Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

This post is focused on the fairies of Old England rather than New England, as I’ve recently been reading the classic Victorian children’s novel The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. I’m interested in the book’s depiction of fairies, because they’re very Victorian fairies, which makes a change from the fairies I usually think about.

Whereas fairies in folklore tend to have quite a dark nature and get up to all kinds of mischief, the fairies in The Water-Babies are very moral beings. They’re basically creatures of imagination who uphold and teach Victorian morality while punishing wrongdoing. They rescue and breathe life (literally) into individuals such as orphans and other victims of violence whom Victorian society has failed or oppressed.

The author, Charles Kingsley, was a reformist and a Christian socialist with a positive attitude toward morality but a critical view of Victorian society. It seems he believed society had failed certain types of people, especially young chimney sweeps, who found themselves doomed to a life of woe. He has a lot in common, in this way, with other Victorian writers, including Charles Dickens and the poet Thomas Hood (see his poem “The Bridge of Sighs”).

The book’s protagonist Tom is a terribly exploited chimney sweep with little chance of escaping his dire situation. He’s beaten by his master and forced to work in horrible, life-threatening conditions for very little reward. He’s also treated like a criminal and deprived of a “moral education.” The author seems to take the view that writers of children’s literature can only depict an escape route for people like Tom if they conjure an imaginary world of how things “could have been.” So he kills Tom off and turns him into a “water-baby.” It’s the fairies who are responsible for bringing about this magical transformation—something they do for all mistreated and murdered children. They take them out of the world, turn them into water-babies, and teach them to become moral beings.

Kingsley’s description of Tom’s transformation is startlingly strange. Describing Tom’s body as a “black thing” found in a river, Kingsley makes it clear that this “black thing” isn’t really Tom, for Tom has undergone a spiritual transformation in which he shed his bodily nature:

Tom was quite alive; and cleaner, and merrier, than he ever had been. The fairies had washed him, you see, in the swift river, so thoroughly, that not only his dirt, but his whole husk and shell had been washed quite off him.

This description of Tom’s dead body clearly depicts it as a site of impurity, whether brought about as a result of his poverty or his lack of a moral education. Neither of these sources of impurity have the power to affect Tom’s innermost self, however, for the “blackness” that defines his body is a “husk and shell” obscuring a pure core. Elsewhere in the novel, Tom fails to recognize a portrait of Jesus Christ: for Kingsley, this appears to be the root cause of his immorality, although Tom’s adult exploiters are ultimately culpable for his religious ignorance. The fairies, in this context, are agents of purification: by stripping him of his old body and imparting spiritual renewal, they remove Tom’s impurity. While this appears to make them agents of the Christian Church—their “washing” being a metaphor for baptism—it might be more correct to say that their salvific activity occurs where Christian organizations have failed (especially when they’ve failed orphans).

Kingsley’s moral fairy educators

In a certain sense, the book has a positive message, but it’s telling that Kingsley couldn’t envision a situation for Tom that would allow him to escape his misfortune and improve himself within society: it’s only in the world of imagination—the world of fairies and “water-babies”—that Tom can become a moral person. Society, Kingsley seems to be saying, is full of moralizers trying to improve people, but society will always fail people, which means the imagination (especially children’s literature) must step in and make up for the failure. The embodiment of the imagination is the Victorian figure of the fairy, and in The Water-Babies, fairies are far more effective educators and moralizers than anyone Tom meets in the “real world.”

Every step on Tom’s journey, the fairies protect and guide him. They deliver justice to the innocent and the guilty. One can’t help being struck by how different they are from the fairies of folklore, who exist on a spectrum from ambivalently moral to self-interested to amoral.

On a more critical note: One doesn’t need to have actually read The Water-Babies to question whether Kingsley’s faith in the power of imagination (particularly, in children’s literature) is reasonable. Doesn’t his depiction of morally upstanding fairies who rescue exploited children imply that the imagination somehow has the power to make up for the failures of society, particularly poverty and exploitation? Although the book criticizes the inequality and injustice of a class-based society, its emphasis on imagination and morality at the expense of concrete change might be likened to an “opium of the people”: it transmutes poverty into a spiritual experience, the suffering of boys like Tom becoming secondary to the spiritual reality that embraces them as “water-babies.” This is a complaint often aimed at various streams of Christian thought in which social justice plays a diminished role, excessive emphasis being placed on “the world to come.”

At the risk of downplaying the actions of real social reformers, one might conclude that many Victorian writers found it easier to imagine people being transmuted into fairies than to imagine social change. If this is so, the Victorian fairy appears to complement, rather than transform, the exploited worker. I don’t mean that as a condemnation of writers such as Kingsley. Perhaps pointing out the unthinkability of change was a critique in itself. And perhaps writers who provided utopian (i.e., imaginary) resolutions to class conflicts used the imagination as a tool for social critique.

The images are taken from the original illustrations of the book.