Of Beasts and Boys: Kingsley, Spencer, and the Theory of Recapitulation

Reading The Water-Babies, Kingsley's fantasy of morphological reversion and progress, against Herbert Spencer's conception of recapitulation through primitive scientific inquiry, this paper considers how this harbinger of the "Golden Age" of children's literature sought to establish the literary text as an allegory of and vehicle for the moral cultivation of the child. No longer Romanticism's innocent ideal, the child was regarded by many post-Darwinian thinkers as a living vestige of the species' bestial, pre-human past. The scientific pedagogy proposed by Spencer, designed to help the child transcend his proto-human state, argued for instruction by nature alone. The Water-Babies adopts this pedagogical program, metamorphosing its young protagonist into a newt who must learn from first-hand observation and self-directed experimentation how to evolve back into a child. However, Kingsley's adaptation of Spencer's recapitulative pedagogy paradoxically admits and ultimately exalts literary and moral instruction within the child's miniaturized ascent from beast to boy.