From The Water-Babies: The Importance Of The Message To Christianity

Sometime around 1863 Christianity changed. It turned camp. That is, as I will show in my discussion of

Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) with Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), it accessed in the words of Michael Screech, its own “kind of inspired madness… [making Christians] ‘fools for Christ’s sake’” (98). Importantly, this is not a change of message necessarily, but a change in the delivery of the message. This is in order to re-position Christianity in the new world of exuberance and transformation posed by Charles Darwin’s Origins of Species (1859). In order to think through how Christianity accesses this new intensity and vitality, I will be drawing on Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “On Camp”. I will think about camp as re-scripting

One example in The Water-Babies is Kingsley’s blend of the fairy tale genre with his Christian message. The narrator preaches didactic lectures on “how little boys ought to be” during asides in the story. These are a set of standards which include Christian virtues on morality (“keep your eye single...your hands clean”), in which delivering a Christian message in a fairy tale may not be taken seriously. Wilde’s “supplementary set of standards” is not mocking the delivery of Christianity as a message but taking it seriously like through Baptism. Anabaptism is the belief that one chooses to be baptized. Jack and Algernon pursue baptism as a requirement in order to marry. To Wilde, this is not "irreligious" (352), but demonstrates Christianity as being present yet not visible. It is present through suggesting marriage and baptism, but not visible as they have no importance towards the end of the play. Throughout the essay, I will use Sontag’s other definitions on camp to amplify my argument that Christianity turned camp in this