The Velveteen Rabbit Was Always More Than a Children's Book

Written for a daughter who was growing up too fast, Margery Williams Bianco's hundred-year-old story is a memorial to what we all lose in exchange for adulthood.

- Andrea Long Chu

YOU PROBABLY remember it. But if you don't, it goes like this. A little boy receives a stuffed rabbit for Christmas. From a wise old toy, the rabbit learns that when a child loves you for a long time, you become Real, and the rabbit yearns to be Real himself. Eventually, he gets his wish: The boy plays with him all spring and summer, and the rabbit doesn't mind that his coat has grown shabby and his stuffing is coming out because he knows he is Real to the boy. But when the boy gets sick with scarlet fever, the doctor orders the rabbit to be burned alongside the other germ-ridden playthings. Shivering on the trash heap, the little rabbit wonders what it all was for. He cries a tear-a real tear-and from the fallen tear there grows a flower, and out of the flower steps a beautiful fairy and the fairy transforms him into a real rabbit at last.

This is the plot of that beloved classic of children's literature The Velveteen Rabbit. First published in book form in 1922 by a little-known novelist named Margery Williams Bianco, it has now been in print for a century, selling over a million copies in the U.S. alone. Dozens of illustrators have reimagined it, including Maurice Sendak three years before Where the Wild Things Are. It is frequently adapted for the stage, and Meryl Streep received a Grammy nomination in 1986 for a recording of it she made with the pianist George Winston. This year, Doubleday released a 100th-anniversary edition with stunning new art by award-winning illustrator Erin Stead. All the while, it has remained a humble bedtime story across the English-speaking world. Perhaps you read it when you were small; perhaps you have read it to someone smaller.