The Water-Babies

Tom is a small, ill-used, illiterate chimney-sweep, the property in all but name of a brutal master. Sent to sweep the flues of a great country house, he loses his way in the dark chimneys and tumbles, sooty and frightened, into the spotless bedroom of a little girl. Catching sight of his own black face in her mirror, he bolts in terror, is chased across the moors, and stumbles at last into a clear stream to cool himself — where he drowns, and is changed into a tiny water-baby, clean at last and set free in the rivers and the sea.

What follows is Tom's education. Underwater, among trout and salmon and lobsters, he must learn what he never learned on land: to be honest, to be kind, to leave alone what is not his, to do the hard right thing unwatched. His teachers are two great fairy schoolmistresses whose names are the whole of their law — Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, who deals out to every creature exactly what it has dealt to others, and Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, who is all tenderness and second chances — and his final test is a long, frightening journey to do a kindness to the very man who wronged him most.

First serialized in 1862–63 and published as a book in 1863, The Water-Babies is one of the strangest and most charming of all Victorian fairy tales — a digressive, half-mocking story that is by turns a nursery tale, a sermon, a science primer engaging the new ideas of Darwin, and a piece of broad social satire. Begun to amuse the author's baby son, it became one of the loudest voices in the campaign that finally ended the use of small boys as chimney-sweeps in England.

Charming, eccentric, and tender, the book also carries the prejudices of its time, and this edition asks the reader to meet both — its mercy and its dated satire alike — with open eyes. It remains, after more than a century and a half, a classic that can be read aloud to a child and pondered by an adult.