Charles Kingsley — The Water Babies

Nottingham & London, Boots the Chemists, 1919. Cloth. A beautiful later edition of Charles Kingsley's renowned children's work 'The Water Babies', lavishly illustrated with colour plates and complete with a dust wrapper. 'The Water-Babies' was originally written as part-satire to support 'The Origin of Species' by Charles Darwin, and quickly became a classic piece of children's literature. As with many classic pieces of Victorian literature, it functions as a didactic moral fable, telling of young chimney sweep Tom's moral education. Penned by Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), a priest, professor, novelist, poet and friend of Charles Darwin.Illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935), an American illustrator active during the Golden Age of illustration. She illustrated for numerous magazines, and is also memorable for her illustrations for the Mother Goose series of illustrations, the Good Housekeeping covers between 1917 and 1933, and 'Little Women' by Louisa May Alcott and Robert Louis Stevenson's 'A Child's Garden of Verses&apos.With in-text illustrations, as well as eleven tipped-in colour illustrations, including a frontispiece. Collated, complete.Undated; dated from copies on Library Hub.In a wonderful decorative binding, with a less common dust wrapper. In the publisher's original full cloth binding with an unclipped dust wrapper. Externally very smart, with just slight bumping to the head and tail of the spine. Dust wrapper is sadly split,, with around half the sunned spine lacking, a large amount of loss to the front cover and clips to the edges and extremities. Internally, firmly bound. Pages are generally bright and clean, with the odd spot and some marks to pages 200 to 208. Very Good Indeed . Ill.: Jessie Willcox Smith. Very Good Indeed/Good Only.