The Velveteen Rabbit

The Velveteen Rabbit

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery
Williams, Illustrated by William Nicholson
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Title: The Velveteen Rabbit
Author: Margery Williams
Release Date: March 29, 2004 [eBook #11757]
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
VELVETEEN RABBIT***

This eBook is courtesy of the Celebration of Women Writers, online at
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/.
The Velveteen Rabbit
OR HOW TOYS BECOME REAL

by Margery Williams
Illustrations by William Nicholson
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. Garden City New York
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To Francesco Bianco from The Velveteen Rabbit
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List of Illustrations
Christmas Morning
The Skin Horse Tells His Story
Spring Time
Summer Days
Anxious Times
The Fairy Flower
At Last! At Last!
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HERE was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really
splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was
spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were
lined with pink sateen. On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in
the top of the Boy's stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws,
the effect was charming.
There were other things in the stocking, nuts and oranges and a toy
engine, and chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse, but the Rabbit

was quite the best of all. For at least two hours the Boy loved him, and
then Aunts and Uncles came to dinner, and there was a great rustling of
tissue paper and unwrapping of parcels, and in the excitement of
looking at all the new presents the Velveteen Rabbit was forgotten.
Christmas Morning
For a long time he lived in the toy cupboard or on the nursery floor, and
no one thought very much about him. He was naturally shy, and being
only made of velveteen, some of the more expensive toys quite
snubbed him. The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked
down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and
pretended they were real. The model boat, who had lived through two
seasons and lost most of his paint, caught the tone from them and never
missed an opportunity of referring to his rigging in technical terms. The
Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn't know
that real rabbits existed; he thought they were all stuffed with sawdust
like himself, and he understood that sawdust was quite out-of-date and
should never be mentioned in modern circles. Even Timothy, the
jointed wooden lion, who was made by the disabled soldiers, and
should have had broader views, put on airs and pretended he was
connected with Government. Between them all the poor little Rabbit
was made to feel himself very insignificant and commonplace, and the
only person who was kind to him at all was the Skin Horse.
The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others.
He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the
seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out
to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long
succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and
by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that
they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For
nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings
that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand
all about it.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side
by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room.

"Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out
handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that
happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just
to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When
you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by
bit?"
"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