A Wonder from Godalming

In November 1726, a royal surgeon examined rabbit remains said to have come from a Surrey woman. Mary Toft’s supposed births were a deception, but the investigation left a harder question: who controlled what happened to her body?¹⁵

A wonder from Godalming

The first specimens did not resemble a cleanly delivered litter. In Nathaniel St André’s published account, the early creature combined features that looked like a cat with the head and one paw of a rabbit. Other deliveries arrived in pieces: feet, internal organs, sections of bodies, skins and heads. The material could be collected, preserved and examined. It was the explanation attached to these objects that made them extraordinary.¹

Toft lived in Godalming, near Guildford, with her husband Joshua, a journeyman clothworker. The local museum records her baptism on 21 February 1703 and her marriage around 1720. This places her among the young working families of the town, far from the court that would soon take an interest. The surviving record contains a miscarriage before the rabbit affair, rather than a straightforward pregnancy which suddenly produced an unexpected species.²

Her explanation reached the doctors through questions and retellings. St André reported that on 23 April she had been weeding when a rabbit sprang up nearby. She and another woman chased it unsuccessfully; a second escaped too. That night, she said, she dreamt of rabbits. A persistent craving followed, but she could not afford to satisfy it. Her desire for food supplied the beginnings of an explanation for what later appeared to come from her body.¹

In the same account, bleeding and abdominal pain led to a miscarriage, followed by further bleeding some weeks later. On 27 September, Toft reportedly sent for her mother-in-law, Ann, described as a midwife. Material thought to be animal organs was taken to John Howard, a surgeon practising in Guildford. St André presented this sequence as the history given to him. It matters that the story was already being organised around an earlier craving before he personally examined anything.¹

Howard’s involvement gave the household events an audience beyond their neighbours. His letters, reproduced by St André, described successive rabbits and movements which he interpreted as another animal struggling inside Toft. One letter of 9 November invited a suitably curious visitor to come promptly and remove a specimen personally. Howard had moved Toft to Guildford for convenience. He was offering access to a continuing phenomenon, with his own professional standing behind the invitation.¹

That invitation made the case unusually persuasive. A reader was not simply being asked to believe a tale from somewhere else. He could apparently travel to the woman, examine her and take part in the next delivery. The offer shifted attention towards the moment of removal. It encouraged a visitor to treat an object brought out under his own hand as stronger evidence than an object first presented by a relative.

The proposed explanation was maternal impression: the idea that a pregnant woman’s powerful experiences or desires could shape her unborn child. Dennis Todd’s account of the case places this belief within wider arguments about imagination and the boundary between mind and body. The rabbit story therefore arrived with a conceptual home. To its supporters, the craving and the animal remains belonged to the same chain of events, rather than being unrelated curiosities.¹⁰

That theory also placed an unusual burden on Toft’s account of herself. Her thoughts were being offered as the mechanism, while other people handled the supposed results. The doctors could ask her to repeat the field encounter and then turn back to the specimens. Their curiosity would take the rabbits to the King, while the woman who supposedly produced them remained available for another examination.

Specimens for His Majesty

St André travelled to Guildford with Samuel Molyneux, secretary to the Prince of Wales, on 15 November. His narrative records their arrival at about half past two and Howard’s announcement that Toft was in labour with a fifteenth rabbit. They found her sitting beside a bed with several women nearby. St André examined her, waited for further pains and then removed the skinned trunk of a rabbit, with heart, lungs and diaphragm attached.¹

He tested a piece of lung in water. It was slightly lighter than the water and rose slowly after Molyneux pushed it down. The organ was small and dark; the heart had an opening which St André associated with foetal life. He also examined Toft and proposed that the rabbits had developed in her fallopian tubes, entering the womb only as the movements and pains began. He was making an anatomical argument, however mistaken, rather than merely pronouncing a miracle.¹

The visit included intervals when the men were elsewhere. During one absence, a nurse removed the lower part of an animal, which they judged to fit the trunk already extracted. Later, St André described personally removing a rolled skin and then a head. His emphasis fell repeatedly on the care of his observation: who touched Toft, where he stood and whether he had moved away. The narrative was designed to close off opportunities for deception.¹

Yet its central inference ran ahead of what the examination could establish. An animal part can be inside a person without having grown there. Removing it may establish its location at that moment, but says nothing by itself about how it arrived. St André treated the extraction and the alleged development as though they supported one another. The stronger his conviction that he had witnessed the former, the harder he found it to abandon the latter.

He examined the preserved remains in detail, recording bones, teeth, fur and organs, and compared them with ordinary rabbits. He took differences in their internal structures as support for an unusual origin. According to his own account, specimens were demonstrated before George I on 26 November. The claim had passed from a working household into a royal setting through a chain of objects, letters and personal examinations.¹

Molyneux’s certificate, printed with the narrative, was more reserved than a blanket endorsement. He said that the account agreed in its material circumstances with his own record and that he had noticed no circumstance of fraud during the visit. He expressly left open whether the animals were unnaturally produced or whether deception was possible. The qualification survives beside St André’s much stronger confidence. The two men did not put their names to precisely the same conclusion.¹

This is one reason the affair resists the familiar picture of a whole medical establishment believing in rabbit births. Being present, agreeing that an object was removed and accepting its supposed biological origin were different positions. Later satire would flatten them into a single scene of foolish doctors. The original narrative itself preserves a more awkward arrangement: close observation, strong conviction and formal reservation could occupy the same pages.

St André signed his narrative on 28 November, before the London investigation reached its conclusion. It would appear in print before Toft’s confession, although surviving copies also bear the date of the following year. His confidence had acquired a public form which could be quoted back at him. Another royal surgeon was already preparing an account that challenged both the evidence and the version of his own behaviour circulating among the believers.¹¹⁹

The surgeon who played along

Cyriacus Ahlers visited on 20 November. In his subsequent pamphlet, he described obstacles to an independent examination almost from the beginning. His companion was excluded from Toft’s room, ostensibly because too much company might frighten her, although other women continued to enter and leave. Howard controlled when Ahlers could examine her. The surgeon’s account concentrated on those arrangements, as well as the animal material: the conditions of observation were themselves part of the evidence.³

Ahlers removed the hind part of a rabbit, but said Howard refused his request to examine further for what remained. He described Howard placing himself close to Toft and limiting what another observer could see. Those claims do not automatically establish Howard’s complicity. They show why Ahlers said he had become suspicious, and why the invitation to witness a delivery was less open than it first appeared.³

He nevertheless behaved as though satisfied. This became the centre of a fierce dispute. St André printed sworn statements from people who said Ahlers had expressed belief, given Toft money and spoken of a royal pension. Ahlers replied that he had deliberately concealed his doubts. He acknowledged adopting the manner of a convinced visitor, while disputing the words attributed to him. Agreement in the room could therefore be presented as either sincere assent or investigative disguise.¹³

The specimens supplied those objections. Ahlers described broken bones and several places where a sharp instrument appeared to have cut the animal. He also examined hard pellets from a rabbit’s intestine and reported pieces of hay, straw and corn. These were awkward findings for an animal said to have developed within a human body. They pointed towards an ordinary rabbit that had lived and fed elsewhere, then been cut into parts.³

The food traces and cutting marks addressed a different question from St André’s comparisons of small organs. They offered a material history of the specimen before its removal from Toft. Ahlers did not need to explain every movement of her abdomen in order to challenge the rabbit’s supposed origin. Nor did he need to deny that a doctor had extracted it. The same object could support the observation and defeat the explanation.

In a postscript, Ahlers also challenged the authority claimed for the demonstration at court. He reported that Dr Steigerthal, present at that demonstration, had remained suspicious and had not found the comparative anatomy satisfactory. Once again, attendance was being stretched into endorsement. Ahlers’s objection concerned the use made of another man’s presence as much as the contents of the jars.³

The investigation was still not over. Toft would be brought to London, where the arrangements for watching her could be tightened. The case was moving towards an apparently decisive test: would the phenomenon continue when the doctors controlled her surroundings? That change would expose a supply of rabbits, but it would also give the investigators much greater power over the woman at the centre of the claim.

Watching the rabbit woman

Sir Richard Manningham’s diary began with his summons to Guildford at the end of November. He examined Toft, felt abdominal movements and later removed a membrane which looked and smelt to him like a piece of a pig’s bladder. A comparison bladder was produced from the house. Manningham said he did not believe the membrane had come from the womb. St André answered by returning to his confidence in the rabbits he had already removed.⁴

Manningham recorded an argument among the men, followed by his agreement to withhold a public announcement while the case continued. He gave investigation as his reason: a premature alarm might obstruct discovery. This is an important distinction between his suspicions and his conduct. Remaining involved did not mean accepting the rabbit births, but it did allow the spectacle to continue under professional supervision. His later diary also served to explain why he had waited.⁴

On 29 November, Toft was brought to Roger Lacy’s bagnio in Leicester Fields, London. A bagnio was a bath-house; this one also provided the accommodation in which she was observed. Manningham sat up with her through the night. His entries describe repeated examinations, apparent labour pains and fits over the following days. The woman was becoming an object of sustained attention, although no further rabbit settled the question for the watching doctors.⁴

Meanwhile, witnesses in Surrey were describing ordinary purchases. The published depositions taken before Lord Onslow on 3 and 4 December include several sellers who said Joshua Toft had bought young rabbits. Edward Costen said a dead one would have suited Joshua as well as a live one. Richard Stedman recalled a request for secrecy; John Sweetapple described rabbits bought after Mary’s move to Guildford. These statements gave investigators a route to follow outside the examination room.¹⁵

Such purchases were not, by themselves, proof of how every animal part had been used. Rabbits were also food. But Elizabeth Mason, at whose house Toft had lodged, said none had been prepared there for her to eat. Mary Costen, her nurse, likewise said she had seen no rabbits supplied as meals during that period. Their evidence made the explanation of a normal household appetite harder to sustain, without identifying who had inserted each specimen.¹⁵

In London, a porter brought the supply question directly to the doctors. Manningham records that Thomas Howard, a servant at the bagnio, gave information before the magistrate Sir Thomas Clarges on 4 December about a rabbit procured secretly for Toft. The woman attending her acknowledged obtaining it but said it had been intended for eating. Mary eventually admitted requesting it on that basis too. The same defence now had to answer a specific transaction in the place where she was being watched.⁴

Manningham still resisted sending her straight to prison. He thought something might remain to be delivered and wanted the suspected deception demonstrated as fully as possible. In a letter reproduced in his diary, he argued for keeping her under strict observation in a private house where medical men could continue to have access. His concern about premature removal preserved the investigation, while also preserving their ability to examine her.⁴

By this point, the scrutiny had changed character. A rural medical wonder had become a suspected offence under a magistrate’s authority. The watchers were seeking an account of how the deception worked, rather than another specimen to admire. Toft’s own explanation was about to become the principal object they wanted from her, and the means of obtaining it would be recorded by one of the men applying the pressure.

Confession under threat

On 6 December, according to Manningham, Clarges threatened Toft severely. Manningham followed with a proposal of his own. He told her he believed she was an impostor and suggested that her anatomy must differ from other women’s if she could deceive them in this way. He announced that he was prepared to perform a painful experiment. Confession, on the other hand, would bring his promise to ask influential people to assist her.⁴

The diary makes the conditional offer explicit: tell the whole story or face the procedure. Toft asked to be left until morning. On 7 December, in the presence of Manningham, James Douglas, the Duke of Montagu and Lord Baltimore, she began to confess. This is evidence of a threatened operation, rather than evidence that the operation was carried out. It also establishes the pressure under which the resulting account was given.⁴

Manningham’s summary explained the mechanism as the insertion and subsequent removal of animal parts. That admission made sense of what the doctors had handled without requiring animals to develop inside her. It did not require all the bodily symptoms to have been invented. Later in the same pamphlet, Manningham accepted that some movements were involuntary, saying he had observed them during sleep and after the fraud had been admitted.⁴

The statement did not become a single, settled confession. Douglas recorded further accounts on 8 and 12 December. In Dennis Todd’s transcription, the first attributes the scheme to an unidentified travelling woman associated with a knife-grinder. The second withdraws that woman and implicates Ann Toft and Howard. The third again identifies the mother-in-law as the instigator and describes an offer of a livelihood. The person assigning responsibility changed her account while being pressed to tell the truth.⁷

The first manuscript’s opening leaf survives in Glasgow’s Douglas Papers. The date at its head is 7 December 1726, despite a mistaken September caption on the digitised image. It is an untidy page of crossed-out words, additions and a movement between Toft’s account and the recorder’s phrasing. Even without solving every word, its physical appearance undermines the idea of a composed statement calmly dictated from beginning to end.⁶

Karen Harvey’s later description of working on these papers explains why their messiness mattered. Comparing the versions, she treated interruptions and deletions as clues to the different voices within them. A polished confession can make questioner, speaker and note-taker disappear into one apparently continuous narrative. The rough documents retain signs of the process which produced the words, including the places where an account was redirected.⁸

That does not make the rough version automatically true. Toft faced punishment and had reasons to shift blame; Douglas was selecting and recording speech during questioning. A change of story may contain a disclosure, an evasion, a response to pressure, or several of those at once. The confessions establish participation in a deception much more securely than they establish a complete hierarchy of organisers and accomplices.

Whose scheme was it?

Money is the most straightforward proposed motive. The statements contain promises that the extraordinary deliveries could provide a livelihood, and the doctors’ accounts mention gifts or hopes of a pension. A person exhibited as a curiosity might attract payment. Those details make an intended income plausible. They do not establish that Toft earned a fortune, that she devised the scheme alone, or that she could freely stop what had begun.¹⁷

The bodily cost was considerable. In her study of the confessions, Harvey emphasises their repeated descriptions of pain, bleeding and the actions of female relatives and neighbours. She argues that the case should be read through the power those women could exercise within childbirth and domestic life, rather than only as an encounter between an ignorant woman and learned men. The intimate household could be a place of authority and coercion as well as assistance.⁵

This reading does not turn Ann Toft’s alleged role into a proven conviction. It changes the question being asked of Mary’s account. Who touched her, who instructed her, who could enter the room, and who had the power to describe what had happened? The same questions were relevant when Ahlers complained about the organisation of an examination. In the household, however, the power to manage appearances could belong to experienced women as well as male practitioners.

The identities of the people around Toft matter for that reason. The published depositions include a nurse and a lodging-house witness, alongside men who sold rabbits. These were people able to observe supplies, meals and family visits which the visiting surgeons did not continuously see. Mary Costen also commented on Joshua’s apparent lack of concern for his wife. That was her interpretation of his conduct, but it shows an observer considering relationships rather than just the mechanics of a delivery.¹⁵

Harvey has also proposed a broader social setting for the hoax. Her research connects the Toft family with tensions over property and access to food, including Joshua’s involvement in a fishpond trespass case earlier in 1726. She considers whether the rabbit affair might be understood in relation to local disaffection and protest. The connection is explicitly circumstantial. A record of conflict involving a family member is not an instruction from Mary explaining a political purpose.⁹

Asked directly about Toft’s goal in a later interview, Harvey said she was not convinced that Mary had a clear one. Her interpretation allows for obedience to family and neighbours, economic hopes and forms of resentment which need not have produced a single conscious plan. It is a serious alternative to the clever lone trickster. It remains a historical interpretation of incomplete evidence, rather than a new confession that can settle the old ones.¹¹

Sarah Fox’s review of Harvey’s book draws attention to divisions within the labouring community, including age, experience and status. That is a useful check on an overly simple opposition between poor women and powerful doctors. People sharing a neighbourhood or economic position did not necessarily have equal authority over one another. The rabbit affair moved between several unequal settings, with Toft’s body remaining the place on which their claims could be enacted.¹²

The explanations need not cancel each other out. An intended spectacle could exploit an existing medical belief, while family pressure sustained participation and professional rivalry prolonged investigation. What cannot responsibly be recovered is a private conversation in which all those purposes were agreed. The sources expose particular actions and competing interests. They leave the original distribution of initiative much less secure than the fact of deception itself.

Doctors in print

St André publicly retreated after the confession. An advertisement reproduced at the end of the published Surrey depositions acknowledges that his narrative had contributed to belief in an imposture. It announces his conviction that the affair was fraudulent and promises a fuller account which would distinguish innocent participants from guilty ones. Even the retraction therefore continued the argument over responsibility. Admitting the central error did not mean accepting the blame attached to it by everybody else.¹⁵

The print market offered less restrained verdicts. The Anatomist Dissected, published under the name Lemuel Gulliver, placed St André under examination in turn. Its title made the man-midwife the person brought to bed, reversing the authority of the bedside encounter. The fictional credentials invoked the kingdoms of Lilliput and Blefuscu. This was a satirical performance using the language of expertise, rather than another participant’s dependable deposition.¹⁴

William Hogarth’s Cunicularii, dated 22 December 1726 in the Wellcome catalogue, turned the affair into a crowded consultation. The print shows Toft with family members and medical visitors, each assigned a role in the joke. Its arrangement recalls the adoration of the Magi: learned men greet an extraordinary birth. The satire works by making their solemn attention ridiculous, with rabbits and medical pronouncements occupying the same theatrical space.¹³

The catalogue also identifies a significant distortion. Hogarth did not carefully separate people who accepted the births from those who doubted them; the figures become a collective display of credulity. The image was memorable precisely because it condensed the messy investigation. Read as evidence of contemporary mockery, it is powerful. Read as an accurate record of who believed what in the room, it repeats the simplification it was designed to produce.¹³

The Royal College of Surgeons’ account describes the abundance of pamphlets and songs, and the collecting of tracts about the episode. Its library holds several of them. Toft had become a subject that could be sold in different forms: an extraordinary report, a defence, an exposure or a joke. Preserving the publications together allows their arguments to be compared, but does not make their repeated anecdotes independent witnesses.¹⁷

Exposure did not instantly settle every associated medical belief either. In 1727, James Augustus Blondel published an argument against the supposed power of a mother’s imagination to mark or deform a child. His preface attacked the weight placed on inherited stories and asserted the need for anatomical reasoning. The book belongs to the contemporary dispute over the theory which had made Toft’s craving seem relevant. It was not the sudden arrival of modern embryology.¹⁸

Blondel’s propositions included ideas about generation which are themselves historical, rather than a body of knowledge that can simply be substituted for ours. His criticism is useful because it shows the theory being argued over within the period. The choice was not between believing every report and possessing a complete modern account of development. A particular fraud could be demonstrated while broader explanations of reproduction continued to change.¹⁸

For the people writing and buying these publications, the confession had supplied a new beginning. The interesting story was now the embarrassment, and its central object could be a doctor’s reputation rather than a rabbit specimen. Toft could appear everywhere in print without controlling any of those appearances. Beyond the pamphlets, the authorities were still deciding what to do with her.

After the rabbits

Toft spent months in the Westminster Bridewell, the house of correction at Tothill Fields. Contemporary newspaper extracts collected by local historian Ann Andrews describe crowds wanting to see her and restrictions on access to her room. The medical spectacle had ended, but public curiosity followed her into custody. Reports of an intended prosecution tell us what was being proposed; they do not supply a completed trial or a conviction.¹⁶

Howard also faced proceedings. A January newspaper report describes a recognizance of £800 requiring him to appear and answer an accusation. That was a bond, rather than a fine imposed as punishment for a proven offence. Later accounts have sometimes turned the amount into a verdict. Keeping the distinction restores the case’s actual uncertainty: the authorities pursued an allegation of complicity without leaving the clear explanatory judgement that a modern retelling might prefer.¹⁶

Harvey’s examination of the legal record finds an ending that remains obscure. The proceedings did not advance to a documented trial resolving everybody’s role. The difficulties included identifying an applicable offence and establishing who had done what. These are possible explanations for the case’s failure, rather than a surviving ruling that declares exactly why it ended. A confident story about the establishment quietly protecting itself goes beyond the evidence too.⁹

By April 1727, newspapers were reporting Toft’s discharge without a prosecution. She returned to Godalming. The museum records her burial there on 13 January 1763, decades after the scandal; the burial date should not be silently converted into a precisely known day of death. Her life lasted much longer than the weeks in which London demanded that she explain the rabbits.²

The archive also preserves a reminder of how quickly a supposedly conclusive ending could be invented. Glasgow’s collection includes a contemporary broadside falsely reporting her suicide in Bridewell. Its existence does not add another tragedy to her biography. It records a publisher supplying one. A printed document may be contemporary with an event and still be wrong about whether that event occurred.¹⁹

An older medical history by S. A. Seligman opened the case as an extraordinary humiliation for the profession. Later work has shifted attention towards the statements of the person whose suffering made the deception possible. That change does not rescue the biological claim. It changes whose experience is considered necessary to understanding an affair long remembered for making doctors look foolish.²⁰⁸

As of the research checked on 7 November 2026, the rabbit births remain an established hoax, while the full allocation of responsibility and motive remains uncertain. The surviving evidence supports inserted animal material, competing medical accounts, a confession obtained under threat and a prosecution that did not deliver a final explanatory verdict. It cannot supply a complete account of every conversation in the household or every decision made over Toft’s body.

The rabbits were examined, preserved and carried to court. The doctors wrote down why they had believed, doubted or waited. Mary Toft left several accounts, each shaped by the people demanding it. The hoax ended when the animals stopped being accepted as births; understanding the scandal requires following the woman after that moment, into the statements and custody which the specimens could not explain.