The Semantic Expanse of Literary Nature in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies

Abstract

As a children’s fantasy ushering in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863) has been much remarked as regards its ‘natural theology’ which finds religious teleology in Nature. Kingsley’s moralization of Nature which renders his fantasy ‘pedagogical’ necessitates the intervention of literary instruction in its narrative. The observational, essentially scientific learning of an unschooled chimney sweep turned a water-baby is juxtaposed with the literary learning/reading of the child reader addressed as “my dear little man” in the narrative of the pedagogical fantasy. While this juxtaposition denotes the writer’s negotiation between Darwinian nature and symbolic ‘Word,’ the religious origin of Nature, the literary and imaginary core of his fantasy fundamentally counters the way Victorian scientific discourses reduce Nature to empirical facts. The ‘semantic’ expanse of his literary Nature which infinitely expands by the plasticity and generative possibility of language rivals the confining materialist mapping of scientific Nature. Closely examining The Water-Babies’ literary expanse of Nature filled with word exercises and imaginary storytellings on natural species and phenomena, which stages some semantic and literary lessons for the illiterate protagonist as well as the reader, this essay reflects on the cultural and educational implication of the linguistic and literary learning posited before the illiterate child protagonist grows into a “great man of science” at the end of his journey. It concludes The Water-Babies’ emphasis on literacy and imagination demonstrates Kingsley’s clerical and scholastic concerns about the mid-Victorian state of spirituality and humanities.