This great wonderful world. 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 preoccupations with the intellectual and social ideas of his day.