Growing up in Surrey I had heard of Mary Toft of Godalming, a poor woman who, in 1726, was seen to give birth to a quantity of rabbits. In a region in thrall to London, where authentic local history, folklore and culture felt thin on the ground, her story often cropped up in county guides.
In 2020 historian Karen Harvey brought together an enormous amount of research in The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England, to try to understand why the hoax was perpetuated, how it came to capture the public’s imagination and what effect its exposure had – particularly on the medical establishment at the time. It is this book that forms the foundation of Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s imaginative retelling.
