ABSTRACT
Margaret Gatty’s Parables from Nature (1855-71) and Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863) derive from both the serious, moral, semi-realistic animal story as developed by Trimmer, and the fantastic, grotesque, carnivalesque comic animal poems of the papillonades and Signor Topsy-Turvy. The explorations of animal subjectivity and the political purposes of the animal autobiographies are not, however, part of their projects. Their focus instead is on natural history, science and theology. Gatty and Kingsley are writing in an increasingly complex Victorian context of evolutionary controversy. Both were accomplished naturalists, on the borderline between amateur and professional, two categories that were not yet fully distinguished in the mid-Victorian period. Gatty published an authoritative book on seaweeds, and Kingsley wrote popular natural history, while also becoming respected in the adult scientific community. Trimmer’s emphasis on an education in natural history, and the use of the microscope, appears in their children’s stories as a more thoroughgoing expertise. Both writers choose children’s animal stories as a place in which to react specifically to theories of evolution. Gatty uses her parables to oppose scientific materialism, aiming to counter the desponding reactions of Tennyson’s poetry to evolutionary theory. Kingsley uses his fairy story to propose a reconciliation between evolutionary theory and religion. He had been famously alluded to as a clerical supporter of Darwin’s position in the second edition of The Origin of Species:
It is worth asking why both these writers choose children’s stories, and talking animals, to put forward or refute complex scientific theories that would be of interest mostly to an adult audience. When contemporary controversies about mechanism and materialism briefly surface in Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories, Mrs Benson quickly shuts the topic down, as unsuitable for young readers:
While Harriet afterwards asks to be informed about the Learned Pig, and Mrs Benson obliges, the issue of mechanism is not returned to. But Gatty’s and Kingsley’s stories are full of allusions that only adults would understand: for instance, Kingsley’s references to the ‘hippocampus’ controversy (see p. 120 below), or Gatty’s epigraphs from Tennyson. Gatty even addresses adults specifically at times. Both writers seem to have been influenced by Romantic idealisations of childhood as a time of uncontaminated vision nearer to our divine origins: the child can often see more clearly than the adult scientist. This Romantic nostalgia for childhood appeals more to the adult than the actual child in the present: the child is valued for something the adult has lost and can only regain through the child. The Romantic influence is most evident in the preamble to a parable of Gatty’s called ‘Inferior Animals’ in which a group of talking rooks parody evolutionary theory. Interestingly, childhood vision is linked here to the belief that animals can talk. The narrator laments the ‘necessary unlearning’ of our childhood instinct for intercommunication with the animals, quoting from Novalis: ‘only children, or child-like men … have any chance of breaking through the charm which holds nature thus as it were frozen around us, like a petrified magic city.’3 She then appeals to the (grown-up) reader to join her in becoming a child, and approach the rooks. Magically, narrator and readers can now understand the rooks’ language.
