The Water Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby

The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a novel by the Reverend Charles Kingsley, first published in its entirety in 1863. Though some of the author’s opinions are very dated now, the journey of a little chimney-sweep water-baby through rivers and storms, under sea and over iceberg, is still a classic, wonderful children’s adventure.

The pace in these chapters is brisk, the narrator's sympathy does not preclude humour, and the approach to the great mystery is made, as it must be, through nature--not through wintry solemn wastes or pastoral meadows, but through the kind of varied and uneven terrain where, as the author has an old cock-grouse maintain, the end of the world is always just around the corner.