# Is "The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby" by Charles Kingsley a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby by Charles Kingsley (Macmillan and Co., 1863) is identified by: First edition, small square octavo, following serialization in Macmillan's Magazine from August 1862 to March 1863.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- 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 ad],1 blank
- This second state carries an inserted frontispiece and a full-page illustration facing page 145, eight large engraved initial letters, and is bound in dark green fine-grain cloth with gilt decoration
- Publisher imprint reads Macmillan and Co.
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Charles Kingsley |
| Publisher | Macmillan and Co. |
| Year | 1863 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | First edition, small square octavo, following serialization in Macmillan's Magazine from August 1862 to March 1863 |
| Book-club edition exists? | — |

## Points of issue
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 ad],1 blank. This second state carries an inserted frontispiece and a full-page illustration facing page 145, eight large engraved initial letters, and is bound in dark green fine-grain cloth with gilt decoration.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
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.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby* by Charles Kingsley a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/the-water-babies-a-fairy-tale-for-a-land-baby
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.