The Velveteen Rabbit
Margery Williams Bianco (1881–1944), 1922
A toy rabbit is loved into reality, worn thin by affection and nearly thrown away — a small book about what love does to the thing that is loved. The telling is tender and lyrical, with a melancholy undertow and a childlike sense of wonder.
Feels like tenderness, melancholy and wonder. About love, memory and time.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy gentle stories about toys, memory, and affection, especially when read aloud. Be aware that the 1922 prose has an old-fashioned nursery cadence, and the rabbit's shabby near-throwing-away may be sad for very young or sensitive listeners.
Why read it
It offers a short, clear-eyed look at how affection changes both the one who loves and the one who is loved, without smoothing over the wear.
Pages from the book
What it costs to become real, told by someone who has already paid.
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” Being loved is a kind of wear, and the wear is the point.
Weeks passed, and the little Rabbit grew very old and shabby, but the Boy loved him just as much. He loved him so hard that he loved all his whiskers off, and the pink lining to his ears turned grey, and his brown spots faded. He even began to lose his shape, and he scarcely looked like a rabbit any more, except to the Boy. To him he was always beautiful, and that was all that the little Rabbit cared about. He didn’t mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn’t matter. How a familiar garden turns strange when you are the one outside it.
And while the Boy was asleep, dreaming of the seaside, the little Rabbit lay among the old picture-books in the corner behind the fowl-house, and he felt very lonely. The sack had been left untied, and so by wriggling a bit he was able to get his head through the opening and look out. He was shivering a little, for he had always been used to sleeping in a proper bed, and by this time his coat had worn so thin and threadbare from hugging that it was no longer any protection to him. Near by he could see the thicket of raspberry canes, growing tall and close like a tropical jungle, in whose shadow he had played with the Boy on bygone mornings. He thought of those long sunlit hours in the garden-how happy they were-and a great sadness came over him. Margery Williams Bianco.Its 1922 first edition was illustrated by William Nicholson, a British painter and woodcut artist whose bold, flat prints had already made him famous.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Velveteen Rabbit for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy gentle stories about toys, memory, and affection, especially when read aloud. Be aware that the 1922 prose has an old-fashioned nursery cadence, and the rabbit's shabby near-throwing-away may be sad for very young or sensitive listeners.
- What is The Velveteen Rabbit like?
- The telling is tender and lyrical, with a melancholy undertow and a childlike sense of wonder. Feels like tenderness, melancholy and wonder. About love, memory and time.
- What should I read after The Velveteen Rabbit?
- If you liked The Velveteen Rabbit, try The Darling and Other Stories (Anton Chekhov), The Happy Prince, and Other Tales (Oscar Wilde) and Short Fiction (Thomas Hardy).
A taste of the feed
A lifetime of milking, written into a woman's forehead.
Her monotonous milking at the dairy was resumed, and followed for many long years, till her form became bent, and her once abundant dark hair white and worn away at the forehead—perhaps by long pressure against the cows. Here, sometimes, those who knew her experiences would stand and observe her, and wonder what sombre thoughts were beating inside that impassive, wrinkled brow, to the rhythm of the alternating milk-streams.
Short Fiction · Thomas Hardy
The thing first love promises that it cannot deliver.
Whether he kissed her once or several times he could not afterward remember, though it must have been an hour that they sat there close together and he held her hand. What surprised him most about making love was that it seemed to have no element of wild passion—regret, desire, despair—but a delirious promise of such happiness in the world, in living, as he had never known. First love—this was only first love! What must love itself in its fullness, its perfection be. He did not know that what he was experiencing then, that unreal, undesirous medley of ecstasy and peace, would be unrecapturable forever.
Short Fiction · F. Scott Fitzgerald
To feel young and ancient at once, and find the day dangerous.
She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
Mrs. Dalloway · Virginia Woolf
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