The Water-Babies

The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby is a children's novel by the English writer Charles Kingsley, written in 1862 and 1863 as a serial for Macmillan's Magazine and first published complete in 1863.

The book begins on land with Tom, a climbing boy apprenticed to a chimney sweep named Grimes, who is beaten, kept short of food and sent up chimneys where the children who do the work are often injured or killed. After an accident and a pursuit he comes to a river and, in the water, is transformed into a water-baby, which gives him a body that can live there and a set of moral lessons about selfishness and work. Kingsley wrote the story as a satire supporting Charles Darwin's account of evolution, so the underwater world is populated with the natural history of rivers and seas and the fairy tale is doing an argument as well as telling a story. The book was one of the staples of British children's literature for decades and was illustrated by several hands.

Kingsley was a clergyman as well as a novelist, and the book's moral programme and its opinions about the poor are part of the same text as the adventure.