Charles Kingsley's lifelong interest in geology is well documented – from the gentleman geologists of his early novels and his membership of the Geological Society, to his introduction to earth science for children, Madam How and Lady Why (1870) – but the influence of geological ideas in The Water-Babies (1863) has been largely overlooked. Instead, academics have broadly categorised the novel as an ‘evolutionary parable’, emphasising Darwinian influences to the exclusion of contemporary geology. I propose that there is a distinct geological subtext underpinning The Water-Babies. Acknowledging both its scientific and religious contexts, I argue that Kingsley integrates elements of his geological studies into clear stratigraphic forms in the novel; that these ideas recur in the novel's surface geography and are informed by his reading of contemporary geologists; and that The Water-Babies is part of a longstanding generic tradition of Christian geological katabasis that can be traced back to Dante's Divine Comedy (1555).
Reply to Discussion: Hennig-Breitfeld, J., H.T. Breitfeld, R. Hall, M. BouDagher-Fadel, and M. Thirlwall. 2019. A new upper Paleogene to Neogene stratigraphy for Sarawak and Labuan in northwestern Borneo: Paleogeography of the eastern Sundaland margin. Earth-Science Reviews 190, 1–32
