Title: The Water Babies
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton For Boots Pure Drug Co., London
Publication Date: 1925
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
ix, 240 printed pages. This edition has twelve tipped in tissue guarded colour plates and pen and ink vignettes by Jessie Willcox Smith. Reprint, undated but with a a small, neat gift inscription for Xmas 1931 on front free endpaper. Foxing to just one side of both free end papers. 25.5 x 20.5 cm. Green cloth covered boards with gilt decoration to front board and gilt lettering and publisher's device to spine. Boards are bright and clean and gilt sharp. The Water Babies, the Reverend Charles Kingsley's 1862 novel about a juvenile chimney sweep, Tom, who finds redemption from the horrors of his work by means of becoming an aquatic creature, is a perennial children's classic that is not so much read today. Partly political tract, scientific satire, Christian parable as well as children's fantasy, it is a moving and troubling book when read as child, and is even more unsettling when read as an adult. It emerged from a sense of social outrage, took on the big questions of morality and philosophy, and is notable for a work by a 19th-century vicar in that it introduces a fantasy world created and ruled not by gods, but by goddesses. Not only did it have a huge effect on young readers, it also helped to reform legislation that relieved the suffering of innumerable juveniles who had been forced to crawl up chimneys to keep them clean. Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935) was an American female illustrator during the Golden Age of American illustration. She was considered "one of the greatest pure illustrators" and contributed to books and magazines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Smith illustrated stories and articles for journals such as Century, Collier's, Leslie's Weekly, Harper's, McClure's, Scribners, and the Ladies' Home Journal. She had an ongoing relationship with Good Housekeeping, which included the long-running Mother Goose series of illustrations and all of the Good Housekeeping cover art from 1917-33. Among the more than 60 books that Smith illustrated were Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline, & Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. Bookseller Inventory # 4243