DADDY DARWIN'S DOVECOT

First edition. Original paper-covered boards with black titles to the spine and an illustration in black and orange to the upper board. Illustrated with a colour frontispiece and black and white in-text illustrations by Randolph Caldecott throughout. A very good copy, the binding square and firm, the paper browned to the edges and starting to chip off at the spine and extremities. The contents, with offsetting to the endpapers and a few tiny spots to the last page, are otherwise clean throughout and without stamps or inscriptions.

Juliana Horatia Ewing was a successful Victorian children's writer whose work had a notable influence on later writers such as E. Nesbit and Rudyard Kipling. Roger Lancelyn Green, children's writer, biographer and member of the Inklings group, described her writing as the "first outstanding child-novels" in English Literature.