水孩子

An eight-year-old boy sees himself clearly in a mirror for the first time -- covered in soot, black as an ape, and he screams in fright. It is the first time he has ever known what he looks like. His name is Tom, a chimney sweep's apprentice, and his master has never once let him wash his face.

The mirror hangs in the young lady of the house's bedroom. He has just climbed out of the flue, trailing soot across the floor, and Miss Ellie is about to fall asleep when her scream wakes the whole house -- look, a thief has fallen out of the chimney!

The Water-Babies is a fairy tale Charles Kingsley wrote in the early 1860s. It came out just a touch before Alice in Wonderland, and it is one of the founding stones of English children's fantasy that keeps getting stepped around. It is remembered, first, because it poured a whole cabinet of Victorian natural history -- fish, insects, sea creatures -- into a child's story of moral growth; second, because underneath the fairy tale sits a layer of satire aimed squarely at adults, with the narrator taking jabs at religious moralizing, Sabbatarianism, and the scientific controversies of his own day. The two layers sit on top of each other, so the book can put a child to sleep and leave an adult reading with a wry smile.

Tom lives in the world of chimneys -- dirty, hungry, ordered around by his master, Grimes. Grimes is the sort of man who never scrubbed the grime of his own childhood off him -- coarse, fond of drink, without a scrap of pity for his apprentice. They are hired to sweep Harthover Hall, the estate of the wealthy Sir John.

At the other end of the house is Sir John's daughter, Ellie. Wrapped in her nightgown, she stands on the far side of a wall of class that Tom cannot even picture climbing -- his first thought on finding himself in her room is that he has dirtied her carpet. The two children's first meeting has none of the gentleness fairy tales usually promise.

Prompt

Tom scrambles over the wall and flees into open country. The wind through Vendale cuts like a blade. An old woman gives him bread and milk, and a mysterious Irishwoman appears by the road and leads him toward the mountain stream that will change his fate. He wants to wash the soot off and to shake off the men chasing him; worn out, he falls asleep by the water and slips in.

The original text plays a trick here -- some say he was drowned, but I know better -- so the reader can never be quite sure whether Tom actually dies. When he wakes he is only a few inches long, with gills growing at his neck, looking out at the world of the streambed. There is no more soot.

Childhood underwater is not idyllic at first. Tom is still the same selfish orphan he always was -- he stuffs pebbles into sea anemones, torments caddis-fly larvae, and believes he has already turned from a boy into something higher. Then the two fairy aunts find him.

The stern one is named Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid -- whatever you have done to someone, she does back to you, exactly, with a fairness that borders on cruelty. The tender one is named Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby -- under her wide skirts live hundreds of water-babies, whom she teaches to be kind and to forgive. Between them, they turn the abstract golden rule -- do unto others as you would have them do unto you -- into two machines of cause and effect you can actually touch and feel.

Every Sunday the water-babies go to lessons together. Ellie -- the young lady whose bedroom Tom stumbled into -- later falls into the water too, in a scene the text keeps just as ambiguous, and the two are reunited underwater. She becomes his closest companion, though the line of class still runs faintly between them: she is a lady of the house, and he was once a thief who swept chimneys.

Tom is seized by the urge for revenge and sets out to settle accounts with Grimes. The journey carries him a very long way -- through the Other-end-of-Nowhere, across Peacepool, past St. Brendan's Isle -- until he reaches Mother Carey, seated on her stone throne by the pool. She does not make things, she says; she only lets them make themselves.

Grimes is waiting out his death in a chimney on the mountaintop. Greedy and cold-hearted in life, he is condemned in death to stay there, forever trying and failing to sweep himself clean, weeping black, sooty tears he can never wash away. Seeing this, Tom swallows every bit of the revenge he came for. He begs mercy for his old master instead. A boy who once pushed pebbles into another creature's wounds has learned to pity.

The title says it plainly: water can wash off soot, wash off the stain of class, wash off a person's selfishness too. Victorian England, its face freshly blackened by industrial smoke, watches Kingsley send a chimney sweep's boy down under the water and bring him back up in something close to a baptism -- you have not died, you have simply changed how you live.

The other side of the book is not so gentle. It jabs, in passing, at the scientific quarrels of its day, at rigid Sabbatarianism, at grown-ups who talk loudly about nothing. The narrator says, half in jest, that Tom grows up to be a great man of science -- and read backward, the joke lands: the adults who claim the right to educate children have not washed the soot off themselves. So the reader should keep this in mind -- this is not only a book for children. Underneath it, there is a bill waiting for the adults.

A guide can only hand you a map; the actual river Tom swims in is the original text. Kingsley's prose has an old-fashioned English chattiness and wit -- he breaks in to needle the reader directly, leaps between passages of natural-history detail and deadpan theological jokes, and lands words over children's heads purely to make the adults laugh. The small details in Tom's resurrection that make you laugh with a catch in your chest, the tongue-twisting wit packed into the fairy aunts' names, Mother Carey's underwater sermon that she does not make things, she only lets them make themselves -- none of that texture survives being summarized. Reading it feels like being led down into the water by the hand of a Victorian country parson who happens to tell a very good deadpan joke.