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The Industrial Fairy Tale: The Adaptable Narrative In Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, Emily Handy

Graduate Theses

Though Charles Kingsley’s mid-nineteenth century children’s book, The Water-Babies, is generally out of favor with canons of Victorian or children’s literature, I argue that The Water-Babies is a highly adaptable text because it is made up of conjoined opposites. The text’s multiplicity of form and content as well as its emphasis on imagination make the The Water-Babies malleable for variation and adaptation, while the approach Kingsley took to the child audience prepared the text for an indefinite future readership. Moreover, the work’s initial intent to be utilized for social change and the proto-environmentalist messages already present in the text situate …