Water Baby Rides a Fish, for Charles Kingsley's "The Water-Babies"
Jessie Wilcox Smith American
Related author Charles Kingsley British
Not on view
In 1916 the leading American illustrator Jessie Wilcox Smith was employed by Dodd, Mead & Co. to illustrate "The Water-Babies," a popular novel by Charles Kingsley first published in London in 1863. This drawing of a child riding a large fish became a black and white line image on the half-title page of the related volume, the first that the reader encounters in the book. The story tells how a chimney sweep, Tom falls into a river and is transformed into a water-baby who then undergoes a moral journey (a tale that combines Christian allegory, a critique of Victorian labor practices and defends Darwin's recently published theory of evolution).
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