I'm pretty sure Victorians should never have been allowed to write children's books. This is actually a satire written in support of Darwin's theories, but with a lot of religion, morality, and now completely unacceptable prejudices. I'm sure I would have felt condescended to if I had read this as a child, because Kingsley spends most of the book addressing the 'reader' as 'my little man' and doing what one critic I read called 'winking at the adult over the head of the child'. I never figured out if the child died or not. At first I thought the whole book was some sort journey through Purgatory to Heaven, but at the end, it seemed like it was just an allegory for struggling up through the layers of society. I'm really not sure what to make of this book, but the overwhelming feeling it left me with is one of nausea from its unbearable, headache-inducing, saccharine didacticism.
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