Description
Kingsley, Charles. The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby. (Philadelphia: David McKay, ND) – Number 24 in McKay’s Young People’s Classics Series.
16mo. 1 pg adv., 224 pages. “Four full-page color plates and numerous engravings”. Hardcover, bound in green cloth-covered boards with printed illustration on front cover and title printed on spine.
Condition: Very Good, hinges are solid, binding tight, slight cant and darkening to spine.
“Charles Kingsley (12 June 1819 – 23 January 1875) was a broad church priest of the Church of England, a university professor, social reformer, historian and novelist. He is particularly associated with Christian socialism, the working men’s college, and forming labour cooperatives that failed but led to the working reforms of the progressive era. He was a friend and correspondent with Charles Darwin. He was also the uncle of traveller and scientist Mary Kingsley.
“His chief power as a novelist lay in his descriptive faculties. The descriptions of South American scenery in Westward Ho!, of the Egyptian desert in Hypatia, of the North Devon scenery in Two Years Ago, are brilliant; and the American scenery is even more vividly and more truthfully described when he had seen it only by the eye of his imagination than in his work At Last, which was written after he had visited the tropics. His sympathy with children taught him how to secure their interests. His version of the old Greek stories entitled The Heroes, and Water-babies and Madam How and Lady Why, in which he deals with popular natural history, take high rank among books for children. Kingsley was influenced by Frederick Denison Maurice, and was close to many Victorian thinkers and writers, including the Scottish writer George MacDonald.” – Wikipedia
