Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children

by Michael Newton

Overview

Wild or feral children have fascinated us down the centuries, and continue to do so today. In a haunting and hugely readable study, Michael Newton deftly investigates a number of infamous cases. He looks at Peter the Wild Boy, who gripped the attention of Swift and Defoe, and at Victor of Aveyron who roamed the forests of revolutionary France. He tells the story of a savage girl lost on the streets of Paris; of two children brought up by wolves in the jungles of India; of a boy brought up among monkeys in Uganda; and in Moscow, of a child found living with a pack of wild dogs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312423353
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	03/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Michael Newton is Lecturer in English at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 (2012), and Kind Hearts and Coronets (BFI Film Classics, 2003).

Editorial Reviews

Newton is a supple, intelligent writer, more an essayist than a scholar.” —Laura Miller, Salon.com

“Extraordinary...[shows] great courage.” —Rocky Mountain News (Denver)

“Newton is a consummate storyteller...[a] detailed study.” —Publishers Weekly

“This is a richly referenced compilation.” —Library Journal

“A collection of six, extraordinary individual histories, beautifully navigated.” —The Evening Standard (UK)

“[An] absorbing study...he shows a keen and sensitive understanding.” —The Sunday Times (UK)

From the Publisher

British professor Newton vents a ten-year obsession, stemming from his Ph.D. dissertation, by examining six celebrated cases of so-called feral children. Romulus and Remus, legendary founders of Rome, are seen by the author as emblematic of the mythic mystery surrounding stories of infants supposedly nurtured in the wild by animals. But not all feral children were raised by wolves: the lost and abandoned, those stuffed into closets, pigsties, or henhouses for years on end by abusive or psychotic "guardians" all initially present society with the same tragic and, it seems, irresistibly exploitable circumstances. In some of the cases Newton delves into, the discovered child could not speak and never fully acquired language; in others, the facility remained from earlier childhood and almost inevitably led to charges of fraud and duplicity that, in the end, transmuted one kind of suffering into another. All of these stories (and others mentioned in passing) are intrinsically fascinating, but the author leans toward intellectual meandering that can take the edge off his revelations. In the case of Peter, the 18th-century "wild boy" brought to England from Germany, for example, Newton’s speculations on the involvement of writers Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe and their reflections on the matter consume entire pages. He touches a nerve, however, in summing up the stark fact that in almost all of these instances, spanning several centuries to the present day, no one could be found who would simply care for the lost child without serving some vested interest. Thankfully, that we get a seemingly happy ending for contemporary wild child Ivan Mishukov, whose story appears in the beginning. Thefour-year-old Muscovite, who took to the streets in 1996 with a pack of dogs that actually kept the cops at bay while he stole food from restaurant kitchens and eventually "promoted" him to pack leader, is now back in school and progressing normally. Fascinating tales, analyzed at times to excess.

Kirkus Reviews