File:The Surrey-Wonder (BM 1868,0808.3518).jpg
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Captions
Captions
Summary edit
The Surrey-Wonder
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| Artist |
Print made by: James Vertue
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| Title |
The Surrey-Wonder |
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| Description |
English: Satire on Mary Toft, the "rabbit breeder" and those who were duped by her fraud. The interior of a large room, presumably intended as Lacy's bagnio in Leicester Fields, in the centre of which Toft reclines on a chair attended by a doctor, John Howard, while a gentleman identified by Stephens as Nathaniel St André, wearing a hat, has laid down a walking stick and kneels to lift a rabbit that is emerging from below her skirts. On the left, three men enter through an open door, the foremost, evidently John Maubray, holding up a specimen bottle and grasping by the shoulder another doctor, who points towards Toft; another holding a staff aplpears to be a constable. Other men (one perhaps intended as her husband) gather behind Toft's chair; Samuel Molyneux, wearing a hat and holding a walking stick turns away in disgust as a midwife holds up a "new-born" rabbit. On a table in the background lie a hat, ink stand and specimens of Toft's rabbits; the walls are hung with five paintings and a large map of Surrey. State before key letters and violin added. 1726
Etching |
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| Depicted people | Representation of: Mary Toft | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date | 1726 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Medium | paper | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dimensions |
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| Collection |
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| Current location |
Prints and Drawings |
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| Accession number |
1868,0808.3518 |
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| Notes |
The print was inspired by a topical 'rabbit scene' introduced into 'The Necromancer', a popular pantomime produced at the Lincoln's Inn Theatre. It was advertised in the Daily Journal, 23 December 1726; Mary Toft had confessed on 7th that she had lied in claiming to have given birth to a series of rabbits. Howard (the Guildford doctor who first brought Toft to public attention), Maubray (whose recent book, "The Female Physician" gave some medical credence to the story with a discussion of the birth of "sooterkins", small furry creatures, to women in the Netherlands) and Molyneux (secretary to the Prince of Wales, the future George II, and one of the first to visit Toft) are identified by their initials which appear in the second state. The man kneeling beside Toft is identified by Hawkins as St André (surgeon to George I and friend to Molyneux) but he is dressed in exactly the same way as Molyneux and may be intended as another view of the latter. According to Stephens, the original drawing by George Vertue is in the Gough collection at the Bodleian Library. He attributed the print to James Vertue on the basis of a ballad entitled "St André's Miscarriage" which contains the following stanza: "He dissected, compar'd, and distinguish'd likewise/The make of these rabbits, their growth and their size./He preserv'd them in spriits, and - a little too late/Preserv'd (Vertue sculpsit) a neat copper-plate." Stephens also records that Frederick, Prince of Wales, was identified by George Steevens as one of the gentlemen in the print, but this cannot be the case as the prince did not arrive in England until two years later. Stephens notes that in 1817 the copper-plate was in the possession of Robert Wilkinson. |
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| Source/Photographer | https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1868-0808-3518 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Permission (Reusing this file) |
© The Trustees of the British Museum, released as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Licensing edit
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| Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
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| current | 12:08, 9 May 2020 | | 1,600 × 1,550 (816 KB) | Copyfraud (talk | contribs) | British Museum public domain uploads (Copyfraud/BM) Satirical prints in the British Museum 1726 #2,510/12,043 |
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