The adventures of Tom, a sooty little chimney sweep with a great longing to be clean, who is stolen by fairies and turned into a water baby and the adventures of the three Darling children in Never-Never Land with Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up.
Charles Kingsley was an English clergyman, university professor, historian, and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and north-east Hampshire.
He was educated at Helston Grammar School before studying at King's College London, and the University of Cambridge. Charles entered Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1838, and graduated in 1842. He chose to pursue a ministry in the church. From 1844, he was rector of Eversley in Hampshire, and in 1860, he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.
His writing shows an impulse to reconfigure social realities into dream geographies through Christian idealism.
The strangest Victorian afterlife fever dream I've ever read, with a social commentary of the new science of natural selection thrown in. Would I want to read it aloud to a child? No. But I am glad I read it for myself, generally being a fan of the Victorian era.