In the style of
Victorian-era novels,
The Water-Babies is a
didactic moral
fable. In it, Kingsley expresses many of the common prejudices of that time period, and the book includes dismissive or insulting references to Americans,
Jews,
Blacks, and
Catholics, particularly the
Irish. The book had been intended in part as a satire, a tract against
child labour, as well as a serious critique of the closed-minded approaches of many scientists of the day in their response to
Charles Darwin's ideas on
evolution, which Kingsley had been one of the first to praise. He had been sent an advance review copy of
On the Origin of Species, and wrote in his response of 18 November 1859 (four days before Darwin's book was published) that he had "long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species," and had "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
pro tempore and
pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the
lacunas which He Himself had made", asking "whether the former be not the loftier thought." In the book, for example, Kingsley argues that no person is qualified to say that something that they have never seen (like a human
soul or a water-baby)
does not exist. "How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none ... And no one has a right to say that no water-babies exist, till they have seen no water-babies existing; which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water-babies... You must not talk about " ain’t ” and " can’t ” when you speak of this great wonderful world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean. You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows; not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Owen, or Professor Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley, or Mr. Darwin, or Professor Faraday, or Mr. Grove." In his
Origin of Species, Darwin mentions that, like many others at the time, he thought that changed habits produce an inherited effect, a concept now known as
Lamarckism. In
The Water-Babies, Kingsley tells of a group of humans called the Doasyoulikes who are allowed to do "whatever they like" and who gradually lose the power of speech,
degenerate into
gorillas and are shot by the African explorer
du Chaillu. He refers to the
movement to end slavery in mentioning that one of the gorillas shot by du Chaillu "remembered that his ancestors had once been men, and tried to say, '
Am I Not A Man And A Brother?', but had forgotten how to use his tongue". and
Thomas Henry Huxley inspect a water baby in
Linley Sambourne's 1885 illustration.
The Water-Babies alludes to debates among biologists of its day, satirising what Kingsley had previously dubbed the
"great hippocampus question" as the "great hippopotamus test". At various times the text refers to "Sir
Roderick Murchison, Professor
(Richard) Owen, Professor
(Thomas Henry) Huxley, (and) Mr. Darwin", and thus they become explicitly part of the story. In the accompanying illustrations by
Linley Sambourne, Huxley and Owen are caricatured, studying a captured water-baby. In 1892 Thomas Henry Huxley's five-year-old grandson
Julian saw this engraving and wrote his grandfather a letter asking: Dear Grandpater – Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Could I see it some day? – Your loving Julian. Huxley wrote back a letter (later evoked by the
New York Suns "
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" in 1897): My dear Julian – I could never make sure about that Water Baby. I have seen Babies in water and Babies in bottles; the Baby in the water was not in a bottle and the Baby in the bottle was not in water. My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby was a very kind man and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did. – There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things. When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers, and see things more wonderful than the Water Babies where other folks can see nothing. Kingsley is critical of industrial and urban pollution and wastefulness. Catherine Judd points out that the city, the loud coal mining engines, and the stultifying country manor of a British landowner are all contrasted with an Edenic
Northern English landscape. With detailed descriptions of native fauna, Kingsley immerses his protagonist into a variety of biodiverse terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems so that readers are drawn to see themselves as part of nature. ==Adaptations==