The Water-Babies
- Date of account
- 1863
- Location
- England; rivers and underwater fairyland in the novel
- Source
- model_recalled_reference
- Record updated
- 2026-10-10
Record summary
Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) follows Tom, a chimney boy who undergoes a water transformation and enters an underwater world populated by fairy-tale and moral allegorical figures. The text is useful for examining nineteenth-century industrial settings, bodily metamorphosis, purification, child death imagery, and the movement between social reality and aquatic fantasy. Its relation to folklore is mediated through Victorian literary invention, natural history, Christian moralism, and contemporary debates about evolution. It should not be treated as evidence for a traditional underwater people.
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