ABSTRACT
As the narrator of Mathilde Sandras’s Snowdrop; or, The Adventures of a White Rabbit (1873) expresses, rabbits were presumed dimwitted “because, ordinarily, we remain motionless, and with eyes fixed.” The broader context of how rabbits were variously represented in nineteenth-century children’s literature reveals a particular case of categorical fluidity. The anthrozoologist Hal Herzog has described how we have classified animals as either those we love, hate, or eat, but in the case of rabbits, the Victorians seemed to consider the rabbit as equally available for any such use—seemingly as likely to be a pet as to be pie. Looking at and beyond the canonical tales of Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter, readers find in children’s periodicals and now forgotten rabbit stories that rabbits were represented as both the sweetest pets and the sweetest flesh. To consider the inconsistencies of Victorian attitudes toward a single species, the rabbit, is to consider the power of children’s literature to legitimize even the most glaring discursive contradictions in our treatment of nonhuman Others.
