The Water-Babies

Tom

Tom begins as Grimes's abused apprentice, sent up flues too narrow for anyone larger, until a wrong turn through a rich house's chimney sets him running for his life. Reborn in the water, he is fearless, curious, and quick to meddle — rescuing a trapped lobster, tormenting the otter — but he carries a nagging fear of Grimes and a longing for the lost green world of Vendale. His restless journey downstream, past mills and barges and sewer-mouths, is the book's moral spine: a small soul learning that going to see the world is a weary business, and that only those who refuse to stop halfway become anything at all.

Mr. Grimes

Grimes is the novel's first portrait of adult vice: he beats his apprentice, poaches salmon, and treats the world as something to be taken. When Tom, as a water-baby, returns to the pool where Grimes fell, he half-expects his old master to have transformed too — but Grimes simply vanishes, carried off by the fairies to wherever things that fall into water truly belong. The dread of meeting him again shadows Tom's downstream journey, and the narrator's wry aside that drowning for twenty-four hours is the only cure for a confirmed poacher turns Grimes into both a warning and a joke the book keeps telling on itself.

Ellie

Ellie is the child of the great house whose chimney Tom tumbles down, and though she is a hundred times his size, he recognizes her instantly as kindred — a little girl, not a creature of another order. She is the first person to treat him gently, and the memory of her follows him into the river, where he longs to have her to play with. Her presence gives Tom's transformation its emotional stakes: he is not merely learning to be good, he is trying to become someone worthy of the one person who ever looked at him without disgust.

Sir John Harthover

Sir John is the novel's picture of the honest English gentleman — a man of property, game, and propriety whose world Tom literally falls into by accident. When Tom bursts out of the flue and escapes, it is Sir John's estate, servants, and hounds that give chase, driving the boy toward the water and his second life. He matters less as a personality than as a boundary: the line between the respectable world above and the hidden world below, and the reminder that Tom's crime was never really a crime at all.

Mother Carey

Mother Carey is the quiet sovereign of the novel's moral universe, the figure the other fairies answer to and the one who reads the Waterproof Gazette each morning to keep track of her charges. She is not warm in the way a human mother is warm; she is vast, patient, and exact, and her lessons arrive as weather and consequence rather than as comfort. For Tom, she represents the end of the journey he does not yet know he is on — the possibility that a naughty little sweep might, after much swimming, be found fit for something more.

Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid

Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid is the novel's most unsettling authority: her name is her law, and she applies it without sentiment, giving sweet things to good children and unpleasant ones to the naughty, always in precise proportion to what they deserve. She reads the police cases in the Waterproof Gazette every morning, which is how Tom's misdeeds come to her attention. Her severity is the counterweight to Tom's charm — she insists that being likable is not the same as being good, and that the universe keeps accounts whether or not anyone enjoys the arithmetic.