The Water-Babies

Note on the Text

Kingsley’s text first appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in eight instalments from August 1862 to March 1863, and he revised it for the first edition, published by Macmillan in 1863. This edition follows the book rather than the serial, since the book is the text as Kingsley finished it. A second edition followed in 1864, in a smaller format. But no substantive revision by Kingsley after 1863 has come to light in the checks made for this edition, and after his death Macmillan reset the book, beginning with the illustrated edition of 1885, so that a few small corruptions crept in.

The copy-text is the Standard Ebooks edition of The Water-Babies, first released in 2023 and followed here as revised to September 2026; the revisions since its release are small editorial changes of spelling and hyphenation. Standard Ebooks based its text on the Project Gutenberg transcription, no. 25564, made by the volunteers of Distributed Proofreaders and released in 2008, and checked it against scans of the same printing. That printing is Macmillan’s edition of 1922 with sixteen colour illustrations by Warwick Goble, printed by R. & R. Clark in Edinburgh. It is a late resetting. But it descends directly from the first edition of 1863 through the Macmillan printings in between, and it shares some readings of the edition of 1885.

Standard Ebooks modernises its texts, and those modernisations are kept here and declared. More than a hundred hyphenated compounds have been closed up (leap-frog is leapfrog, bull-dog is bulldog, dragon-fly is dragonfly), and every one, any one and some one are printed as single words where they mean everybody, anybody and somebody. To-day, to-morrow, for ever and good-bye become today, tomorrow, forever and goodbye, and some spellings are modernised, such as coconut for cocoa-nut, Hindu for Hindoo, Tibet for Thibet and bogey for bogy. Ligatures, the joined letters of the old printings, are split, so that mediæval is medieval, and the comma that the old printers set before a dash is dropped. Standard Ebooks also sets the Moral in roman rather than in the italic of the 1922 printing, gives the titles of imaginary books capital letters, and reads the lists that the old printings set in two columns down each column in turn.

This edition makes a few changes of its own, and first of all it restores six readings of the first edition, which are listed with the evidence in the Textual Notes at the end of the volume. Four of them reverse changes made by Standard Ebooks (grown-up, sate, divers and magic-lanthorns), and two correct misprints that entered the Macmillan text between 1864 and 1885 (harelds and might). The heading of the last chapter is restored to Chapter VIII and Last, as it stands in both 1863 and 1922. The chapter epigraphs are set after the chapter headings rather than before them, and the catalogues that Standard Ebooks set as bulleted lists are printed as indented lines, keeping the numbers where the old printings number them. Two names in Chapter V that Standard Ebooks set in bold type, its way of marking the small capitals of the source, are printed in roman. No illustrations are reproduced.

Kingsley wrote no notes of his own, so every footnote in this edition is the editor’s. The notes gloss old, dialect and technical words, identify places, creatures and plants, and explain the people named, real and satirised, and the controversies behind the jokes. They also trace quotations from the Bible, the poets and the classics, including every epigraph, mark the passages of racial, national and religious prejudice, and record where this text differs from that of 1863.