Blue pill - wrong Kingsley

extract, Nelson's Column, page 15,
East Devon Coast & Country, Dec 2012

One for Misattribution Corner. I was just reading East Devon Coast & Country, one of our glossy regional magazines. I recommend it: it's an exception to the usual run of advertorial magazines in actually having good articles, and paying contributors for them. What's more, it puts its issues online.

I did, however, catch one of its regulars in an error in the December 2012 edition, with a reference to a quotation concerning dyspepsia:

The art of Linley Sambourne

Edward Linley Sambourne's classic Darwin cartoon from Punch in 1882.

I wrote about Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies a while back (see The Water-Babies, JSBlog, 17th August 2008). Following up from that, I just ran into the paperback reprint of the 1880 Macmillan edition, and was struck by the illustrations: the vivid and often surreal work of Linley Sambourne, probably better known for his illustrations for Punch magazine.

An 1894 Macmillan edition is online at the Internet Archive (ID waterbabiesfairy00king2) and is worth reading. The weird and sometimes voluptuous illustrations - Tenniel and Doré spring to mind as comparisons - are well in keeping with a book that is a barbed social satire and, like many children's classics, exceedingly dark and complex once you put aside its stereotype as a children's story.

See, for instance, the charming "leap-frog" preface picture; the water-nymph illustrating the "Clear and cool" poem (page 43); the queen of the water fairies (page 57); "the great fairy Science" (page 86); Tom's encounter with the trout (page 93); Tom and the lobster (page 143); Professor Ptthmllnsprts (page 149); the decline of the Doasyoulikes as they devolve to apes -which has considerable thematic and compositional similarity to the Punch Darwin cartoon (page 230); Tom's water-dog (page 262); Mother Carey (page 269); the sentient blunderbuss (page 312); and Grimes in Hell (page 314).

A contemporary review said:

Kingsley's "Water-Babies," with its hundred illustrations, shows Mr. Linley Sambourne at his best. The artist has had a task after his own heart, and he has absolutely revelled in his work. It is full of graceful idea and elaborate drawing. The fish, the weeds, the lobster pots, the otters, have all been most carefully studied and accurately reproduced. The humor and the poetry pervading all the illustrations are marvellous. Perhaps the most humorous drawing is " The Professor and the Water-Baby," which gives excellent portraits of Professors Owen and Huxley; and possibly the most poetical is " The Queen of the WaterFairies." Mr. Sambourne has had an excellent opportunity for the display of his fertile fancy, his accurate knowledge, and his exquisite draughtsmanship, and he has fully availed himself of it.
- "S", page 6, The Book Buyer, Vol 3, No. 1, February 1886.

If some of the illustrations, the water-nymphs, seem outright erotic, it's unsurprising in the light of Sambourne's career. I'd seen some of his Punch illustrations before, but didn't know of his later covert interest in erotic photography and in photographing schoolgirls with a disguised camera, as mentioned in the Spectator review of Leonee Ormond's 2010 biography (see Fine artist, but a dirty old man, Bevis Hiller, The Spectator, 3rd April 2010).  As described in the Great Wen weblog entry Mucky pics in Victorian London and The Virtual Victorian's Mr Linley Sambourne's Photographic Passions, it developed from his practice of using photographs as the basis for his political sketches.

Nevertheless, whatever one might think of his interests, it's impossible to doubt the imagination and sheer technical and compositional quality of Sambourne's illustration work. The Alphabet of Illustrators 1 has a section devoted to Sambourne, including samplers from The Water-Babies (here) and his artwork from Punch (here and here).  In addition, Wikimedia Commons has a couple of dozen scans of his caricatures for Punch.

For a good contemporary account of his working practices, see the 1895 A History of "Punch":

One day when Mr. Linley Sambourne made a successful appearance as Admiral Van Tromp at a fancydress ball, Mr. W S. Gilbert drily observed, "One Dutch of Sambourne makes the whole world grin!" The jest was wider in its application than he who made it, probably, had intended. The humour of the artist, his quaintness of fancy, wit, and touch, are appreciated by whoever looks for something more, even in a professedly comic design, than that which is at first and immediately obvious. When, early in 1867, Mark Lemon fell into admiration of a little drawing that was luckily thrust into his hand, and declared that the young draughtsman who wrought it had a great future before him, he proved himself possessed of a faculty of critical insight, or of an easy-going artistic conscience, uncommon even among editors. Few who saw Mr. Linley Sambourne's early work, even throughout the first two or three years of his practice, would have imagined that behind those woodcuts, for all their cleverness, there lay power and even genius, or that the man himself would soon come to be regarded as one of the greatest masters of pure line of his time.

At that time Mr. Sambourne had been working in the engineering draughtsmen's office of Messrs. Penn and Sons, of Greenwich. But the work was not congenial; the " pupil" spent most of his time in sketching, and there is a story —doubtless as apocryphal as it is malicious—that in one of his designs for a steam-engine, he sacrificed so much to "effect" as to carry his steam-pipe through the spokes of the fly-wheel. It was his office companion in misfortune, Mr. Alfred Reed, who secured his friend's release from the thraldom of the iron-bound profession, by seizing the sketch already alluded to and showing it to his father, German Reed. By that gentleman it was submitted to his friend Mark Lemon, who had about that time been writing an "entertainment" for the company at the "Gallery of Illustrations." The result was an editorial summons to the sketcher, and an engagement which has lasted to the present da}-. Thus it was that, with a sketch of John Bright tilting at a quintain under the title of "Pros and Cons," Mr. Sambourne found himself, at the age of twenty-two, a regular contributor to Punch—though he had still to wait until 1871 before he was rewarded with a seat at the Table.

Of artistic education he had had practically none. In the engineering drawing-office he had learned how to handle the pen and to put it to uses which have become a feature of his draughtsmanship. But besides a life-school attendance extending over not more than a fortnight, he had no other teachers than his own eyes and his own intelligence. In his earliest work with the pencil there was a curious use of the point. Suddenly he was called upon, through the unexpected absence of Charles Keene from town, for more important work than that with which he had hitherto been entrusted. This was the half-page head-piece and the tailpiece to the preface to Vol. LIII. Then came promotion to the "small socials" and "half-page socials." Some of the work he did fairly well, founding himself now upon Leech, now upon Keene; but his character and originality were too powerful to follow any man. He began to form a style of his own, and that style did not lend itself to the representation of modern life. It was suited better for decoration than for movement; while the beauty of line and of silhouette which he sought and obtained, in spite of his intense, almost aggressive, individuality, placed him absolutely apart from all the black-and-white artists of the day.

It was, I have said, to the example of his predecessor, Charles H. Bennett, who died in April, 1867 (the very month in which Sambourne's first drawing appeared), that we owe those wonderful initial letters to the "Essence of Parliament" of Shirley Brooks—those intricate drawings which, covering nearly a whole page, were such miracles of invention, of fancy, and of allusion, swarming with figures, overflowing with suggestion, teeming with subtle symbolism. But these things did not come at once. It was not until the "comic cut" idea was put entirely on one side and his imagination allowed full play, that Mr. Sambourne fully developed his powers—his strength of conception, design, and execution. And then it was that he revealed the fact that though a humorist—and invariably, too, a good-humorist— by necessity, he is a classic by feeling.

The artist's personality, as it should, impresses us first, powerfully and irresistibly. While under Mark Lemon, Mr. Sambourne, as an artist, was still unformed. Under Shirley Brooks was awakened his wonderful inventive faculty. Under the regime of masterly inactivity—the happy policy of laissez faire—of Tom Taylor, the talent had burst forth into luxuriance, not to say exuberance. And under Mr. Burnand it was schooled and restrained within severer limits.

It was many years before regular political cartooning* fell to his lot. He illustrated several of Mr. Burnand's serials in Punch, and some of his work out of it. But afterwards he rose to the treatment of actuality. Upon the event of the hour his picture is formed, and each week his work must be forthcoming. There can be no question of failure, no dallying with the subject, however elaborate or unpromising it may appear. A decision must be come to, and that rapidly; and there the artist sits, his watch hung up before him, "one eye on the dial and the other on the drawing-paper," knowing that at the appointed hour the work must be ready for the messenger. Thus the majority of his four thousand designs have been greatly hurried—hurried in thought as well as in execution. Many have been wrought in a single day; the great majority within two days; very few, indeed, have taken more. But when he has the time he wants, what amazing results are achieved! Sir John Tenniel once exclaimed to me: "What extraordinary improvement there is in Sambourne's work! Although a little hard and mechanical, it is of absolutely inexhaustible ingenuity and firmness of touch. His diploma for the Fisheries Exhibition almost gave me a headache to look at it—so full, cram-full of suggestion, yet leaving nothing to the imagination, so perfectly and completely drawn, with a certainty of touch which baffles me to understand how he does it."

For the rest, Mr. Sambourne's method, like his work, is unique. Keen of observation though he is, his memory for detail is not to be compared to that of Sir John Tenniel; and, actuated by that desire for accuracy which he holds desirable in a journal specially devoted to topical allusion, he avails himself extensively of the use of photography. In the cabinets in his studio, filled full of drawers, each labelled according to their contents, over ten thousand photographs are classified: every celebrity of the day, and to a certain extent of the past, British and foreign, at various ages, in various costumes, and in various attitudes; representatives of the Church, the Bench, and the Bar; of Science, Art, Literature, and the Stage; the beasts and birds and insects in and out of the Zoological Gardens; figures by the score, nude and draped; costumes of all ages and every country; soldiers, sailors, and the uniforms of every army and navy; land and sea and sky; boating and botany, nuns and clowns, hospital-nurses, musical instruments, and rifles, locomotives, wheel-barrows, shop-windows, and everything else besides—everything, in short, as he himself declared, "from a weasel to a Welshman "—all are photographed mostly by himself, and all are arranged by himself, in readiness against the demand for accuracy and the exigencies of haste. But when time permits, Mr. Sambourne goes to greater trouble still. Does he require a special uniform? he begs the War Office—not unsuccessfully—to lend him one or two men, or even a detachment; does he want to represent Mr. Gladstone—say, as Wellington (as he did November 2nd, 1889)? he procures the loan of the duke's own raiment, and only stops short at borrowing Mr. Gladstone himself. For his types, too, he takes pains not less thorough. For Britannia's helmet, he made working drawings of the unique Greek piece in the British Museum, and from that had a replica constructed—one of the most notable items in a notable "property" room.

At the back of his house is a paved courtyard, wherein his servant poses as every character under the sun while he is photographed by his master, who then runs inside to develop the plate and make a dash at his drawing. Or he will photograph himself, or the model in the desired attitude; or he will get his friends to pose. Among his sitters there is none more useful than the burly man who serves equally well for "Policeman A 1 " or John Bull, for the Duke of Cambridge or Prince Bismarck. It was he who sat for one of the finest of Mr. Sambourne's "junior cartoons" on the occasion when the great ex-Chancellor had said: "I am like the traveller lost in the snow, who begins to get stiff while the snow-flakes cover him." This picture of the aged and forlorn statesman, accompanied only by his faithful hound, is perhaps the best of the artist's achievements of dignity and pathos—worthy of being named with "Dropping the Pilot" of Sir John Tenniel. His passion for realism is so great that, I remember, when he was engaged on his "Mahogany Tree" for the Jubilee number of Punch—one of the most popular drawings he ever made—he had just such a table duly laid for dinner in the courtyard, with one person sitting at it in order to show the proportion, and photographed it from a window of the house at the necessary elevation. But for his love of accuracy he would not have done these things; nor, but for his love of naturalism, could he have given us his numerous fine studies of Nature. And but for this, Mr. Punch would never have printed one or two of his Norwegian sketches, such as "The Church-going Bell," in which there was not the slightest attempt at humour or fun—nothing but a calm and reposeful love of Nature, the deep, sad impression on the mind and heart of the artist as he watches the northern sun dip in sleepy majesty behind the panting waves. Like Rabelais, he can use the pencil to greater ends under cover of the motley, and encase bitter truths with the gilt of a printed jest. Like Giotto and his legendary feat, he can draw you a perfect circle with his pen—and perhaps he is the only man in the country who can do it. His is the rare gift that in him sense of fun, of dignity, and of art is equal. He will brook nothing more serious in his sallies than chaff and banter; and yet his kindly art, based upon Nature and observation of the work of others, has, by its very truth, made him enemies even on foreign thrones. Nevertheless, it is less as a politician and a satirist that he claims recognition; it is primarily as an artist that he will assuredly be remembered when his place among his countrymen has to be determined.

- The History of "Punch", MH Spielman, 1895

His diploma for the Fisheries Exhibition in 1883 is repeatedly described as a remarkable piece of artwork. The Hull Museums description of their holding of a couple of copies is:

Two engraved certificates (mounted on linen backing) with award printed within an illustrated border of national and symbolic figures and motifs, with the bust of Queen Victoria at the top centre with trident, eagle, orb and sceptre in front of a curved rim against the sky with seabirds and fishing implements within the outer allegorical figures of 'Aqua Marina' and 'Aqua Viva' and two scenes below of a ship on the high seas and a boat on a lake either side of the Royal Coat of Arms. The central text after the title consists of 'The Commissioners Appointed by Her Majesty's Government have upon the Recommendation of the International Jury Awarded a Gold Medal with this Diploma To: Knowles and Knowles, For: Trawl Net, Beam and Heads on one copy (on stretcher frame) and For: Manilla Net Twines on the other (cloth backed and rolled). Marked with name of the designer/artist at the bottom left 'Linley Sambourne, 1883'.

I haven't been able to find an image online.

Addendum, 28th Aug 2011:  see Ptak Science Books (Man is But a Worm--Darwin and Redon, 1881-1883) for an interesting exploration of the historical context of the Punch cartoon, along with a look at the work of the French symbolist Odilon Redon, who was among the first artists to create works based on Darwin's Origin of Species.

1. Just one section of Chris Mullen's extensive and fascinating The Visual Telling of Stories website.

- Ray

Cader Idris: volcanic myth not yet extinct

I was just reading Charles Kingsley's 1872 Town Geology (Gutenberg EText-No. 10251 1) which reminded me of a brief e-mail exchange I had a while back with Tate Britain: a geological nitpick over its excellent A Picture of Britain thematic exhibition. The caption to Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idris by Richard Wilson - the first great British landscape painting and an example of the growing artistic taste toward "sublime" (i.e. scary) scenery - says "This picture shows the lake of Llyn-y-Cau, on the mountain of Cader Idris in North Wales" which they changed with commendable promptness from "volcanic lake".

Llyn Cau does superficially resemble a volcanic lake, and the rocks of Cader Idris (aka Cadair Idris) are volcanic, but they form part of the roots of a geologically ancient volcanic complex. Cader Idris itself is not itself a volcano, and its "crater" is a cwm (aka corrie or cirque), one of the classic landforms of glacial erosion. The caption may well have sprung from a historical catalogue description of Wilson's painting, "An English landscape, with the remains of a volcanic crater", but Tate Britain aren't alone in repeating this myth. My first reaction was that it showed what you get when you let art curators loose on geomorphological description. However, a little search of Newsbank and elsewhere found repeated examples of this claim.

"the dead volcano Cader Idris on the edge of Snowdonia"
- Arts: Beloved country: Romancing the stone, Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, July 5, 2001

"Cader Idris, once the biggest volcano in Europe"
- BBC Wales

"Cadair Idris ... an extinct volcano with Llyn Cau, its crater lake"
- Canolfan Corris blurb

"First up, Cader Idris, half the rim of a volcano extinct for 150,000 years: reached through shadowy deciduous woodland, it delivers views over glittery volcanic lakes"
- Escape: Europe: These routes were made for walking, Nick Redman, The Observer, August 29, 2004

150,000 years? The last volcanic activity here was in the Ordovician, some 450 million years ago! The myth undoubtedly stems from the general resemblance of Cwm Cau to a volcanic crater. This idea can be traced as far back as the description of Cader Idris Mntn in the 1860 Tallis's Topographical Dictionary of England and Wales. Tallis reports on the 1801 visit of a Mr Donovan 2, who correctly recognised the rocks as volcanic but wrongly concluded of Cwm Cau that

with respect to the crater itself, it appears very clearly to have derived its origin from the violence of an explosion upwards, in which a very considerable portion of the highest eminence was torn from its native bed of rocks, and thrown over the other parts of the mountain. In confirmation of this suggestion it should be stated that the summit of the mountain is covered with an immense wreck of stones, ejected, as it is presumed, from the crater at the time of the explosion. It would be difficult otherwise to account for the vast profusion of those stones scattered in all directions round the loftiest elevations, and which, from the confused manner in which they are dispersed, must have been thrown into their present situation by no small violence.

In contrast, Kingsley's Town Geology had it right.

I beg my readers to put out of their minds once and for all the fancy that in any known part of these islands craters are to be still seen, such as exist in Etna, or Vesuvius, or other volcanoes now at work in the open air. It is necessary to insist on this, because many people hearing that certain mountains are volcanic, conclude—and very naturally and harmlessly—that the circular lakes about their tops are true craters. I have been told, for instance, that that wonderful little blue Glas Llyn, under the highest cliff of Snowdon, is the old crater of the mountain; and I have heard people insist that a similar lake, of almost equal grandeur, in the south side of Cader Idris, is a crater likewise. But the fact is not so.

By Kingsley's time, this had been established by Alfred Russell Wallace, whose Ice Marks in North Wales (With a Sketch of Glacial Theories and Controversies) (S124: 1867) was the first account of the many glacial features on Cader Idris such as striations and moraines.

However, despite the Victorian debunking, the myth looks likely to trundle on for some time to come. As Kevin Rushby wrote:

One of the Victorian walkers who came up here looking for answers was Alfred Russel Wallace , a man whose theory of evolution had been rather eclipsed by Darwin's Origin Of Species (published a year after Wallace dreamed up the idea while in the East Indies).

Wallace had always been interested in the Welsh landscape and in 1866 he began a series of walks determined to solve long-standing issues about how Cadair Idris had been formed. From the summit looking south, it's easy to see why the volcano theory grew: the craggy lip of the mountain falls away in a broad curve, inside which is a larger and darker lake, Llyn Cau, looking like a very convincing example of a water-filled crater. Wallace , however, was a man who liked to settle arguments with facts (his bullish approach to data collection while in south-east Asia had included butterfly hunting with a shotgun). He took the Craig Cau ridge southwards, a classic walk along the edge of the precipice and down to what was assumed to be the lower lip of a crater. No it wasn't, Wallace deduced. Cadair was volcanic rock, but not a volcano: the craters were ice age scourings. Wallace was right, but that hasn't stopped the story. It was just too good, too appropriate for this dramatic mountain.

- Rock legend: It may not be big, and most of the tales attached to it are tenuous at best, but Cadair Idris is all mountain to walkers, Kevin Rushby, The Guardian, October 1, 2005

1. It's relatively little known that Kingsley was a keen amateur naturalist - an interest reflected in the many biological threads of his The Water-Babies.
2. See Account of an extinct volcano in Britain, Retrospect of philosophical, mechanical, chemical, and agricultural discoveries, pub. J. Wyatt, 1809. "Mr Donovan" is Edward Donovan, writer, natural history illustrator, amateur zoologist and curator/owner of the London Museum and Institute of Natural History, which displayed his own extensive collection of specimens.

- Ray

The Water-Babies

Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, has had enduring popularity since its publication in 1863. For the benefit of those who don't know it, the basic plot concerns Tom, a boy chimney-sweep who, pursued on false suspicion of trying to rob a stately home, drowns in a stream and, reborn as a "water baby", has aquatic adventures leading to a quest through various dystopias, learning moral lessons on the way, until he is finally restored to humanity. See Glynn Hughes' Squashed Writers for an ultra-abridged version.

However, until recently there has been a strong tendency toward abridged editions that focus on it as a moral adventure story. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; its heart is utterly in the right place (for instance, its stress on the wrongness of cruelty to animals). But the unabridged edition - see Project Gutenberg EText-No.1018 - is definitely worth reading if you never have. Like many children's classics, The Water-Babies wasn't entirely written for a child audience. Although nominally for his son Grenville, who was five, it's full of immensely erudite material that would have been way over the latter's head, and was first published in installments starting in August 1862 in the highbrow journal Macmillan's Magazine.

It reflects a number of Kingsley's concerns: his interest in natural history; an indictment of child labour; sanitation and pollution; his religious views as an Anglican clergyman (slightly non-standard ones, since the Purgatory-like afterlife Tom enters could be viewed as distinctly Catholic); his dislike of quack medicines; his dislike of certain other children's authors; and his views on Darwinism. Contemporary readers were well aware of its intent, and it received equally scholarly reviews in, for instance, the Anthropological Review (Vol. 1, No. 3 (Nov., 1863), pp. 472-476) which recognised its heavy science and highly barbed satire.

... the "land babies", for which it is ostensibly destined, must, however, attain a competent knowledge of biological controversy before they can hope to comprehend it, while the disciples of the false philosophies which it satirises, will hardly relish the castigation which it administers.

The biological controversy to which this refers concerns Darwin's newly-published Origin of Species. Kingsley, it should be remembered, was a science enthusiast (he was made a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1863) and received an advance copy of Origin of Species. It blew him away. He wrote to Darwin:

All I have seen of it awes me
...
I have long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species
...
I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful pro tempore and pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which he himself had made."

- The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Barnes & Noble, 2005, ISBN 0760769087

In short, Kingsley became an immediate convert to the long-running liberal Christian view that Darwinism could be reconciled with Deism, and to the controversial view that humanity itself might be open to modification. His story-within-a-story of the Doasyoulikes, who devolve into apes after climate change, is pure Darwinism in action ...

And she turned over the next five hundred years. And there they were all living up in trees, and making nests to keep off the rain. And underneath the trees lions were prowling about.

"Why," said Ellie, "the lions seem to have eaten a good many of them, for there are very few left now."

"Yes," said the fairy; "you see it was only the strongest and most active ones who could climb the trees, and so escape."

"But what great, hulking, broad-shouldered chaps they are," said Tom; "they are a rough lot as ever I saw."

"Yes, they are getting very strong now; for the ladies will not marry any but the very strongest and fiercest gentlemen, who can help them up the trees out of the lions' way."

... even if it was initiated by the sin of "doing only what they liked" (Kingsley has a downer on this, very much in tune with his now well-known style of Muscular Christianity; and Tom's final redemption and reunion with Ellie is only achieved by "going where you don't like, and helping someone that you don't like"). Some of this Doasyoulike section reveals a nasty racist streak in Kingsley, by present-day standards, where the first stage of the Doasyoulikes' degradation is that "their jaws grow large, and their lips grow coarse, like the poor Paddies who eat potatoes" - the same Irish he called "white chimpanzees" in a letter to his wife (see Racism and Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England) - and the final stage is a single 7-foot individual who is shot by a hunter after trying, and failing, to say "Am I not a man and brother?" - which fairly explicitly identifies this man-degraded-to-ape with a black person, the words being an iconic anti-slavery slogan. (Kingsley had already used the allusion in his 1857 Two Years Ago for the chapter "Am I not a woman and a sister?" concerning a subplot surrounding an actress' black ancestry).

Kingsley appears not to much like Americans, who he describes as having been made "naughty" by "being quite comfortable" and who he likens to the parliament of hoodie crows, who peck to death one of their number for refusing to be greedy - perhaps alluding to his views that post-bellum Americans had "exterminated their southern aristocracy", then forced the "northern hereditary aristocracy, the Puritan gentlemen of the old families, to retire in disgust from public life" (see Writers, Readers, and Reputations, Philip J. Waller, OUP, 2006). The Jews and the French get snipes too, and this doesn't complete the list of groups he didn't like. There's a deal of literature on his Racial Prejudices; it's hard to say whether he was about par for his time (a time when science seemed to support a scale of racial inferiority/superiority) or whether he was more than usually xenophobic.

That aside, The Water-Babies is full of many academic jokes surrounding biology and other topical subjects. For instance, its references to arguments about a "hippopotamus major" in the brain refer to the debate between TH Huxley and Richard Owen about the significance of the hippocampus minor. All in all, the unabridged Water-Babies well returns the investment of a bit of study. You can get a glimpse of the sheer strangeness and topicality by glancing at the end of Chapter 4 (courtesy of the University of Adelaide Library's e-books) and its list of Victorian quack remedies - can anyone imagine this as written for children? - tried on Professor Ptthmllnsprts to rid of him of the belief in water-babies:

...
Metallic tractors.
Holloway’s Ointment.
Electro-biology.
Valentine Greatrakes his Stroking Cure.
Spirit-rapping.
Holloway’s Pills.
Table-turning.
Morison’s Pills.
Homoeopathy.
Parr’s Life Pills.
Mesmerism.
Pure Bosh.
...

The Water-Babies continues to provide academic interest even now. For instance, Charles Kingsley, H. G. Wells, and the Machine in Victorian Fiction (Colin Manlove, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Sep., 1993), pp. 212-239) explores its unusual positive focus on machines, particularly the way Kingsley describes Nature, and even divine creation, in mechanistic terms: whether the workings of a rotifer, Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid (who describes herself as working "by machinery, just like an engine; and am full of wheels and springs inside"), and Mother Carey (who sits in the Arctic at the heart of a factory making self-replicating creatures). Another interesting analysis, from a while back, is Rabelais and "The Water-Babies" (Dorothy Coleman, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Jul., 1971), pp. 511-521) which cites structure and content - such as the grimly comic, morally instructive dystopias at the "Other-end-of-Nowhere" in Chapter VIII and last, and Kingsley's repeated reference to "the coming of the Cocqcigrues" (i.e. the end of time - "Cocqcigrues" being the "Cocklicranes" of Gargantua/Chapter XLIX) showing The Water-Babies to be influenced by Rabelais.

There are a couple of critiques of particular aspects at the Victorian Web - Revising the fairytale: Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, and Charles Kingsley's Water-Babies - and Boston College Libraries has a further list of analytical texts. Though I haven't read it, the Broadview Press edition that came out earlier this year - The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley, ed. Richard Kelly, Broadview Editions, 2008, ISBN: 9781551117737) looks to have some interesting appendices that further elucidate Kingley's influences and in-references. He wasn't above digs at other authors such as the Bostonian Samuel Griswold Goodrich; an advocate of instructional literature over imaginative who wrote as "Peter Parley", he appears as "Cousin Cramchild". Kingsley also hated American domestic novels for their "execrable goody-goody-ness" and "insipid respectability (utterly untrue to life) of their personages". This passage...

Next he saw all the little people in the world, writing all the little books in the world, about all the other little people in the world; probably because they had no great people to write about: and if the names of the books were not Squeeky, nor the Pump-lighter, nor the Narrow Narrow World, nor the Hills of the Chattermuch, nor the Children's Twaddeday, why then they were something else. And, all the rest of the little people in the world read the books, and thought themselves each as good as the President; and perhaps they were right, for every one knows his own business best.

... takes a swipe at Maria Susanna Cummins' sentimental 1854 The Lamplighter, and Susan Warner's 1850 The Wide, Wide World (the novel that Jo in Little Women spends an afternoon crying over, up in an apple tree), 1852 Queechy and 1856 Hills of the Shatemuc. I haven't been able to find any reference to what The Children's Twaddeday refers to, but I strongly suspect it's The Children's Holiday, the lead story in Mary Botham Howitt's 1853 The Dial of Love: A Christmas Book for the Young (although it's not American, the date and general style otherwise match Kingsley's pattern of dislikes).

As the Anthropological Review said:

Careful perusal, and a thorough scientific education, are preliminaries to the study of this work ...

Coming back to the present day: The Water-Babies is listed in Alasdair Gray's Lanark as a central "Difplag" (diffuse plagiarism) within the latter. Describing The Water-Babies as "a Victorian children's novel thought unreadable nowadays except in abridged form", Gray describes it in Lanark's "Index of plagiarisms" as

a dual book. The first half is a semi-realistic highly sentimental account of an encounter between a young chimney sweep from an industrial slum and an upper class girl who makes him aware of his inadequacies, Emotionally shattered, in a semi-delirious condition, he climbs a moorland, descends a cliff and drowns himself ... He is then reborn with no memory of the past in a vaguely Darwinian purgatory with Buddhist undertones ... At one point the hero, having stolen sweets, grows suspicious, sulky and prickly all over like a sea-urchin! He is morally redeemed by another encounter with the upper-class girl ... and then sets out on a pilgrimage through a grotesque region filled with the social villainies of Victorian Britain.

Although somewhat spun for similarity, this is the plot of Lanark, in which the working-class artist Duncan Thaw, depressed by a failed relationship with the middle-class Marjory Laidlaw, drowns and is reborn as "Lanark" in the dystopian city of Unthank (a dark mirror of Glasgow) where at one point he develops a disease called dragonhide and is redeemed by meeting Rima, Marjory's also-reincarnated counterpart. Lanark's apocalyptic ending even features a throwaway reference to the Cocqcigrues arriving, which is about as definitive a conclusion as you can get.
- Ray