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Notes on "The Water Babies" (1862)
Dec. 8th, 2022 05:37 pm- What the fuck was that? I'm not even new to the weird world of Victorian kidlit, and still: what just happened?
- There is SO MUCH child mortality in this book; it's not just the lynchpin of the plot, enabling Tom's conversion from chimney sweep to water baby, it's then additionally thrown in every few chapters at random. Meet a baby? WELL NOT FOR LONG! "Der Struwwelpeter" (1845) gets name-checked multiple times, but that collection's blithe viciousness seeps right through the whole of this text. The difference in vibe between this employment of the supernatural for a morality tale and Dickens' earlier use in the Christmas Books that very likely inspired this is profound. "Water Babies" is simultaneously more Christian and, despite frequently attaining to real sentiment, nastier. That's not to say that even mature Dickens doesn't have a degree of narrative cruelty, but the grittiness of "Water Babies", mixed with its sugary quality, strikes me as more jarring.
- The politics are such a wild melange. 'I wish missionaries converted everyone!' mixed with some class consciousness, which is then itself commingled with deep complacency about class. It's bad to abuse child-labourers, but also this notorious slaver is a bit of a jolly fellow. And now it's time for racialised panic about indolent tropical people devolving into monkeys! We then cut to an interlude about how amazing imperialism and eco-devastation are. Over-fish! That! Shoal!! Hey--you'd kill a white girl if she dated a black guy, right? Ahah of course you would, just checking, just checking. (This conveyed via the metaphor of fish.)
This book is extremely self-contented in its ideas and didactic, but the actual position it's staking out is all over the place.
- Similarly, this is one of the most extreme examples of the Victorian obsessions with taxonomy, systematisation and carceral justice (concepts which are not unrelated). We hear so much about punishment, it's like Dante's "Inferno" in a tide pool. At the same time, this wildly incoherent book loses track of its own expansive cosmology. This gets especially fraught with the book's many, many depictions of sentient predator-prey relationships. The book might say that all this isn't supposed to be taken seriously--mate, you dwelt on these mechanics and this proselytising for 80% of the text. They don't sell lampshades big enough.
- So the water babies grow into adults at the end? Or they're reborn? And Tom grows up to be a scientist who invents, among other things, railroads (presumably for India, etc.) and guns? That's--that's all okay, by this moral system? Somehow?
- For all this (all this!!), this book is often engagingly-written, chummily intimate and well-described. One thing that unnerves me, though, is how much the book relies on appeals to you, the reader, which draw you into its in-group. The book's position is so scattershot that anyone's bound to fall afoul of cosy agreement with it, whereupon they can, I suppose, go to one of the book's many lavishly-described hells.
- I need to stress to you that somehow, this book was really popular; it was like, a hard-core classic. I was absolutely aware of it as a youth, even if I didn't read it (because I'd been told it was racist--which it is, but not in quite the blatant, thorough-going way you'd expect: just very intensely on a few occasions).
- Is this conflation of the faeries with high-key Christian divine mother shit out of Spenser? Is this... Faerie Queene again?
- There is SO MUCH child mortality in this book; it's not just the lynchpin of the plot, enabling Tom's conversion from chimney sweep to water baby, it's then additionally thrown in every few chapters at random. Meet a baby? WELL NOT FOR LONG! "Der Struwwelpeter" (1845) gets name-checked multiple times, but that collection's blithe viciousness seeps right through the whole of this text. The difference in vibe between this employment of the supernatural for a morality tale and Dickens' earlier use in the Christmas Books that very likely inspired this is profound. "Water Babies" is simultaneously more Christian and, despite frequently attaining to real sentiment, nastier. That's not to say that even mature Dickens doesn't have a degree of narrative cruelty, but the grittiness of "Water Babies", mixed with its sugary quality, strikes me as more jarring.
- The politics are such a wild melange. 'I wish missionaries converted everyone!' mixed with some class consciousness, which is then itself commingled with deep complacency about class. It's bad to abuse child-labourers, but also this notorious slaver is a bit of a jolly fellow. And now it's time for racialised panic about indolent tropical people devolving into monkeys! We then cut to an interlude about how amazing imperialism and eco-devastation are. Over-fish! That! Shoal!! Hey--you'd kill a white girl if she dated a black guy, right? Ahah of course you would, just checking, just checking. (This conveyed via the metaphor of fish.)
This book is extremely self-contented in its ideas and didactic, but the actual position it's staking out is all over the place.
- Similarly, this is one of the most extreme examples of the Victorian obsessions with taxonomy, systematisation and carceral justice (concepts which are not unrelated). We hear so much about punishment, it's like Dante's "Inferno" in a tide pool. At the same time, this wildly incoherent book loses track of its own expansive cosmology. This gets especially fraught with the book's many, many depictions of sentient predator-prey relationships. The book might say that all this isn't supposed to be taken seriously--mate, you dwelt on these mechanics and this proselytising for 80% of the text. They don't sell lampshades big enough.
- So the water babies grow into adults at the end? Or they're reborn? And Tom grows up to be a scientist who invents, among other things, railroads (presumably for India, etc.) and guns? That's--that's all okay, by this moral system? Somehow?
- For all this (all this!!), this book is often engagingly-written, chummily intimate and well-described. One thing that unnerves me, though, is how much the book relies on appeals to you, the reader, which draw you into its in-group. The book's position is so scattershot that anyone's bound to fall afoul of cosy agreement with it, whereupon they can, I suppose, go to one of the book's many lavishly-described hells.
- I need to stress to you that somehow, this book was really popular; it was like, a hard-core classic. I was absolutely aware of it as a youth, even if I didn't read it (because I'd been told it was racist--which it is, but not in quite the blatant, thorough-going way you'd expect: just very intensely on a few occasions).
- Is this conflation of the faeries with high-key Christian divine mother shit out of Spenser? Is this... Faerie Queene again?
