Water Babies

KINGSLEY, Charles. The Water Babies. Illustrated in colour by A. E. Jackson. London: Humphrey Milford [1929]. 4to, 252pp. Blue-gray cloth pictorially stamped in gold and navy; t.e.g. Pictorial endpapers; 16 color plates hand-mounted on gray stock with printed captions, pictorial title page, pictorial half-title, pictorial list of illustrations, and 3 b&w illustrations at the start and 1 at the end of each chapter. Spine ends and upper corners a bit rubbed, spine sunned, light soiling to cloth, endpapers a tad aged, foxing to foredge of sheets and to the margins of the first few leaves, else a clean, tight copy.

1929 printing of this 1920 edition. A stunningly illustrated edition of Charles Kingsley’s classic fantasy which first appeared as a serial in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1863. Written in part as a satire in support of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and in part as a tract against child labor, this book was a seminal work in the history of British children’s literature. A.E. Jackson’s gorgeous illustrations, first published in 1920, wonderfully capture the magic of this children’s fantasy.