He was a man of his time; and quite radical, believe it or not. The Water Babies, if you look more closely at it, was pretty subversive by contemporary standards. Most people hadn't even imagined that the children who cleaned their chimneys (and frequently died in the process) even belonged to the same species, let alone that they might have imaginations, and dreams, of their own.

Kingsley, like Kipling, is all too often misunderstood by people who make assumptions based on modern (anachronistic) attitudes. You need to understand how things were then before making judgements.