The Water-Babies, a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (Unabridged)

The Water-Babies, a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (Unabridged)

Title: The Water-Babies, a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (Unabridged)
Author: Charles Kingsley
Release: 2020-09-20
Kind: audiobook
Genre: Classics
Preview Intro
1
The Water-Babies, a Fairy Tale for a Lan Charles Kingsley
The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children's novel by Charles Kingsley. Written in 1862-63 as a serial for Macmillan's Magazine, it was first published in its entirety in 1863. It was written as part satire in support of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. The book was extremely popular in England, and was a mainstay of British children's literature for many decades, but eventually fell out of favour in part due to its prejudices (common at the time) against Irish, Jews, Catholics and Americans. 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 appears to drown and is transformed into a "water-baby", 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.

More from Charles Kingsley

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Kingsley, James Martineau & More
Charles Kingsley
Cyrus Townsend Brady, Frank Thomas Bullen, R. J. Cleveland, James Fenimore Cooper, George Cupples, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Jean Ingelow, Charles Kingsley, W. H. G. Kingston, Pierre Loti, Frederick Marryat, Herman Melville, Charles Reade, William Clark Russell, Michael Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson & Jean Rudolf Wyss
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley
William Wordsworth, John Dryden, Edmund Spenser, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lord Byron, John Donne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christopher Marlowe, Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Charles Kingsley & Sir Walter Raleigh
Charles Kingsley