People left in shock at finding out what Stuart Little really is

Stuart Little, of Stuart Little fame, is apparently not what you think he is.

You would expect him to be a mouse considering the fact that he looks exactly like a frigging mouse, but he genuinely isn't in the original version.

If you're thinking of the movie version then yes, he is a mouse who can talk and ended up at an orphanage for humans after his actual parents died in a supermarket after a stack of cans fell and crushed them.

You'd think in a world with sentient talking mice they'd perhaps make that less of a hazard, but hey, and in the film some other mice who can also talk show up pretending to be his actual parents.

So in the movie, he is genuinely a mouse, but in the original book he's a human boy who looks like a mouse and was born to human parents.

Imagine being one of those kids in the orphanage and learning they adopted the mouse instead of you (Columbia Pictures/Getty Images)

The book notes that when Stuart was born 'everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse', which must have been a very easy childbirth for Mrs Little.

"He was only about two inches high; and he had a mouse's sharp nose, a mouse's tail, a mouse's whiskers, and the pleasant, shy manner of a mouse," goes his description.

"Before he was many days old he was not only looking like a mouse but acting like one, too – wearing a grey hat and carrying a small cane. Mr and Mrs Little named him Stuart, and Mr Little made him a tiny bed out of four clothespins and a cigarette box."

Despite all that, he's still supposed to be a human boy who looks like a mouse.

There's got to be some leeway involved here, considering he's a bipedal, talking mouse-boy and mice generally don't do that sort of thing beyond the odd enunciation of a squeak, so if that's possible then perhaps humans having a son who looks like a mouse but isn't is on the table.

He's only a mouse in the movies, in the original book he's a boy that looks like a mouse which is just several magnitudes weirder (Penguin)

Also, it's a work of fiction and there's a certain element of 'just go with it' expected from the audience.

Still, the notion that Stuart Little was originally not a mouse but a boy who happened to look exactly like one has weirded out quite a lot of people.

There have been people with the rather understandable reaction of 'what the f**k is this', while someone else said it was a 'disturbing' discovery.

It might be why they decided to drop that angle for the movie as it's frankly far more effort to explain than it is to just say he's a talking mouse, the man in the street can understand a talking mouse more than he can a boy born to human parents who looks like a mouse.

As several observed as they digested this troubling trivia, they reckoned that Mr Little might have been 'asking some questions' to his wife after she gave birth to Stuart.