TY  - BOOK
AU  - Kingsley, Charles,
TI  - The Water babies: a fairy tale for a land baby
PY  - 1923///
CY  - J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, London
KW  - Fairy tales
KW  - Juvenile fiction
N1  - For young people; John Martin Bequest 86
N2  - 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
ER  -