The Water-Babies
A chimney sweep falls into a river, is transformed into a water baby, and begins a moral education among creatures who live in streams and seas. Kingsley wrote it as a serial for children, and it is one of the oddest books in the Victorian canon.
The plot is thin, the moralising is heavy, and some of the satire is aimed at adults rather than children. But the descriptive writing is beautiful, and the book's central image, of a child learning to be clean and kind in a world of water, has a strange power. Read it as a curiosity rather than a masterpiece.
Public-domain status
First published in 1863. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Charles Kingsley died in 1875, so this work has been free to republish there since 1946.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 25564 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll, 1865
- The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling, 1894
- Seven Little Australians — Ethel Turner, 1894
- Peter and Wendy — J. M. Barrie, 1911
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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