The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley is written as a children’s story that tells the tale of Tom, a working boy who undergoes a transformation after fleeing from a mansion where he has been accused of thievery. However, upon closer examination, it is obvious that Kingsley was using the narrative for political persuasion against the senselessness of corporal punishment used on children in the workforce, as well as the chance to advance the other works he was generating. The Water-Babies helped to fuel the changes happening with the use of corporal punishments in schools due to the way it was able to portray the lasting fear it causes Tom in the book. By viewing counter-arguments against Kingsley’s beliefs it can be found that he was not an advocate for the use of corporal punishment, a fact he spoke of often; he uses Tom to show horrific corporal punishment in the workplace. Grimes’ characterization shows the vicious cycle and effects of corporal punishment and the stance that Kingsley held toward corporal punishment in his personal life. As it has been written that he refused to use it in his own home. Charles Kingsley was a man with views of corporal punishment that strayed from most of society. While there was a surge to fight the use of corporal punishments in schools, there was little done to protect working children. In his sermons, Kingsley points out that physical punishment like we can see Grimes use on Tom stems from anger rather than anger at sin. From this statement, we see that Kingsley uses Tom and the severity as well as the frequency of his beatings to show how corrupt the system was. As well as the way that Grimes would manipulate the system to be able to beat Tom without care because it was a common tool in education.
While The Water-Babies tells the tale of a child working as a chimney sweep dealing with corporal punishment and abuse to establish dominance and instill fear, not all historians and authors believe that Kingsley was standing up for the working class. Meiji University English Literature lecturer Jenny Holt writes, “Kingsley also differs from his predecessors by placing the blame for child labor abuses on the working class.” (pg. 364) Holt points out that Humphrey Carpenter, a well-known biographer, accuses Kingsley of blaming the working class for the use of child labor. Holt also writes, “In fact, Kingsley apparently rather approves of the system; his only harsh words are reserved…for the spiritual unhealthiness of the working class.” (pg. 360) Kingsley stands accused of calling out the spiritual unhealthiness, however, he regularly gave sermons on how to treat your brother with honor and respect.
A reading of the first few pages of The Water-Babies is all it takes for a reader to determine that Kingsley uses Tom to show how corporal punishment was used in the workplace. When Tom is introduced to the reader, he is identified as “a little chimney sweep” (pg. 1) whose mother is dead and his father is absent; this leads him into the care of Mr. Grimes. It is quickly established that Tom was never sent to school. This is partially because educational opportunities simply weren’t offered for the poor and working-class children as the schools were places reserved for the children of the wealthy. Kingsley tells us, “He could not read nor write, and did not come to do either.” (pg. 1) The reader also learns that Tom was not a boy seen in church, “He had never been taught to say his prayers. He had never heard of God, or Christ.” (pg. 1) This is the first indication given to the reader is that Tom is being unfairly treated by Mr. Grimes. With clear examples of neglect like this, it is clear that the use of corporal punishment would not be something that Mr. grimes would refrain from embracing.
Throughout the story, it can be seen that Tom is not only afraid of the treatment from Mr. Grimes, but he is also used to this treatment. This is seen when Tom as a water-baby finds Mr. Grimes as he is swimming. He quickly leaves for fear of Mr. Grimes chasing after him to beat him. “Tom turned tail and swam away as fast as he could. “Oh dear me!” he thought, “now he will turn into a water-baby. What a nasty troublesome one he will be! And perhaps he will find me and beat me again.” (pg. 74) Tom leaves in fear that Mr. Grimes will chase after him to beat him yet again. He also shows his confusion at the thought of someone as impure as Grimes being able to become something so pure like a water-baby.
Mr. Grimes is also quick to ignore the fears that Tom holds. Kingsley writes that Tom is afraid of the dark chimneys but this is ignored in favor of the work being done, “and so after a whimper or two and a kick from his master.” (pg. 12) this exchange leads to Tom climbing up a dark, dirty, and complex chimney that he does not feel comfortable going into. Mr. Grimes is using corporal punishment to beat Tom for not working, even though the lack of work is due to fear. He is not using the punishment to teach Tom anything: he is solely using it to establish himself as the master in the situation. An example of such is the description Kingsley gives us of Tom climbing up into the dark chimney. “He cried when he had to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it did every day in the week, and when his master beat him, which he did every day in the week, and when he had not enough to eat, which happened every day in the week likewise.” (pg. 1) The description of the abuse that Tom suffers here shows the reader the severity and frequency of the beatings that Tom is forced to endure. Not only was his apprenticeship hard work for his body often leaving him scratched or injured, but Mr. Grimes would beat Tom daily in addition to that.
Holt argues in her article with words from philanthropist and traveler Jonas Hanway saying, “He recommends giving master sweeps a legal obligation to feed, clothe, wash, accommodate, and educate their apprentices banning the use of children under ten and limiting apprenticeship to five years so that those unsuited to sweeping might train for other occupations.” (pg. 356) This belief was something that was campaigned extensively by Hanway as he worked to improve the working conditions for sweeps’ apprentices. These are things that Mr. Grimes is clearly not doing in addition to him using corporal punishment on Tom.
While Tom may not be the most well-behaved child, it is established by Kingsley that he is not a poorly behaved child either. This is where he differentiates greatly from Mr. Grimes who was not at all a well-behaved child growing up for his mother. Kingsley presents this information by saying, “Ah! a good woman she was, and she might have been a happy one in her little school there in Vendale if it hadn’t been for me and my bad ways.” (pg. 182) Mr. Grimes takes this moment to think back on his life and the decisions that he has made that have led to him being stuck in awful situations; including but not limited to him being hit on the head roughly and being forced to suffer in dark chimneys in the land of the water-babies, as Tom did in his life before becoming a water-baby.
“So you go along, you kind little chap, and don’t stand to look at a man crying that’s old enough to be your father, and never feared the face of man, nor of worse neither. But I’m beat now, and beat I must be. I’ve made my bed, and I must lie in it. Foul I would be, and foul I am, as an Irishwoman said to me once; and little I needed it. It’s my own fault; but its too late.” (pg. 183)
At this admission, Mr. Grimes has begun to realize that he was abusive to Tom rather than using corporal punishment in an attempt to teach Tom how to correct his behaviors.
Mr.Grimes never uses a form of punishment on Tom that would have ever helped him learn and grow; rather he beat Tom to establish dominance. Kingsley asserts this in his sermon National Rewards and Punishments when he says, “A father has two ways of showing his love to his child – by caressing it and by punishing it.” Kingsley shows this spoken of lack of love or learning from the beating in the scene at the fountain in chapter one. As jealousy takes a firm grasp on Mr. Grimes in the book when the Irishwoman is ignoring him in favor of speaking to Tom, Grimes beats Tom at the fountain. Mr. Grimes takes out his aggression as “he dashed at him with horrid words, and tore him up from his knees, and began beating him. But Tom was accustomed to that, and got his head safe between Mr. Grimes’s legs, and kicked his shins with all his might.” (pg. 7) Tom fights back against Grimes proving that he knows that he is being treated unfairly when Grimes beats him the way he does. While Tom is afraid of the dark chimneys, he does hold a unique position that not many children working at the same time as he did. Tom is able to climb up a chimney to get away from Mr. Grimes and his abuses that are considered corporal punishments.
When looking at Charles Kingsley’s views on corporal punishment and his refusal to use it in how own home stemming from his lack of acceptance of it in society, it is important to consider his variety of works. Due to the punishing situation that Charles Kingsley lived in while he was growing up, he did not believe in the use of corporal punishments of any kind whether they were in the workplace or in a domestic setting. According to his wife, “His own childish experience of the sense of degradation and unhealthy fear it [corporal punishment] produced of the antagonism it called out between a child and its parent, a pupil and its teachers, gave him a horror of it.” (pg. 4) As a result, Kingsley and his wife, Francis Eliza Grenfell refused to implement corporal punishment in his own home with his children. “Punishment was a word little known in his house.” (pg. 4) recalled his widow, and “Corporal punishment was never allowed.” (pg. 4) Kingsley believed that corporal punishment could lead children to lie instead of confronting the issue at hand. “More than half of the lying children,” he wrote, “is, I believe, the result of fear and fear of punishment.” (Pg. 4) Even worse, Kingsley argued “the boy learns not to fear sin, but the punishment of it, and thus he learns to lie.” (pg. 5) Being a religious man Kingsley hated lying and the belief that corporal punishment led to lying only further pushed him to not use the practice in his own home. This allowed for him to practice situations of anger at the sin versus anger at the sinner.
Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies unapologetically tackles the difficult conversation of corporal punishment and its predominant use in mid-Victorian England workplaces. The argument had stood that the use of corporal punishment helped to encourage children to work harder and become more productive members of the labor force. Yet, Kingsley fought against this in his narrative. He uses his story to emphasize how there was no need for these punishments in the workplace, school, and home. As he points out, children respond to both love and punishment. This becomes the foundation of Kingsley’s refusal of corporal punishment and endows him with the conviction to enable Tom to grow from the boy he was working under Grimes into the man he becomes after his experiences as a water-baby.
Works Cited
Holt, Jenny. “‘A Partisan in Defence of Children?’ Kingsley’s The Water-Babies
Re-Contextualized.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 33, no. 4, 2011, pp. 353-70.
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Kingsley, Charles. “Sermons on National Subjects.” Project Gutenberg, 2014,
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8202/8202-h/8202-h.htm#page184. Accessed 8 Apr.
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– – -. The Water-Babies. Penguin Books, 2008.
– – -, Frances Eliza Grenfell Kingsley. Charles Kingsley: His Letters and
Memoires of His Life. H.S. King & Company, 1877. Google Books,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Charles_Kingsley/aQgPAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbp=0. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.
The Water-Babies Web 