Red calf spine with gilt title. Red cloth boards.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

A well kept lovely collector’s edition: A new edition with 100 illustrations by Linley Sambourne. A lovely copy of this tale of the horrors endured by child labour, specifically by chimney sweeps and their eventual Christian redemption.

Children’s reading age 8+ years.

When Tom, a young chimney sweep, falls into a river and drowns, he is transformed from a twelve-year-old boy who has known nothing but brutality and poverty into a ‘water-baby’. In an underwater world surrounded by fairies, insects and water nymphs, he soon discovers a new life of adventure and excitement.

Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, first published in 1863, is a truly special gift to treasure.

The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children’s novel by Charles Kingsley. Written in 1862–1863 as a serial for Macmillan’s Magazine, it was first published in its entirety in 1863. It was written as part satire in support of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. The book was extremely popular in the United Kingdom and was a mainstay of British children’s literature for many decades, but eventually fell out of favour in America in part due to its prejudices against Irish, Jews, Catholics, and Americans.

Charles Kingsley was born in Holne, Devon, in 1819. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Helston Grammar School, before moving on to King’s College London and the University of Cambridge. After graduating in 1842, he pursued a career in the clergy and in 1859 was appointed chaplain to Queen Victoria. The following year he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and became private tutor to the Prince of Wales in 1861.

Kingsley resigned from Cambridge in 1869 and between 1870 and 1873 was canon of Chester cathedral. He was appointed canon of Westminster cathedral in 1873 and remained there until his death in 1875.

Sympathetic to the ideas of evolution, Kingsley was one of the first supporters of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), and his concern for social reform was reflected in The Water-Babies (1863). Kingsley also wrote Westward Ho! (1855), for which the English town is named, a children’s book about Greek mythology, The Heroes (1856), and several other historical novels.

Edward Linley Sambourne (4 January 1844 – 3 August 1910) was an English cartoonist and illustrator most famous for being a draughtsman for the satirical magazine Punch for more than forty years and rising to the position of “First Cartoonist” in his final decade. He was also a great-grandfather of Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon, who was the husband of Princess Margaret. (Queen Elizabeth’s sister).