Down the rabbit hole

Mary and Elizabeth are working in the hop fields in Godalming in 1724, “very poor, very tired”, one of them three months pregnant, when they see a rabbit. Food! They fail to catch it, but an idea has been planted. The rabbit represents “everything that is wrong with Godalming”, beginning with the Duchess of Richmond, who has spent twelve shillings on a new outfit for her pet monkey when labourers like Mary and Elizabeth earn a penny a day – if they can get work. Field work is drying up, however, because the money (for those who already have it) is in rabbit-farming. The rabbits belong to the rich. The rabbit dream is of overturning the system, bringing food, comfort and warmth to all. Like all dreams it takes strange shapes.

Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s Mary and the Rabbit Dream reimagines a media and medical sensation. In the mid-1720s the papers were full of the story of Mary Toft, an illiterate nobody who had apparently begun to give birth to rabbits. Intelligent, educated men took this story seriously. After all, women were strange creatures and their bodies worked in mysterious ways. Most people believed that a woman called Mary had conceived a baby without any help from a man – so why not rabbits? Thus, the wise men of the time, including Sir Richard Manningham, one of the king’s physicians, left their clubs and went in their coaches to Godalming to investigate.

But how did you investigate whether a woman’s body was making rabbits? You could sit it out and wait to see, or you could put your hand in and grope. Mary Toft wasn’t making rabbits, but her body was certainly trying to expel something. She was in pain. What came out when she heaved and cried was pieces of rabbit that had been pushed into her by her mother-in-law, Ann, and sister-in-law Elizabeth, the hard-faced, impoverished women who were using her. Their dream was Mary’s nightmare, “physical, painful and vile”.

Kiss-Deáki tells this ugly story in incantatory, repetitive short sentences that sit on the page like a prose poem. Her sympathies are with all the women and all the poor. Ann’s idea is “outlandish” and cruel, but so is the system that favours men and wealth. Having “a sharp brain and sharp thoughts”, and being “fed up with the state of things”, Ann wanted to set it all on fire, and Mary was her tool. This seems a reasonable interpretation of the limited evidence available about motives.

What begins as a story about women (“One might imagine that such a community of women … could perhaps be cosy and intimate. It is not cosy and intimate”) is quickly taken over by men. The author’s tone is deliciously sardonic, lightly conversational, mixing the language of deference with occasional modern idioms and all-knowing modern erudition. Kiss-Deáki uses and amplifies Karen Harvey’s well-researched The Impostress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and eighteenth-century England (2020), and has gone back to the sources that Harvey used, notably pamphlets issued at the time and shortly after by the medical men involved. When the imposture was revealed and the whole nation was laughing, the fine men were embarrassed. William Hogarth’s print “The Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation” (1726) showed them as well-dressed fools, crowding the doorway while Sir Richard, the male midwife, wearing his birthing robe, reaches his strong arm towards Mary on the bed as baby rabbits scurry about the floorboards.

Sir Richard, whose status is subtly undermined by his being referred to throughout as “Sir Manningham” – as if Kiss-Deáki doesn’t know how the strange system of titles works – was professionally tarnished. Who would want the hands that had birthed rabbits to bring forth their children? But he wasn’t ruined: neither his money nor his daily comforts were lost to him. Mary, by contrast, was sent to prison, charged with “imposture”. But it turned out that having rabbits inserted into you wasn’t a crime (if the rabbit was acquired lawfully), and nor was having said rabbits pulled out. After four months’ hard labour, and with nothing to charge her for, she was released. She remained poor.

Mary and the Rabbit Dream catches the absurdity of the case and the systemic cruelty of “the state of things” in eighteenth-century England. In a useful afterword the author explains her choices as she contemplated making fiction out of these historical events: she wanted to be “in tune with modern research” while allowing herself to stray from “verifiable facts” and “shamelessly indulge” her imagination. As might be expected, she wanted to give Mary a voice – and she does – but the subversive wit she turns on the men is what makes this novel sing.

Norma Clarke is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Kingston University. Her most recent book is a family memoir, Not Speaking, 2019

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