The Velveteen Rabbit: A Little Book About What Makes Us Real

A Little Book About What Makes Us Real

There are children’s books we remember because we loved the pictures. Others because someone we loved read them to us. And then there are the rare stories that somehow stay with us long after childhood is over.

The Velveteen Rabbit is one of those books.

Margery Williams’s story first appeared in book form in 1922, with illustrations by the celebrated British artist William Nicholson. More than a century later, its central idea remains as affecting as ever: that we become real through being loved.

The story begins with a toy rabbit given to a little boy at Christmas. At first the Rabbit is splendid and new, but he soon discovers that being new is not the same thing as being important. In the nursery he meets the old Skin Horse, who understands something the younger toys do not: becoming “Real” has very little to do with how beautiful or perfect something looks.

It happens through love.

That simple idea gives this little story extraordinary power.

The Rabbit is eventually loved so thoroughly that his fur grows shabby, his shape changes and much of his original newness disappears. Yet in the world Margery Williams created, those signs of wear are not losses at all. They are evidence that something has been treasured.

And perhaps that is one reason The Velveteen Rabbit feels especially meaningful now.

We live in a world that is very good at celebrating what is newest, fastest and most perfect. This story quietly makes the opposite argument. It reminds us that the things — and people — we love most deeply are often changed by that love. They acquire history. They become irreplaceable.

Williams herself spoke affectionately about old toys and the way they become part of family life, acquiring personalities almost like people. That understanding sits at the heart of the story.

There is sadness here, too. The Velveteen Rabbit never talks down to children or pretends that loving something means never losing it. The story touches on illness, separation and change, but does so with enormous tenderness. That mixture of happiness and heartbreak is precisely what gives the book its staying power.

Children hear an enchanting story about a rabbit.

Adults hear something more.

We hear about loving something enough to make it matter. About the passage of time. About childhood slipping away. About the strange alchemy by which an ordinary object can become priceless simply because of the memories attached to it.

And perhaps we remember a stuffed animal of our own — the one with the worn ear, the missing button, or the fur rubbed smooth from years of being carried everywhere.

That is why this is such a wonderful book to give a child. It isn't merely something lovely for the nursery shelf. It is a story a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle or godparent can read aloud now, knowing that some part of it may remain with that child for the rest of his or her life.

At Clever Girl, those are exactly the children's books we want to keep finding: the ones that deserve to be read rather than simply displayed, passed from one child to another, and remembered years after the nursery itself is gone.

The Velveteen Rabbit is more than 100 years old.

It still knows something important about love.

And that hasn't aged a day.

The Original Velveteen Rabbit
by Margery Williams
with the original art of William Nicholson

Available in the Children’s Books collection at Clever Girl.