KINGSLEY, Charles.

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The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby. First edition, second issue, from the library of the English writer Richard Adams (1920-2016), author of Watership Down, with his pictorial bookplate on the front pastedown. Kingsley's "most enduringly popular work" (ODNB) was originally serialized in Macmillan's Magazine from August 1862 to March 1863. The Water-Babies "began as a story for [Kingley's] own children and an attack on the continuing employment of climbing boys to sweep chimneys. But the story sends little Tom on an evolutionary moral journey and includes incidental satiric commentary on education, fashion, and current affairs, as well as mockery of post-Darwinian controversies about human descent and distinctiveness and the nature of scientific evidence" (ibid.).The book initiated the first golden age of children's books in England: Kingsley "was the first writer in England, perhaps the first in the world, except for H. C. Andersen, to discover that a children's book can be the perfect vehicle for an adult's most personal and private concerns... it was quite different from anything else written for children... in a small space, it managed to discover and explore almost all the directions that children's books would take over the next 100 years" (Carpenter, pp. 24-37).The second issue was published without the "L'Envoi" leaf: "Kingsley had second thoughts about this while the book was being printed, and he had the leaf removed, but not before a few hundred copies o

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