The Water Babies. Illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith.

London:: Hodder and Stoughton, n.d.. 4to. viii, [2], 305, [1] pp. 12 tipped in colour plates by Jessie Willcox Smith, title-vignette and numerous figures. Original full publisher's orange cloth stamped in black and blue; supper corner bumped, corners showing, a hint of wear to spine ends. Rubber-stamp of the Montreux English Library (ffep). Very good. First British edition with illustrations by Jessie Willcox Smith. The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children's novel by Charles Kingsley. Written in 1862–63 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 had been intended in part as a satire, a tract against child labor, as well as a serious critique of the closed-minded approaches of many scientists of the day in their response to Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution, which Kingsley had been one of the first to praise. – Holt, Jenny, "'A Partisan Defence of Children? Kingsley's The Water-Babies Re-Contextualized". Nineteenth-Century Contexts, September 2011, 33 (4): 353–370.