The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

Subtitled: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby
Written by Charles Kingsley originally for his son Grenville in 1862-3. Published in 1863 with Noel Paton doing the illustrations. You can get it an any book store with the illustrations.

Anyway, it is sort of a moral story of how cleanliness and neatness is important for children. With unmistakable names of the characters, such as: Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, makes no attempt to hide the motive of telling the story. But the story is done good enough to be interesting.

The basic story is about a young boy named Tom, who works for a nasty bully, named Mr. Grimes, as a who is a chimney sweep.
Well Tom falls down a chimney, and finds a girl called Ellie who makes Tom aware of the value of cleanliness and neatness is, and how dirty blackened his own body is.
Anyway Tom is chased out of Ellie's house, falls into the river where he enters a magical underwater world and becomes a water-baby. Kingsley portrays the water world in vivid and exciting way.
Here Tom meets creatures such as the caddis fly and salmon that teach Tom morality.

This fairy tale also eludes to moral education of the poor and how the poor should be treated. The issues of whether enforced child-labour is immoral so it is also aimed at adults who read the story to kids.