thought than Mother Goose

“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 Pterodactyls: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.”
- Reverend Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies, 1863

The Water Babies is a children’s novel by Reverend Charles Kingsley, written in the 1860s, and it was my mother’s favorite book when she was a girl. I remember her reading it to me before I could read it myself. I do not know what became of the copy she had; I wish I did. It was a very popular book in its day, but less so now. (I’ll talk about the reasons tor that in a bit.)

The book was a rebuke of child labor, and espoused a progressive view on other social issues of the time. It is also a strong rejection of scientific as well as social orthodoxy. The book took a stand in favor of science over dogma, and supported Darwin’s Origin of Species, still much debated at the time.

But there’s another aspect to this book, one that it’s not so easy to praise; it’s rather racist. There are passages in the novel that are anti-just-about-everyone-that-isn’t-white-and-British.  Specifically, there are passages that are anti-Semitic, anti-Irish, anti-Catholic, anti-black and anti-American. This is probably why the book, so popular in its day, isn’t quite so well regarded now.

Is it possible to admire such a novel now? Well, yes and no. On one hand, yes, it should be possible to regard such a book in the same way we regard the works of H. P. Lovecraft, who was a brilliantly imaginative writer whose works are still widely read despite the man’s (and often his fiction’s) racism.

On the other hand, no.  The standard “excuse” given for authors like Lovecraft and Kingsley is that they were men of their time, and that their time was one in which their kind of casual racism was common, even normal. This excuse doesn’t stand close scrutiny when you remember that there were great men and women of the same era that rejected such thinking. A great many such, and many of them were raised in the same environments of casual racism as those who retained that racism all their lives.

There’s another aspect that should be considered: The Water Babies is a children’s novel. I’m not a parent but if I were I might be more than a bit hesitant to expose my children to this sort of casual racism. But the other side of that coin is the fact that I myself was exposed to this novel at a young age and I did not become much of a racist. I was raised in such a “casually racist” environment without myself succumbing to that kind of thinking (much).

I should also note that I am an admirer of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. Though of the man himself, not so much.

It’s possible to respect, even love, a person without accepting what that person stands for. This is something that my own father never understood. He always thought that by rejecting his values, I was rejecting him. And, though these may be unrelated, I believe that it was primarily his rejection of my values that led to his rejection of me (which happened long before we’d stopped talking).

(If you think that last paragraph was a bit too personal, tough shit. Books, to me, are very personal.)

For all that it’s a children’s novel, The Water Babies is not a simple book and never was. Its author is no less of an enigma; Reverend Kingsly wrote with a profound regard for science belied by his own racism, a strong social consciousness that nevertheless existed within a framework of a racially stratified world view.  His casual acceptance of the racial conventions of his day could perhaps be forgiven if not for the thousands of men and women willing to risk all, even their lives, to change those same conventions.

It isn’t necessary to reject the works of a Kingsley (or a Lovecraft) because you reject what they believed. Nor is it necessary to reject an entire novel because there’s something in it (or even quite a lot of something) that offends your sensibilities. We are thinking beings (most of us, anyway) and can think about what we read, understand where the author was coming from, and judge the merit of the work without judging the work based on its author. Or vice versa.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are my own and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.