 In 1726, Mary Toft convinced the press that she was giving birth to rabbits. I'm Maddie Smith and I'm a curator at the British Library in the Printed Heritage Collections Department and I'm here to talk to you today about the strange story of Mary Toft. She was an ordinary working-class woman. She made the headlines in a way that was unprecedented at the time. Printed in the early days of newspapers, the story spread nationally and caused a bit of a sensation. She went into labour at her home in Surrey. She apparently gave birth to rabbits. People caught wind of it. Her friends and family believed her. The local doctors got involved and before you knew it she was being shipped off to London and being examined by some of the leading surgeons and physicians of the day. And bizarrely they all believed her. They were completely hoodwinked by it. And so I think today we have to ask the question of why people believed her. There was a theory called maternal impression at the time and the idea behind that was that what a woman did and saw prior to going into labour affected the outcome of that pregnancy. Mary Toft claimed that she saw lots of rabbits running across a field just before she went into labour and so people actually thought that this was a credible story. But Mary Toft couldn't maintain her hoax forever and she was called smuggling parts of rabbits into her rooms in London in order to carry on the hoax. When she was caught she was forced to confess and out it all came. The whole thing was a fake. Surprise, surprise. She was humiliated. She was sent to Bridewell prison in London and after that when she was eventually released she went back to Surrey and faded into obscurity. But she was known for decades afterwards as the rabbit woman. And we still don't really know today why she ever claimed that she could give birth to rabbits in the first place. So what has all of this got to do with us today? Well, I think it says a lot about the idea of fake news. And so fake news itself is as old as news and it has been around for centuries and this story is a really good historic example of it. And so I think in this instance it's the desire to believe weird and wonderful stories and this was very much the case in the 18th century and I still think that it's the case today. How many stories do you click on that really you don't really believe or you're a little bit skeptical about but you'll read it anyway just in case. And then the last big parallel that I think that we can draw from it and take home today is the idea of a story going viral and particularly a sensational story going viral. It spread across the regional press of the day which was quite new at the time. It was unprecedented for a story like this to be covered so swiftly and so comprehensively across the UK. It generated great headlines. It generated a lot of amazing visual content which are really key to sensationalism as a whole. Even though the way in which we receive the news has changed. We now have social media. We have the digital world. Everything is online. There are certain things about the news that have always stayed the same and probably always will and we can see how they existed in the 18th century and we can still see how they exist today. Next time you're tempted by that clickbait story, think about Mary Toft and maybe think twice about whether or not you believe it.