... This great wonderful toorld, of which the wisest man knows only the smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean'
(CHARLES KINGSLEY
The Water Babies)
Gillian Beer , Fellow of Girton College. Cambridge, argues that into this fairy tale Kingsley poured all his own preoccupations with the intellectual and social ideas of his day.
