The Lion and the Unicorn

Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1862–63) tells the story of Tom, a degraded young chimney sweep who is transformed into a “water-baby.” In a magical, mystical version of evolution, Tom is “born again” into a wonderful underwater world, where he is given a second chance to develop into the man he should have been. After journeying through the natural wonders of stream, river, and ocean. Tom evolves into a true, strong man who is able to take an instrumental role in the land world as “a great man of science, [who] can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth . . .” (358). The Water-Babies presents Nature as “a blooming, buzzing confusion” of unbelievable yet true diversity. The book’s exposition adds to the confusion: while accurately teaching readers about the natural world, the narrator contends that the story is merely a fairy tale, continually baiting the reader with assertions that can’t be proved and demonstrating how difficult it is to be certain about anything. It avers that Nature’s truth may be as outlandish as any fairy tale, and conversely, that the truth of “common sense” and Utilitarianism may be only a phantom. Furthermore, Nature is inextricably intertwined with moral and spiritual issues. The Water-Babies has been analyzed in Freudian terms, in Christian terms, in Darwinian terms. ¹ I propose here to investigate Charles Kingsley’s characteristically Victorian naturalism as proto-environmentalism, a foray into an issue that has become extremely important to us in the late twentieth century: the relationship between human action and natural process. ²

Children’s literature, almost from its inception, has been deeply invested in drawing connections between humans and the natural world, as the recent issue on “Ecology and the Child” of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (1994–95) demonstrates. The Water-Babies is a [End Page 233] solid part of that tradition in that it both educates readers to revere nature and advocates political action to protect human and natural resources. If Kingsley’s goals are not always the goals of modern environmentalists, his metaphors are productive; they insist on a biological link between humans and nature, so that readers are drawn to see themselves as a smaller part of a larger Nature. As metaphoric mother, Nature’s precepts must be obeyed, her love for her children cannot be compromised, and she implacably punishes those who wrong her or others. Kingsley thus places natural process in a framework easily understood by children learning similar lessons at home. Kingsley’s environmentalism is both Victorian and radical: taking his contemporaries to task for urban blight and industrial pollution, he uses a fairy-tale form to posit alternatives to the wastefulness of industrialism, suggesting that we ought rather to follow Nature’s ways of production. Kingsley’s unapologetically anthropocentric imagery still has relevant implications for humanity’s relationship with the environment, because he holds humans responsible for their actions.

When Kingsley wrote The Water-Babies, Darwin’s Origin of Species had only recently been published (in 1859); Kingsley, though a Church of England clergyman, had been one of the first to argue for its truth. The term “ecology” was not yet coined (it would be in 1866 by a German naturalist [Bate 36]), but naturalists and other physical scientists were already well aware of Nature’s “web,” investigating the interconnections between humans, animals, plants, and landscape as part of a total environment. However, in this period of the Industrial Revolution, England’s economy was booming, and laissez-faire capitalist policies had repudiated any effort to control factory labor or environmental policies. ³ Utilitarians argued that social policy could be based on arithmetic definitions; profit was “good” and human happiness only relative. Further, they held that because “Nature” governed through pain and pleasure, self-interest was and ought to be the governing rule for human society. ⁴ Carrying out these ideas in the classroom, many teachers and educational theorists advocated that the young be taught facts and materialist rationality alone—that fancy served no useful purpose. ⁵ Overall, the intellectual climate questioned received...