2 Charles Kingsley first editions are documented on this shelf, from Westward Ho! (1855) to The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1863) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Charles Kingsley title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.

Identification only, per the house rule: no prices and no appraisals here. Checking a Charles Kingsley copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

Westward Ho! — 1855 · Macmillan & Co.First edition, three volumes, octavo, bound in blue cloth with gilt-lettered spines and yellow endpapers, paginated viii,303,[1]; vi,367; vi,373,[1] across the three volumes, plus 16pp. of publisher's catalogue. The earliest state of the terminal catalogue in volume three is dated February 1855, with a first-issue misspelling on page 7 of the ads; a later state of the same catalogue is dated April 1855.…. A second edition, identically dated 1855 with the same place and publisher on its title page, is distinguished only by the words 'second edition' on the title page itself, so the title page must be checked, not just the imprint date.
The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby — 1863 · Macmillan and Co.First edition, small square octavo, following serialization in Macmillan's Magazine from August 1862 to March 1863. The true first state includes a leaf bearing a poem titled 'L'Envoi', which Kingsley had removed from all but the first roughly 200 copies while the book was still being printed. Most surviving first editions are therefore the 'second state' lacking the L'Envoi leaf, paginated [viii],[3],4-350,[1…. The book stayed in print with wholly new illustration programs — Linley Sambourne's 100 illustrations for the 1885 edition, Warwick Goble's color plates for 1909, and W. Heath Robinson's for Constable's 1915 edition among them — so an illustrated 'gift book' copy of The Water-Babies is not the sparingly illustrated 1863 Macmillan first edition and should not be mistaken for it.

More Literary Fiction (US) & Award Winners shelves: Charles W. Chesnutt, Charles Willeford, Charles Williams, Charlotte Brontë (as 'Currer Bell'), Charlotte M. Yonge, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

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