The Water Babies
Apparently, The Water Babies was hugely popular in it’s day. It was published in 1863, and it stayed a staple until the 1920’s.
The story is about a boy named Tom that is basically beaten and worked to death, who runs away from a chimney-sweep-related misunderstanding, then dies on a creekbed.
He wakes up a “water baby.”
The author was a minister, so there’s a ton of appeals to faith in the book—he basically dares the reader (who is assumed to be a boy) to believe in fairies and water-babies in spite of modern science and reason and, I assume, that was meant to ensure that the perils of modern science didn’t destroy religious faith.
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.
Argue with that.
The book has wonderful illustrations by Warwick Goble.
The Fairy Queen follows Tom around and sets her fairies to keeping him safe. Can you imagine putting such a thing in a book targeted at boys today? HA!
After his transformation, Tom has various interactions with bugs and other water-creatures, including fish that want to eat him and impolite, undignified otters.
Tom had never seen a lobster before; and he was mightily taken with this one; for he thought him the most curious, odd, ridiculous creature he had ever seen; and there he was not far wrong; for all the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful men, in the world, with all the old German bogy-painters into the bargain, could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious, and so ridiculous, as a lobster.
Again. Argue with that.
He eventually gets tired of sea life, and hears tell of other water-babies. He goes to the ocean to seek them out.
Again… put that in a modern boy’s book, and see how it works out.
In the end, the book turns into a tale of Christian redemption, which, given that it’s a 19th century children’s book written by a minister, should come as a shock to no one.
Surprisingly, in this day and age, though, Tom’s eternal reward is to become a scientist.
Argue with that.
