Kingsley's Chrono-Baby: Standardized Fictions of Class Time

This essay engages Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1862) in order to articulate the underlying narrative logic of standardized education. Kingsley was uniquely positioned, as a theologian, educator, and scientific hobbyist, to comment on the education reforms that set the scene for what we now recognize as the genesis of universal standard education. His highly popular children's fable uses time-traveling clockwork fairies to administer a system that naturalizes its processes both religiously and scientifically. This piece argues that the layered temporality of the fairies that orchestrate the novel's moral architecture is actually a simplistic Bildung narrative.