The Water Babies cover art

The Water Babies

Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

€0.00/month for the first 3 months
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

The Water Babies

By: Charles Kingsley
Narrated by: Bernard Cribbins
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £6.99

Buy Now for £6.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Bernard Cribbins reads Charles Kingsley's much-loved tale about a little chimney-sweep who is turned into a water baby. Tom the chimney-sweep has a hard life. He is beaten by his master, the cruel Mr Grimes, and forced to climb up dark flues where he bruises his knees and elbows and gets soot in his eyes. He is always hungry, for there is never enough to eat, and always dirty, as there is nowhere for him to wash. One day, he is so tired from sweeping flues that he comes down the wrong chimney and lands in the bedroom of a beautiful young girl, where he is mistaken for a thief and runs away. He falls asleep near a river - and when he wakes up, the fairies have transformed him into a water-baby. He loves his new life swimming in the stream and having adventures, but he has no one to play with. So he sets off on a journey to the sea, to find the other water babies.

Public Domain (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths

Listeners also enjoyed...

Just So Stories cover art
The Skylark's Secret cover art
How Much Land Does a Man Need? cover art
The Cottage at Bantry Bay cover art
Andersen Retold cover art
A Literary Christmas cover art
Puck of Pook's Hill cover art
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens & Peter and Wendy cover art
The Travel and Adventures of Little Baron Trump cover art
The Celtic Twilight cover art
At the Back of the North Wind cover art
The Psammead Trilogy cover art
Tales from the Perilous Realm cover art
Roverandom cover art
The Once and Future King cover art
The Little Mermaid and Other Stories cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
Very well read by Bernard Cribbins, he kept the shortened version of the book interesting.

Good book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Abridged version lost very little of the story, keeping in some lovely lines. A great accompaniment to my journey.

Beautifully read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

In my opinion the story tried to be full of meaning and morals but I think was rather weak. Sorry. The narration was good though.

Good narration, but the story was silly

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

It seems the greatest fans of this story are adults who vaguely remember it from their youth. The story does not stand up by itself as frankly it’s not well-written and lacks both depth or description. Neither my primary-school-aged children, nor I could follow Kingsley’s meandering narrative and after an hour we still had no clear idea what a water baby was. Perhaps we needed to research a Victorian world-view before starting?! It was like listening to someone describing a dream with some very strange twists of reality and time. We struggled to finish it, not for us.

Not one for the kids

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.