Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1893; 1896.
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Hardcover. Four volumes. Later and first editions (as detailed below). Small octavos. Each volume is uniformly bound in three-quarter brown morocco gilt and marbled papercovered board presentation bindings, topedges gilt, ribbon markers. Overall attractive very good or better copies. Four volumes on childhood education mostly exploring the educational philosophy of Friedrich Fröbel, co-written with her sister, Nora Archibald Smith (including the trilogy, *The Republic of Childhood*). Each volume is Inscribed by Kate Douglas Wiggin to her second husband, George C. Riggs. Although best known for her classic children's book, *Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm* and many other popular books for both children and adults, Wiggin was also a pioneer of early childhood education in the West, starting the first free kindergarten in California in the slums of San Francisco in 1878. In 1881 she married San Francisco attorney Bradley Wiggin, and was required to resign her teaching job, and began to write in order to raise funds to support her school. When Wiggin died suddenly in 1889, she moved to Maine, and later married New York City businessman George C. Riggs on March 30, 1895 to whom she had been introduced in May, 1894 on a transatlantic shipboard cruise on the Britannic by her Captain Edward Smith, who later commanded the *Titanic*. Wiggin wrote of her romance with Rigg in the chapter "An Ocean Romance" in her posthumously published biography, *My Garden of Romance* (a copy of that book is included). These books date from just before and just after the advent of their marriage.
Item #398103
