MARKET-HOUSE, GODALMING.
But Godalming was a place notorious in the eighteenth century as the scene of one of the most impudent frauds ever practised upon the credulity of mankind. There have been those who have said that such trickery as that to which Mary Tofts, the “rabbit-breeder” of Godalming, lent herself, would meet with no success in so enlightened an age as this; but in so saying those folk have done a little less than justice to the eighteenth century, and have been particularly lenient to the nineteenth, which has proved itself, in the matter of Mahatmas, at least as credulous as by-gone ages were.
MARY TOFTS
The story of Mary Tofts, if not edifying, is at least interesting. She was the wife of Joshua Tofts, a poor journeyman cloth-worker of this little town, and was described as of “a healthy, strong constitution, small size, fair complexion, a very stupid and sullen temper, and unable to write or read.” Stupid or not, she possessed sufficient cunning to maintain her fraud for some time, and even to delude some eminent surgeons of the day into a firm belief in her pretended births of rabbits. For this was the preposterous nature of the imposition, and she claimed to have given birth to no less than eighteen of them. She attempted to account for this remarkable progeny by recounting how, “when she was weeding a field, she saw a rabbit spring up near her, after which she ran, with another woman that was at work just by her: this set her a-longing for rabbits.... Soon after, another rabbit sprang up near the same place, which she likewise endeavoured to catch. The same night she dreamt that she was in a field with those two rabbits in her lap, and awoke with a sick fit, which lasted till morning; from that time, for above three months, she had a constant and strong desire to eat rabbits, but being very poor and indigent, could not procure any.” A Mr. Howard, a medical man of Guildford, who claimed to have assisted Mary Tofts in giving birth to eighteen rabbits, seems, from the voluminous literature on this subject, to have been something of a party to the cheat; and even if we did not find him a guilty accomplice, there would remain the scarce more flattering designation of egregious dupe. But Mr. Howard, dupe or rogue, was extremely busy in publishing to the world the particulars of this extraordinary case. The woman was brought over from Godalming to Guildford, so that she might be under his more immediate care, and he wrote a letter to Dr. St. André, George I.’s surgeon and anatomist, asking him to come and satisfy himself of the truth of this marvel. St. André went to Guildford post-haste, and returned to London afterwards with portions of these miraculous rabbits, and with so firm a belief in the story that he wrote and published a pamphlet setting forth full details of these wonders—the first of a long series of tracts, serious and humorous, for and against the good faith of this story.
Public attention was now roused in the most extraordinary degree, and the subject of Mary Tofts and her rabbits was in every one’s mouth. The caricaturists took the matter up, and Hogarth has left two engravings referring to it: a small plate entitled “Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godliman,” and another, a very large and most elaborate print, full of symbolism and cryptic allusions, entitled “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism.”
Even the clergymen of the time rushed into the fray, and one went so far as to assert that Mary Tofts was the fulfilment of a prophecy in Esdras.
MARY TOFTS.