Down the Rabbit Hole

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The previous owner of the house I grew up in left various treasures buried in the overgrown garden. There was a ceramic Cheshire Cat, the underside of which dripped with earwigs whenever I lifted it from the ground. A strangely shaped slate, once some piece of garden-centre kitsch, its message long since worn away. And a bronze rabbit, squat and greening, with large ears and an oddly malicious gaze. This totem was never in the same place twice. Each time I played in the garden, I’d make a game of searching for it. Down the rabbit hole, I’d think to myself, crawling through the thicket of hedges and plunging my hands into the earth.

Like all the best fairytales, the story of Mary Toft begins with a rabbit hole – a portal out of coherent reality. But this story is no fairytale, except in the sense that, as Marina Warner reminds us, ‘a story is an archive, packed with history’, which ‘bears the marks of the people who told it over the years, of their lives and their struggles’.

Our heroine – if you can call her that – was born in impoverished obscurity in 1703 and died in impoverished obscurity sixty years later. Yet for a brief period in the 1720s, Mary Toft became a minor celebrity when, fresh from a painful miscarriage, Mary began to give birth to rabbits. Throughout the autumn of 1726, this unassuming woman underwent repeated and agonising ‘labours’, each of which resulted in her birthing dismembered rabbit parts, labelled as ‘monstrous births’. As her case gained fame and notoriety, Mary was examined by six different doctors in Surrey and London and scrutinised in the popular press, before eventually confessing to fraud in December. Though suspicions of deception had surrounded Mary from the start, none of those attending the case declared the affair a hoax until after her confession, in which she implicated the Guildford physician John Howard and a number of women in her community, including her mother-in-law Ann Toft.

The story of Mary Toft is not a fairytale. It is the true account of a real woman’s life and the many afterlives of that tale – how it has been reshaped to fit the contours of the cultures in which we tell it.

Episodes from history can lie undisturbed for years beneath the sediment of time before resurfacing.

Three hundred years after her case first captivated the English public, Mary Toft is having something of a moment. She’s the subject of a major historical work – Karen Harvey’s The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder (2020) – and at least two novels: Dexter Palmer’s Mary Toft, or the Rabbit Queen (2019), and Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s Mary and the Rabbit Dream (2024), as well as an earlier short story by Emma Donaghue (‘The Last Rabbit’, 2002) and a 2011 radio play. Mary is a stock feature in podcasts and blogposts with titles like ‘A hare-raising tale’, ‘The curious case of Mary Toft’, or ‘How to give birth to a rabbit’, and the subject of countless social media posts.

Like the bronze rabbit in my childhood garden, episodes from history can lie undisturbed for years beneath the sediment of time before resurfacing. It’s worth asking why we are retelling this story now, in these particular ways. Part of the recent interest in Toft is surely a result of historiographical trends, which since the 1970s have come to value ‘history from below’, examining the subaltern, socially marginalised and subjected, as well as re-centring embodied experiences of gender, identity and subjectivity, often through the medium of microhistory. Harvey’s scholarship, dedicated to reproducing Mary’s ‘personal truth about her physical and subjective experiences’, is a particularly evocative account of a society characterised by immense social inequality and simmering political anxiety. Kiss-Deáki cites The Impostress Rabbit-Breeder as the primary source material for her novel, which has an explicitly feminist bent; labelling the tale a case of ‘oppression and dehumanisation’ in an extensive epilogue. As this suggests, contemporary interest in Mary Toft isn’t solely historical. Her story still speaks to contemporary concerns about gender and class power, women’s bodies and bodily transgression. It’s difficult to believe that one woman’s traumatic pregnancy and its aftermath could grip a nation today – but they regularly do, in cases of postpartum psychosis, preventable maternal deaths and, perhaps most worryingly, in an increasingly politicised abortion debate.

At the same time, part of what draws us to Mary Toft is exactly what captivated eighteenth-century commentators – its strangeness. Just how did Mary insert the animal parts into her womb? Who were her shadowy accomplices? Could a woman ever really give birth to rabbits? We’re fascinated by the oddities of the past, drawn to their grotesque, logic-defying weirdness and corporeal peculiarities.

Mary, like Charcot’s hysteric ‘Blanche’ Wittman and the French glutton Tarrare – the subjects of Victoria Mas’s The Mad Women’s Ball and A.K. Blakemore’s The Glutton, respectively – has entered the collective stock of historical characters drawn on to illustrate the tired axiom that ‘the past is a foreign country’. Yet, like the accused witches of early modernity, these figures evoke both fascination and unease. They trouble our sense of sameness and difference, the boundaries constructed between our rational, scientific present and the othered past. We struggle to envision a world where women could conceivably give birth to rabbits (or lobsters or mermaids or any of the other monsters detailed in James Paris du Plessis’s 1733 Short History of Human Prodigies, and Monstrous Births) yet can find visceral sympathy for Mary’s haunting description of her traumatic labours as causing ‘pains…like the tearing of brown paper’. Even as we seek to relegate stories of witches, wonders and monsters to an absurd and irrational past, we’re drawn to retelling and retelling them.

This isn’t new, though. A similar impulse to distance the episode and treat it as a final exemplar of a dark and ignorant past also possessed the first readers of the Toft case. In 1726, Mary was fresh meat flung into the foment of a nascent public sphere where medical matters were the subject of intensive public interest. The theory of maternal imagination, which explained birth defects as the result of the mother’s strong impressions or longings, and which was cited by both Mary and her doctors as explanation for the rabbit births (Mary had chased a rabbit prior to her miscarriage), was coming under scrutiny, as were miraculous and diabolic phenomena. As the historian Lisa Cody suggests, Toft’s case was immediately used as an ‘example of England’s former credulity, a remnant of a not-quite enlightened nation in embryo’, not least by Voltaire. The satirist William Hogarth included a romanticised image of Mary as a swooning maiden, her skirts suggestively lifted to release a flock of fluffy bunnies, in his 1762 print ‘Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism’, which mocked popular and religious beliefs in demons, witches and miracles. Hogarth had previously depicted Mary, at the height of public interest, in a scurrilous rendering of her bedchamber sardonically titled ‘Cunicularii or The Wise men of Godliman in Consultation’.

In both these images, created thirty years apart, Mary is an emblem of the fading ‘dark ages’, but she is also a performer, a fraud, drawing the observers into a ludicrous world of lay gullibility and feminine excess. She is a wilful, active agent in the hoax, yet little more than a sexualised female body, swooning and exposed, who bears minimal resemblance to first-hand descriptions of Toft. ‘Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism’ might have been intended as a satirical critique, yet it also served to titillate and scandalise, and provided a ‘who’s who’ of recent preternatural causes célèbres, like a kind of wondrous Where’s Wally?.

Hogarth’s image has come to define popular understandings of the pre-Enlightenment past – as, of course, has the very term ‘Enlightenment’ itself, with its implication of sudden illumination and the expelling of shadows. We gasp and scoff, yet like Hogarth’s original audience, we can’t get enough. Modern Western society may no longer label birth defects or miscarriages as ‘monstrous births’, but the concept of the monstrous remains powerful – and problematic. Nowhere is this more apparent than TikTok and Instagram Reels.

If the early modern era had the wonder book and the cabinet of curiosities, and modernity had the freak show, post-modernity has bite-sized, hash-tagged content – a social media landscape driven by sensationalism and monetised views.

I first encountered Mary Toft in academic scholarship, but I quickly began to notice her everywhere, particularly in TikToks and Reels that could be loosely labelled as ‘popular history’. After scrolling through a few, I was struck not only by their deep inaccuracy – in contrast to the work of historians like Harvey and Cody – but by their ironic reproduction of eighteenth-century reactions. Even as they cast the premodern era as one of irrational darkness and monstrous grotesquerie, they reproduced the very same fascination and spectacle.

There’s something deeply uncanny about these AI renderings, where historical figures purportedly ‘speak for themselves’.

One commentator, who goes by @hesoswag, describes Mary as one of the ‘most interesting and disturbing individuals in human history’ and calls the rabbit hoax a ‘desperate attempt to gain fame and fortune’. His video is tagged #weirdhistory #creepypasta and, ironically, #LearnOnTikTok. Daisy Foko, whose video has 1.1 million likes, begins her narration with ‘this lady was actually bullshit’ and ‘here’s what actually happened’. What ‘actually happened’, apparently, is that a hungry Mary was devastated that she had to share her rabbit soup with her children, leading her to find a rabbit warren and dismember the babies inside, before inserting them into her vagina. According to Foko, she must have been suffering ‘psychosis’, but we can’t know because ‘it’s not like we can study her’. I’d be delighted to introduce Foko to the discipline of history sometime, but she seems to believe she already knows what that is, given her liberal use of hashtags #grosshistory #weirdhistorylesson #disturbingfacts #historytime and #historybuff. The one-minute tale she tells is very far from Harvey’s humanising efforts in The Impostress Rabbit Breeder, where Mary’s story is that of an unfortunate young woman caught in the rabbit-trap of pain and power. Even videos like that by @archthot, which depicts a woman crying and singing Paris Paloma’s feminist anthem ‘Labour’ beneath the text ‘Mary Toft when she’s SA’d…but is remembered in history as a scammer and not a victim’ implicitly centre the creator’s reaction rather than Toft herself, and apply a twenty-first century filter to the context in which she lived. As Harvey writes, Mary was ‘neither a scheming deviant, a feisty example of glamorous early-eighteenth century “girl power”, and even less a proto feminist’. You wouldn’t know that from TikTok, though.

I find these videos incredibly upsetting to watch. They’re sensationalist in the same way as a true crime podcast, leering into the salacious detail while papering over the story’s complexities and ambiguities. Much like the way true crime treats its victims, these reductive ‘weird histories’ transform Toft into a character and deploy her to shock. One video, by creator Heidi Wong, pastes a sentence summary of the case over a video of Heidi gasping in horror, and is tagged #truecrime #scarystories #history. I’m struck by the way this content combines the same sneering tone and sensual appeal as Hogarth’s prints, displaying an appetite for the weird and grotesque that once again unites purportedly rational twenty-first century viewers with Mary’s first observers, those who greedily consumed the spectacle of her suffering body or depicted her as the mastermind of a sick hoax. In Mary and the Rabbit Dream, doctors sit like children ‘waiting for the Easter Bunny to appear’ and a wealthy gentleman demands ‘to see the rabbit birth’ as ‘a private show’. Today, comments on videos about Toft call her ‘sick’, ‘disgusting’, ‘scary’, while begging for more information about the gory physical particulars.

And it isn’t just Mary Toft. Like Hogarth in ‘Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism’, today’s TikTok ‘historians’ stitch together bitesized narratives drawn from millennia of human history. Homogenising the past as ‘weird’, ‘strange’ and ‘scary’, these compilations focus on what microhistorians call the ‘normal exception’, yet without the necessary analysis of the contexts from which such remarkable stories arose. Often using AI to generate images and videos of their subjects telling their stories, the immersive, eye-catching nature of these compilations conceals their highly reductive content. There’s something deeply uncanny about these AI renderings, where historical figures purportedly ‘speak for themselves’ yet are as distorted as Hogarth’s image of Mary as a swooning maiden, the dismembered rabbit parts, complete with jagged bones, teeth and claws, as frolicking fluffy bunnies. I’m reminded of the recent debate over the ‘Living Museum’ website, which enables visitors to ‘chat to artefacts’ in the British Museum collections using AI. These projects might introduce people to new topics and understudied histories, but in a time of funding cuts and ‘culture wars’ against the humanities, they also indicate a worrying trend towards a populist, post-fact ‘history-lite’, an education-as-entertainment designed to serve declining attention spans and the market for online ‘slop’ rather than any real interest in the past.

The late Hilary Mantel wrote that ‘The writer of history [whether novelist or historian] is a walking anachronism, a displaced person, using today’s techniques to try to know things about yesterday that yesterday didn’t know itself. He must try to work authentically, hearing the words of the past, but communicating in a language the present understands.’ History and historical fiction are both disciplines involving a command of what Mantel calls ‘stories’ and ‘skills’. The orientation to the past evident in ‘weird histories’, salacious TikTok compilations and AI-renderings displays little command of either. Like the satirists, pamphleteers and readers who anatomised Mary’s still-living body, they present curiosities without stories, suggestions without skill. To an optimist, these micro-histories might act as a gateway drug to history. More often they’re just a drug. Easy, addictive, they invite us to look rather than think, to view rather than read, to gaze upon the past as upon a cabinet of curiosities.

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Helena C. Aeberli is a writer and researcher from London. She is currently working on a PhD on early modern eating disorders at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Her essays, reviews and short stories have appeared in the LARB, Oxford Review of Books, Lunate Journal, Atmospheric Quarterly, Necessary Fiction and Leon Literary Review, among others. Her pamphlet, Sea Glass(es), is published by Tallfinger Press, and her short story, ‘Reflection’, was nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize. She writes the Substack Twenty-First Century Demoniac, which takes a closer look at what we’re missing when we get stuck in a doomscroll.

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