Abstract
Peter the Wild Boy was discovered in the woods near Hamelen in Germany either in July 1725, or around Christmas of the same year.1 The case of Peter the Wild Boy represents the first major account of an actual feral child, a key symbolic figure in Enlightenment culture.2 Such children exist as images of ‘essential’ humanity, human beings living in a realised and unique state of nature. Although the possibilities inherent in the subject are not fully explored in the writings on this case, Peter’s story does employ a number of themes that would become central in the representation of the feral child, including: the understanding of silence; the relation between nature and culture; the differences between animals and human beings; and the political image of the institution of society.
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Notes
Biographical information relating to the case of Peter the Wild Boy is drawn primarily from contemporary pamphlets. These will be described fully in endnote 3. Other sources of information are: Robert Zingg, Wolf-Children and Feral Man (New York: Harper Row, 1942) and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1865). Some details are drawn from James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics (Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1779–99). Some additional information derives from the periodical press of the period, in particular Dodsley’s Annual Register (London: J. Dodsley, 1787).
Excluding mythic or purely fictional accounts, there are, in fact several cases of feral children written about in the two centuries prior to Peter’s discovery. These include: Phillipus Camerarius, Operã Horarum Subcisivarum, sive Meditationes Historicã (Frankfurt: Petri Kopffij, 1609) and Nicolaus Tulpius, Observationes Medicã (Amsterdam: Daniel Elzevir, 1671). However, these stories are limited in size and ambition, and always form part of work primarily devoted to other subjects.
Aside from Defoe’s Mere Nature Delineated, the pamphlets are: It Cannot Rain but it Pours: or London Strow’d with Rarities (London: J. Roberts, 1726); The Most Wonderful Wonder that ever Appear’d to the Wonder of the British Nation (London: A. Moore, 1726); The Manifesto of Lord Peter (London: J. Roberts, 1726); Vivitur Ingenio (London: J. Roberts, 1726); An Enquiry How the Wild Youth, Lately taken in the Woods near Hanover (and now brought over to England) could there be left, and by what Creature he could be suckled, nursed, and brought up (London: H. Parker, 1726) (this exists in two versions); The Devil to Pay at St. James’s (London: A. Moore, 1727). All these pamphlets are anonymous, though It Cannot Rain and The Most Wonderful Wonder have been at various times ascribed to Swift or Arbuthnot, and The Devil to Pay has been ascribed (in a notoriously bad eighteenth-century edition) to Arbuthnot.
See Sylvanus Urban, The Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle, (1785) Vol. 55, p. 236.
Daniel Defoe, Mere Nature Delineated (London: T. Warner, 1726), p. 1.
See Aristotle, De Anima, trans. R. D. Hicks, Loeb Edition (Cambridge: University Press, 1907).
Quoted from The Dumb Philosopher (pp. 32–3). In The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988: p. 192), P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens point out that the attribution of this text to Defoe has been disputed by Rodney Baine in his Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural (1968).
See René Descartes, Philosophical Writings, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1970).
See the second edition of Julien Jan, Offray de La Mettrie’s Man A Machine (London: G. Smith, 1750).
See Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, De l’Education d’un Homme Sauvage, ou des Premiers Développemens Physiques et Moraux du Jeune Sauvage de l’Aveyron (Paris: Gouyon, 1801). Itard’s case history refers to the story of a boy discovered living wild in the woods near Aveyron in 1798.
See Chapter 1, Book 2, of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: University Press, 1975).
Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: University Press, 1990) offers a revealing account of the uses of the body in the writings of Swift and Defoe. Although her work does not mention Peter the Wild Boy, some of her conclusions are suggestive in connection to my own.
Robert Harley, An Essay upon the Public Credit (1710), p. 8. Harley’s text is available in a later edition published in London in 1797 by W. Baynes.
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Newton, M. (1999). Bodies without Souls: the Case of Peter the Wild Boy. In: Fudge, E., Gilbert, R., Wiseman, S. (eds) At the Borders of the Human. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27729-2_11
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