Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

THE WATER-BABIES: A FAIRY TALE FOR A LAND BABY (1863)

  A strange and powerful tale for children that combines imaginative exuberance, uplifting themes of redemption, and contemporary ideas about evolutionary theory and contemporary child labor.

  The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley (1819–75) might ostensibly be a fairy tale, but this most imaginative of Victorian fables is directed at thinking adults as much as children of the period.

  The hero, Tom, is that stalwart of Victorian literature: a chimney sweep. He blunders down a chimney at Harthover House and finds himself in the bedroom of Ellie, a daughter of the family. Suddenly ashamed of himself, he realizes he is “dirty” and runs away. Obsessed with the idea that he must somehow become clean, Tom throws himself, suicidal, into a nearby stream. He does not drown, but is swept down to the ocean, washed clean, and morally and physically reborn in a series of fantastic adventures, involving, among others, his bullying master Grimes (who is finally dispatched on the Sisyphean task of sweeping Mount Etna) and the mysterious Mother Carey. He learns valuable life lessons from Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and less valuable lessons from Professor Ptthmllnsports. Finally Tom, who has undergone a literal “sea change,” is united with Ellie and goes on to grow up “a great man of science,” saved by the power of clean water.

  Charles Kingsley was a clergyman, the leader of the so-called “Muscular Christianity” movement. He perceived the mission of a clergyman as confronting social problems. The social problem that most exercised him, to the point of obsession, was sanitation. If Kingsley pictured the devil it was not horns, tail, and cloven hoof, but filth. For Kingsley it was not the proverbial “cleanliness is next to godliness,” but cleanliness was godliness. This obsession propels the narrative of this “not just for children” tale.

  The origin of the story stems from the history of London. In 1854 the city had been ravaged by a cholera epidemic. These outbreaks happened every couple of years, and were regarded by Londoners as no more unusual than the coming of winter (which also killed thousands). The prevailing opinion thought the disease to be “miasmic,” or spread by foul air. In 1854, however, a young doctor named John Snow traced the source of a recent out-break, ascertaining that it was not, in fact, bad air but bad water that was responsible. Meanwhile, beneath the horse-manured and garbage-strewn streets of London, another revolution was taking place. The urban engineer Joseph Bazalgette was laying down the first effective sewage system since the Romans. Bazalgette’s task was given added urgency by the famous “Great Stink” of the summer of 1858, which was so malodorous, and lethal, that it enforced the closure of Parliament. Bazalgette’s network of subterranean sewers (replacing the old open canals, such as the one that gave Fleet Street its name) ensured it would never happen again.

  According to one sardonic German historian, “the English think civilization is soap.” Dickens certainly did. In 1850 he addressed the Metropolitan Sanitary Association: “I can honestly declare, that all the use I have made of my eyes—or nose [laughter] that all the information I have since been able to acquire through any of my senses, has strengthened me in the conviction that Searching Sanitary Reform must precede all other social remedies [cheers].… Give me my first glimpse of Heaven through a little of its light and air—give me water, help me to be clean.” He further prefaced Martin Chuzzlewit with the declaration: “I hope I have taken every available opportunity of showing the want of sanitary improvements in the neglected dwellings of the poor.”

  Of all the persecutions of the Victorian child, chimney sweeping was the most vile. Oliver Twist narrowly escapes that fate: Had he remained in the brutal employment of Gamfield (who offers five pounds for ownership of the lad) Oliver, like many others, might well have succumbed to the cancer of the scrotum or pulmonary disease—two occupational hazards. Few sweeps made it to middle age, many did not even make it to adulthood.

  Pure water had another centrally important value for the nineteenth century. It symbolized Christian salvation—by the primal rite of baptism. William Blake runs the ideas together in one of his “Songs of Innocence,” “The Chimney Sweep.” Blake’s point is that death cleanses. But, more importantly, so did birth. Baptism was a huge event in Christian life in the nineteenth century. The baby (what with gowns, favors, christening mugs, and silver spoons) received almost as many gifts as a bride on her wedding day.

  These two ideas—sanitary water supply and baptism—are fused in The Water-Babies. Reverend Kingsley believed, with all his soul, that social progress and fundamental religion were not contradictory. God wanted his creation to have water as pure as that in Eden. And, by God, Charles Kingsley would be at the head of those who fought for it.

  LEWIS CARROLL (CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON)

  ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND (1865)

  A classic of nonsense fantasy and the curiosities it contains—a rabbit with a pocket watches, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and the tyrannical Queen of Hearts—it has enchanted readers, young and old, for more than 150 years.

  Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a mathematics don at Christ Church College in Oxford, and he famously wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for a colleague’s three little girls: Ina, Alice, and Edith Liddell, whom he used to take on outings on summer days to the river. He would entertain them by “telling them stories,” and luckily for the Liddell girls, he was one of the greatest (if strangest) storytellers of all time.

  A novelist friend of Dodgson, Henry Kingsley (brother of Charles, author of The Water-Babies, 1863, here), read the story and was of the opinion that Alice should be given to the world at large, urging Dodgson to have it published. The unworldly Dodgson first thought of Oxford University Press, however the house rejected the manuscript as not suitable for their learned list, and further it was intimated that it would do him no good academically to publish such a work under his own name.

  Eventually Dodgson was persuaded to submit the work to Macmillan and Co., Kingsley’s publisher, with illustrations by John Tenniel. Dodgson came up with a pen name that suited him and his witty tale, “Lewis Carroll.” It was a pun, inevitably—and one that his colleagues at the high table at Christ Church College doubtless had a high time puzzling out (Lewis is etymologically linked, via Latin, to “Lutwidge”; Carroll, likewise, to “Charles”).

  The two “Alice books” (the successor to the bestselling adventures in “Wonderland” took the little girl Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There) are unusual among children’s literature in appealing equally to adult readers. Ideally, clever adults, who are able to appreciate the depth of Carroll’s intellectualism embedded in his writing.

  The tale begins with Alice lolling under a tree in high summer and failing to read her book, when she sees a white rabbit rush by:

  There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

  In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

  We do not need the aid of Freud to work out that this little girl, eight years out of it, is “returning to the womb,” finding herself in a mad world. Alice’s way is blocked by locked doors, she eats and drinks substances that make her grow and shrink, she encounters mythical creatures like the Gryphon, extinct creatures like the Dodo, toothy, but smiling, creatures like the Cheshire Cat. She breaks in, uninvited, on the Mad Hatter’s tea party and is finally
sentenced to be beheaded by the irascible Queen of Hearts (a mother figure from hell).

  As the queen’s playing card entourage falls on her, with decapitation in mind, Alice wakes with dead leaves brushing her face. It was spring, and now is autumn. The little girl is growing up.

  Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

  JULES VERNE

  TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1870)

  This classic tale of adventure by the “Father of Science Fiction” voyages through the realm of the imagination from the lost city of Atlantis to the South Pole.

  The narrative of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), like those of all Verne’s (1828–1905) major works, is no more than a row of pegs on which to hang wild flights of his distinctive imagination. Dip anywhere into the novel and there is page after page of vivid pictorialism—see, for example, the long descriptions of submarine “coral forests,” the submerged ruins of Atlantis, the sunken galleons rotting in the Bay of Vigo. Verne was also a famously light-fingered writer. The novel’s climax, detailing the attack by giant squid, is borrowed (with acknowledgment) from Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea (1866). The self-destruction of Captain Nemo and his craft in the great northern “maelstrom” is also borrowed, from Edgar Allen Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841). However, one readily forgives these narrative larcenies, because there is so much in Verne’s story that is hugely original.

  Pierre Aronnax, a world-famous French marine biologist, narrates the story. On his way back from a North American expedition in March 1866, the U.S. government recruits him to help hunt down a mysterious giant, glowing creature. Aronnax sets out on the USS Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by his omni-competent, urbane manservant, Conseil, and a Canadian “king of harpooners,” Ned Land, a character who seems to have walked off the pages of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (another source candidly plundered by Verne).

  The Abraham Lincoln sights the mysterious, phosphorescent “cetacean,” gives chase, and fires on the beast. It proves immune to artillery and turns on the ship, ramming it. Aronnax, Conseil, and Land tumble into the ocean. They cling to the sides of what turns out to be not a whale but an immense metallic submarine. The trio is taken aboard and the submarine Nautilus is revealed to be a miracle of modern technology—electrically propelled, air conditioned, and palatial in its amenities. The three captives are, however, informed that they can never leave. Ned Land takes this particularly badly and spends the whole novel plotting his escape from this “metal prison.” Aronnax is delighted. For him it is not a prison but the world’s finest laboratory. The body of the book details their 20,000-league, nine-month voyage above and below the oceans. The heroes finally escape by being thrown clear of the maelstrom that sucks the craft and its crew to their destruction.

  Aronnax controls the narrative, but it is Nemo, the captain of the Nautilus, who grips the reader’s imagination. Verne wanted to make the captain a Polish aristocrat, bent on revenge against Russia for its brutal repression of the 1863 uprising. However, he was talked out of this by his publisher and instead Nemo was made enigmatic—a man of mystery whose name is Latin for “no one.” We never learn what motivates him or where he comes from. He speaks five languages—none of which seem to be his native tongue despite his fluency in all of them. He is somber and gloom-ridden by nature, but omniscient on everything he talks about. His age is uncertain; his crew is drawn from the four corners of the earth. He is a walking question mark.

  In the book’s many film and television adaptations, Nemo is usually given comprehensible motives, but in all versions he is a man who has lost faith in humanity. In the 1954 film, Nemo was a former slave who had been subjected to inhuman treatment and now intends revenge—a Spartacus of the waves. Verne, more artfully, lets readers of the novel wonder, and stay wondering. Nemo is not a destroyer, but merely a self-willed exile from the human race and the lands it inhabits, the attraction of the seas being that no human resides there.

  This anonymity is played with through hints and half-clues designed to tantalize rather than inform. The last image Aronnax has of his captor is of Nemo sobbing while gazing piteously at the picture of a woman and two children on his cabin wall, as the Nautilus is pulled down into the maw of the maelstrom. His wife? His mother? Aronnax will never know, nor shall we.

  Twenty Thousand Leagues first appeared for French readers in installments in the Magasin d’Education et de Recreation, from March 1869 to June 1870. Verne’s opening sentence is: “The year 1866 was marked by a bizarre development.” The subsequent narrative takes the action forward to mid-1867. This is, for a novel, a strikingly contemporary setting. Moreover, the story references several significant current events. The name of the ship Aronnax embarks on, the Abraham Lincoln, is named for the sixteenth American president assassinated only two years earlier in 1865. There was nothing new about the idea of the submarine in 1869, but the first time submarines were used effectively in warfare was in the American Civil War by the Confederate Navy. They demonstrated the new crafts’ immense military potential when the forty-foot Hunley (with an eight-man crew and a hand-operated propeller) sank the USS Housatonic off the coast of Charleston in 1864. Suddenly the world took note of this new kind of weapon, which would revolutionize warfare at sea.

  These and innumerable other topicalities echo resonantly in the novel, and they relate to that feature in fiction, immediacy, which is specifically French rather than English or American. French popular novels tended to appear, as did Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, as what were called feuilletons—daily, weekly, or bi-weekly serials in newspapers. In Britain it was the monthly magazine and the hard-backed volume that were the principle vehicles for novels “of the day.” The immediacy of the French practice goes back to the Revolution, fueled as it was by pamphlets and newspapers churned out by the hour by secret hand presses (“under the cloak” publications, as they were called). Verne’s novel is likewise hot off the press.

  The sea is everything.… It is an immense desert place where man is never lonely, for he senses the weaving of Creation on every hand. It is the physical embodiment of a supernatural existence.… For the sea is itself nothing but love and emotion. It is the Living Infinite, as one of your poets has said. Nature manifests herself in it, with her three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable, and animal. The ocean is the vast reservoir of Nature.

  With endless imagination and exhaustive detailing, Verne draws on contemporary discovery to expand into the new and unknown, putting forward technological, geographical, and dimensional concepts to create a world never before seen or imagined. Through this thorough and enthralling landscape, he meditates on the relationship of men with nature, with themselves, and with their freedom in the modern world.

  Jules Verne may not be a great prose stylist—not even his warmest admirers make that claim—but his big ideas are unsurpassed in their daring and gripping nature. No more imaginative writer ever drew his pen across the page.

  SAMUEL BUTLER

  EREWHON (1872)

  A provocative satire on the traditions of Victorian society, which also highlights a prescient comment on the rise of machines.

  Samuel Butler’s (1835–1920) great dystopian satire of Victorian society may be a little more obvious than some later imagined worlds, yet Erewhon is still as bracing as an ice-cold shower in showing the stupidity of viewing the British Empire—or indeed any modern society—as a righteous utopia.

  Butler was one of the most eloquent skeptics of his age, among his propositions were a denunciation of Christ’s resurrection, and the belief that the Odyssey must have been written by a woman. Erewhon was originally published anonymously but when it met with popular success Butler claimed it as his
own, and it is now best remembered for his Darwinian-inspired discussions on what we would now describe as “artificial intelligence” and the evolution of the machine.

  Erewhon, and the world it imagines, draws initially on Butler’s own experience rearing sheep in New Zealand after his graduation from university. His narrator (later revealed to be called Higgs in Butler’s inferior sequel, Erewhon Revisited, from 1901) is a young shepherd, who wonders if there is anything beyond the towering mountains that surround his farm. He embarks on a journey over perilous cliffs and a treacherous river to arrive at the unknown country of Erewhon. (Much like More’s Utopia, Erewhon is a thinly veiled “nowhere” in anagram form.)

  He first encounters a circle of “rude and barbaric” statues that elicit a terrible howl from the wind as it passes through them and cause him to collapse in fear. He is later awoken by girls tending goats who bring him to their elders. As a stranger Higgs is taken into custody, his watch removed and health assessed before being briefly imprisoned. Higgs observes that the practices and beliefs of the Erewhonians seem strangely topsy-turvy and in reverse to his own. Most intriguing is their response to the “crime” of becoming sick, in comparison to, one might assume, more voluntary transgressions:

  … if a man falls into ill health, or catches any disorder, or fails bodily in any way before he is seventy years old, he is tried before a jury of his countrymen, and if convicted is held up to public scorn.… But if a man forges a check, or sets his house on fire, or robs with violence from the person, or does any other such things as are criminal in our own country, he is either taken to a hospital and most carefully tended at the public expense, or if he is in good circumstances, he lets it be known to all his friends that he is suffering from a severe fit of immorality…