About this Item
Green cloth with gilt and black lettering. White, red, black and green cover decoration and vignette of a woman. Minor edgewear. Previous owner gift inscription dated 1907 to front endpaper. Text is clean and bright, no marks. With one hundred beautiful illustrations throughout by Linley Sambourne. "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 The Origin of Species. The book was extremely popular in England, and was a mainstay of British children's literature for many decades, but eventually fell out of favour in part due to its prejudices (common at the time) against Irish, Jews and Americans. The protagonist is Tom, a young chimney sweep, who falls into a river after encountering an upper-class girl named Ellie and being chased out of her house. There he drowns and is transformed into a "water baby", as he is told by a caddisfly an insect that sheds its skin and begins his moral education. The story is thematically concerned with Christian redemption, though Kingsley also uses the book to argue that England treats its poor badly, and to question child labour, among other themes." (Wiki). Seller Inventory # 92809G
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