The Laws of Nature or Nature’s God?: Penal Authority in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies

Abstract

The Laws of Nature or Nature’s God?: Penal Authority in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies Erin Sheley (bio) “What next will be demanded of us by physical science?” asked Charles Kingsley, in an 1871 lecture at Sion College. “Belief, certainly . . . in the permanence of natural laws” (“Natural Theology” 320). He went on to observe: “I cannot see how our Lord’s parables, drawn from the birds and the flowers, the seasons and the weather, have any logical weight . . . unless we look at them as instances of laws of the natural world, which find their analogues in the laws of the spiritual world, the kingdom of God” (320). Kingsley’s answer to his own question neatly summarizes a worldview in which his theological position as a clergyman of the Church of England can be reconciled with his belief in the theory of natural selection, in which his university audience would have been interested. Indeed, his adherence to natural selection had led Darwin to include a version of Kingsley’s remarks upon On the Origin of Species in the second edition of the book, and he was an important defender of the work.1 Most famously, Kingsley dramatized the processes of natural change in his children’s novel The Water-Babies (1863), in which Tom, a degraded chimneysweep, “evolves” into a morally educated Christian man by first transforming into a magical “water-baby.” Contemporary critics such as Gillian Beer and John Hawley have explored Kingsley’s efforts to use the developing scientific discourses of the nineteenth century—particularly that of evolution—in the service of Christian moral teaching through a kind of magical syncretism made possible by the fanciful world of the text.2 However, to understand fully the relationship between science and religion and the structures of authority through which they act, one must also consider a third discursive framework which the text both critiques and legitimizes: that of earthly positive law. For Kingsley’s remarks at Sion College allude to more than simply a recasting of natural processes as manifestations of God’s will. His reference to these values as embodied in “laws” implies the existence of interconnected systems [End Page 133] of authority to create such laws and, as Kingsley’s habitual usage makes clear, to enforce them through punishment, a process which necessarily implicates human as well as evolutionary or divine lawgivers. This preoccupation with punishment is exemplified by The Water-Babies; Tom flees from his earthly judges into a world in which physical and procedural trials and punishments mark his progress from “heathen” to Christian man of science. Kingsley utilizes the discourses of both science and earthly law to access what he believes to be a set of universal spiritual truths, but this triangulation breaks down into a perplexing multiplicity of authorities, all of whom seek to assert legal and penal control over Tom. I will argue that Kingsley initially attempts to interpose an embodied Mother Nature in lieu of earthly systems of positive law as a more suitable mediator of divine laws. Yet ultimately nature herself fails as a dispenser of divine justice, and Kingsley’s fantasy world of nature collapses into a return to reliance on earthly systems of legal authority. Kingsley’s effort to develop a principled reconciliation of evolution and God, then, fails in its pragmatic execution, leaving scientific discourses about the physical world somewhat morally suspect. Yet Kingsley’s simultaneous failure to rehabilitate satisfactorily the positive law framework he challenges early in the text leaves Tom—and the reader—uncertain as to the proper sources of authority best suited to mediating the universal right and wrong. His eventual reliance on essentialist moral qualities of English common law underscores the discursive contingency of nineteenth-century conceptions of just punishment in general. While tensions over the legitimacy of punishment always complicate the standard liberal narrative of political bodies originating in prepolitical social contracts never agreed to by present-day citizens, these tensions seem uniquely striking in Kingsley’s strange text for children, in which he criticizes both discipline and the lack thereof. In this sense, Tom’s experiences in The Water-Babies resonate with Foucault’s account of the “birth of the...