Georgian Britain

Every Christmas the proportion of money we spend online escalates. This year probably more than a third of all our festive gifts and food will be sourced via the internet. With this will go the usual hand-wringing about consumerism causing neighbourhoods to become clogged up with delivery vans and the death of our high street. If you think calls to boycott Amazon and entreaties to shop local are a new phenomenon, think again. In 1888, a Tunbridge Wells vicar implored his flock to support the town’s shopkeepers, for ‘the weight of goods arriving at our local stations for private people far exceeds that for the tradesmen’. He was bemoaning the

Mary Toft seems to be having something of a moment. The English 18th-century peasant who stunned society with her claim to have given birth to rabbits has been the focus of a suite of recent books, including Dexter Palmer’s Mary Toft, or the Rabbit Queen (2019) and Karen Harvey’s The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder (2020). There was even a nod to Toft in the 2018 film The Favourite. Queen Anne, played by Olivia Coleman, had 17 rabbits, one for every child she’d miscarried – a reference to Toft’s 17 ‘miraculous’ rabbit births. It’s not hard to see why Toft’s grotesque story still captivates us. In 1726, a poor young woman in