Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

In October 1726, Mary Toft, a poor woman from Surrey, gave birth to some seventeen rabbits. By early December she had been exposed as a fraud, but in the intervening months the monstrous births were the talk of London—medical, literary, political, and religious circles all buzzed over the wonder—and they continued to reverberate in the English poetic and visual imagination for years thereafter. Dennis Todd’s study unravels the tangled story of how Toft briefly held the London limelight, situates the episode within the context of early-eighteenth-century fears of enthusiasm and the diseased imagination, and explores how the theme of monstrosity resonated in the work of writers like Jonathan Swift and, especially, Alexander Pope. Although the book is written primarily for literary historians, it may interest historians of medicine on at least two counts: first, for its thickly textured reading of the cultural meanings of the imagination (especially the maternal imagination) and monstrosity in early-eighteenth-century England; and second, for its sensitive account of what it was like to be a monster in eighteenth-century England.

Todd is largely dependent on secondary sources for his account of the theory of the maternal imagination as a cause of monstrous births. The originality of his account lies, rather, in his close readings of the many satirical pamphlets written in response to the Todd affair. He argues that the magnitude and vehemence of that response can be understood only in terms of the association of Toft’s monstrous births with the threat of religious enthusiasm, both understood as products of the diseased imagination: “When Mary Toft said she was giving birth to rabbits, she invoked the power of the maternal imagination to shape the fetus, and when she invoked this power, she could not help but to invoke the power of the corporealizing imagination to shape the self, the power which manifested itself most radically as Enthusiasm” (p. 102). Read against this background, the debate over the efficacy of the maternal imagination between Daniel Turner and James Blondel (whose treatise on The Strength of Imagination in Pregnant Women Examin’d [1727] was provoked by Todd’s imposture) expands beyond issues of preformationism and mechanism to embrace worries about the sources of identity and selfhood.

The large (and growing) recent literature on monstrosity contains a great deal of material about intellectual and cultural responses to monsters, and almost nothing about the responses of the monsters themselves to their milieux. In the final chapter of his book Todd addresses the sensibility of the monster in a perceptive analysis of the public and private writings of Pope (deformed by tuberculosis of the spine) and of William Hay (born with a twisted back). Although neither Pope nor Hay was a monster of the spectacular variety displayed at fairs and coffeehouses, both described their deformity as “monstrosity” and struggled to disentangle their moral selves from their stunted, gnarled bodies. By showing how Pope and Hay at once protested against and confirmed their culture’s stereotypes of how monstrous bodies caused monstrous hearts and minds, Todd offers a rare glimpse into the lived consequences of pinning body and soul together by the imagination.