'What Is REAL?' The Velveteen Rabbit Passage and What It Means

It's a children's book, and yet the passage everyone remembers from it gets read at weddings, quoted in sympathy cards and copied into notebooks by people who haven't had a toy in fifty years.

The Velveteen Rabbit was written by Margery Williams and published in 1922. The scene is simple. A new toy rabbit, unsure of himself, asks the oldest toy in the nursery what it means to be Real, and the old Skin Horse answers him.

For: anyone who has been loved a little threadbare

The Passage

From The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

What It Means

The Skin Horse is talking about toys, but nobody reads it that way for long. Real, in his sense, is what happens to anything that is loved over a long time and handled a lot. It wears. It gets loose in the joints. And that wear is the evidence of the love.

He's honest about the cost, too. Becoming Real sometimes hurts, and it doesn't happen to people who break easily or have to be carefully kept. Some of the best-loved things in any house are the battered ones.

The Reflection

I read this differently now than I did when I was small. Then it was a story about a rabbit. Now it reads like a description of long marriages, of grandparents, of old friends who knew you before you had your life sorted, and of the softer, more lived-in body most of us arrive at in middle age.

There's a kind of relief in it. You don't have to stay shiny to be loved. If anything, the shine goes because you were.

The Book

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

It takes about fifteen minutes to read aloud, and it's worth reading the whole thing as a grown-up at least once. The ending is braver than people remember.

The Question to Sit With

Who loved me into being a bit more Real?

A Gentle Pause

If you'd like to sit quietly with a sense of being enough as you are, I recorded a meditation for exactly that.

Listen: Inner Peace Meditation

Words for the Wall

Shop this print: By the Time You Are Real

The Skin Horse's words come as several prints in the shop. There's By the Time You Are Real, When a Child Loves You and Once You Are Real, plus the Rabbit's own Shabbiness Doesn't Matter and the opening passage of the book. They all make lovely gifts for a new baby, a long marriage or a grandparent.

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