Brian Alderson has long been involved in the study of children's literature as editor, translator, lecturer, and exhibitions organizer. He takes a particular interest in bibliographic aspects, especially those related to the history of British and American publishing and illustration. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is the author of Becoming Dickens (Harvard UP, 2011), winner of the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, and he has edited editions of Dickens's Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor for Oxford World's Classics. He writes regularly for publications including the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, TLS, and New Statesman.

With an introduction that attends to all the eccentricities of book and author, this new edition reveals Kingsley as a progressive thinker who embraced evolutionary theory and championed environmental causes even as he perpetuated stereotypes and trumpeted stale moral pieties.

• Introduction ; Note on the Text ; Select Bibliography ; A Chronology of Charles Kingsley ; THE WATER-BABIES ; Appendix I: Textual Variants ; Appendix II: 'The Wonders of the Shore' ; Explanatory Notes

Brian Alderson has long been involved in the study of children's literature as editor, translator, lecturer, and exhibitions organizer. He takes a particular interest in bibliographic aspects, especially those related to the history of British and American publishing and illustration. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is the author of Becoming Dickens (Harvard UP, 2011), winner of the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, and he has edited editions of Dickens's Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor for Oxford World's Classics. He writes regularly for publications including the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, TLS, and New Statesman.

With an introduction that attends to all the eccentricities of book and author, this new edition reveals Kingsley as a progressive thinker who embraced evolutionary theory and championed environmental causes even as he perpetuated stereotypes and trumpeted stale moral pieties.

• Introduction ; Note on the Text ; Select Bibliography ; A Chronology of Charles Kingsley ; THE WATER-BABIES ; Appendix I: Textual Variants ; Appendix II: 'The Wonders of the Shore' ; Explanatory Notes