Rabbit Hill
by Robert Lawson
Summary
The wild animals living around an old, long neglected house in the Connecticut countryside, including Little Georgie the rabbit, his parents, Uncle Analdas and a fretful mother rabbit, face a hungry winter because the abandoned garden has gone to weeds. Word arrives that new people are finally moving into the house, and the animals spend the book's first half arguing over what that means for them: hunters who will trap and poison, or gardeners who might plant enough to share. When the New Folks arrive and begin fixing up the property, tension builds until Georgie is injured and carried indoors by them, and the other animals, fearing the worst, panic and destroy part of the new garden out of self protective instinct. Georgie returns unhurt and describes a household that has been quietly leaving out food and building a small stone birdbath, and the animals realize their fear was misplaced. The book ends with the New Folks placing a statue of Saint Francis in the garden, inscribed with the words There Is Enough for All, and the animals of Rabbit Hill settling into a shared, peaceable life alongside the people who moved in.
It reads gently and warmly, closer to a fable than to adventure, narrated with real affection for its animal cast and their small society, and Lawson's own illustrations, done in the same soft, humane style as his prose, are pa rt of what makes the book feel like a picture book stretched into a short novel. Lawson returned to the same animals in a 1954 sequel, The Tough Winter.
Historical Context & Significance
Rabbit Hill won the 1945 Newbery Medal for a book Viking published in 1944, illustrated by Lawson himself. That year's honor books were Eleanor Estes's The Hundred Dresses, Alice Dalgliesh's The Silver Pencil, Genevieve Foster's Abraham Lincoln's World and Jeanette Eaton's Lone Journey: The Life of Roger Williams. Lawson had already won the Caldecott Medal in 1941 for illustrating Munro Leaf's They Were Strong and Good, and Rabbit Hill made him the only person to hold both the Newbery and the Caldecott.
NBC adapted the book as a television special, Little Georgie of Rabbit Hill, in 1967, and Lawson wrote a sequel, The Tough Winter, in 1954. Later printings quietly edited out a minor character, Sulphronia, originally drawn on racial stereotypes common to the period, a change publishers made starting in the 1970s as attitudes toward such caricatures shifted.