Queen anne

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

Researching the seditious literature of earlier periods is seldom suspenseful, pulse-quickening work. For every thrill of archival discovery, there are countless hours of slow, methodical, sometimes crushingly unproductive labour aimed at uncovering the individuals and agencies behind books that, as clandestine productions, were primarily designed not to surrender such secrets. The underground networks behind dissident pamphlets in 17th- or 18th-century England, for example, frequently hid their own involvement by withholding the names of authors, printers and places of publication from their title pages, leaving puzzling blanks or laughable fictions in their stead. While contemporary press licensers had battalions of beagles, book-trade informants and the disciplinary machinery of the state to