Editing The Water-Babies (section)

=== Environmentalism ===
{{Quote box
| quote = Only where men are wasteful and dirty, and let sewers run into the sea, instead of putting the stuff upon the fields like thrifty reasonable souls; or throw herrings’ heads, and dead dog-fish, or any other refuse, into the water; or in any way make a mess upon the clean shore, there the water-babies will not come, sometimes not for hundreds of years (for they cannot abide anything smelly or foul) : but leave the sea-anemones and the crabs to clear away everything, till the good tidy sea has covered up all the dirt in soft mud and clean sand, where the water-babies can plant live cockles and whelks and razor shells and sea-cucumbers and golden-combs, and make a pretty live garden again, after man’s dirt is cleared away. And that, I suppose, is the reason why there are no water-babies at any watering-place which I have ever seen.
| author = Charles Kingsley
| source = The Water-Babies
| width = 50%
}}Literary critic, Naomi Wood, treats Kingsley's "characteristically Victorian naturalism as proto-environmentalism," since it both educates the reader about the environment but also advocates political action to protect the environment.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal |last=Wood |first=Naomi |date=1995 |title=A (Sea) Green Victorian: Charles Kingsley and The Water-Babies |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/35296 |journal=The Lion and the Unicorn |volume=19 |issue=2 |pages=233–252 |doi=10.1353/uni.1995.0033 |issn=1080-6563 |via=Project Muse}}</ref>  Kingsley is critical of industrial and urban pollution and wastefulness.  Catherine Judd points out that the city, the loud coal mining engines, and the stultifying country manor of a British landowner are all contrasted with an Edenic [[Northern England|Northern English]] landscape.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Judd |first=Catherine Nealy |date=March 2017 |title=Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies: Industrial England, The Irish Famine, and The American Civil War |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/victorian-literature-and-culture/article/charles-kingsleys-the-waterbabies-industrial-england-the-irish-famine-and-the-american-civil-war/37F2FD472437C061F6D739A8F8EE3940 |journal=Victorian Literature and Culture |language=en |volume=45 |issue=1 |pages=179–204 |doi=10.1017/S1060150316000498 |issn=1060-1503 |via=Cambridge University Press}}</ref>  With detailed descriptions of native fauna, Kingsley immerses his protagonist into a variety of biodiverse terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems so that readers are drawn to see themselves as part of nature.<ref name=":0" />