1900 Rare Book - The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, Illustrated

An attractive turn-of-the-century illustrated edition of Kingsley’s strange and beloved Victorian fairy tale, bright in its red pictorial cloth and filled with Linley Sambourne’s lively engravings.

Author: Charles Kingsley. Illustrated by Linley Sambourne.
Title: The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby.
Publisher: New York, The Macmillan Company / London, Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1900. New Edition. Reprinted August 1900.
Language: Text in English.
Size: 7.5" x 5".
Pages: 330 pages + publisher’s catalogue.
Binding: Attractive and very good original red publisher’s cloth binding, decorated in gilt and black to the front board and spine, with floral borders and gilt lettering. The binding is bright and tight, with wear and scuffing to the upper part of the spine and a light bump to the upper rear cover edge, as shown. Protected in a removable mylar cover. 
Content: Very good content, bright, tight and clean overall, with light age toning, as shown. Endpapers professionally replaced by a previous owner.
Illustrations: Complete with one hundred illustrations by Linley Sambourne, including numerous full-page and in-text black-and-white engravings.

Estimate: USD $150-$180.

The book: A charming 1900 Macmillan edition of The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley’s curious, moral, and fantastical Victorian tale of Tom, the young chimney-sweep who enters a strange underwater world of transformation, wonder, satire, and redemption. This edition is especially appealing for its handsome red cloth binding and the abundance of illustrations by Linley Sambourne, whose energetic line work gives the story a wonderfully lively late-Victorian character.

The author: Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) was an English clergyman, novelist, historian, and social reformer. Best remembered today for The Water-Babies, he combined fantasy, moral allegory, social criticism, and natural history into a story that became one of the enduring classics of Victorian children’s literature.

The illustrator: Edward Linley Sambourne (1844–1910) was a British illustrator and cartoonist, best known for his long association with Punch. His detailed, witty, and imaginative illustrations for The Water-Babies bring a distinctive satirical energy to Kingsley’s fairy tale, balancing fantasy with the sharp observational humour of the late nineteenth century.