The Water-Babies
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3.5 • 21 Ratings
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Publisher Description
The protagonist is Tom, a young chimney sweep, who falls into a river after encountering an upper-class girl named Ellie and being chased out of her house. There he drowns and is transformed into a "water baby",[2] as he is told by a caddisfly—an insect that sheds its skin—and begins his moral education. The story is thematically concerned with Christian redemption, though Kingsley also uses the book to argue that England treats its poor badly, and to question child labour, among other themes.
Customer Reviews
Brilliant
I read this book at school many years ago, and it was a good read then and still is today
Dreadful book
Preaching, full of allusions to all sorts of things from its time but horribly dated now. Racist, of course.
How did any child ever manage to read it? Probably forced on Sundays.
Good points?
Maybe the underlying moral of Do as you would be done by.
Some of the wildlife descriptions, especially in the first stream, were good.
But lots of killings too.