 Word On Books
with Jeremy Fenton
Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children
By Michael Newton
Published by Faber and Faber
 For millennia the idea of ‘wild’ or ‘feral’ children has played large in human imagination, folklore, and history. The story of Rome’s Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf is a primary example, as are the literary gifts of Kipling’s The Jungle Books and Burrough’s Tarzan of the Apes.
The notion that an infant or child could really live with the animals, sharing their food, sleeping places and, usually, mistrust of humans, has frequently been consigned to fiction or myth. When such cases have emerged – and there are several well documented since the 1700s, including some in our own time – they have been the subject of equal parts intense curiosity and scepticism.
In 1996, a four-year-old boy from Moscow ‘left’ home because of his mother’s inability to cope with him or her alcoholic boyfriend. When successful at begging for food on the streets, Ivan Mishsukov would share a portion of his ‘spoils’ with a particular pack of feral dogs. Soon the dogs adopted him as their ‘pack leader’: he gaining protection and warmth in cold Russian winters, they gaining the smarts of a human (albeit a young one).
When eventually ‘discovered’ and separated from the pack, two years after he had gone wild, Ivan was snarling and behaving in the manner of an untamed animal.
His is merely one of the most recent in a long line of well-known wild children that have included the savage French girl Memmie Le Blanc, Victor of Aveyon, Kaspar Hauser, the ‘wolf-girls’ of India, Kamala and Amala, and Genie, discovered in 1970 after being locked in a room for 13 years.
Stories of wild human young are about much more than survival against impossible odds and, specific to our day and age, child abuse. They are about our place in nature, human adaptability and our past.
For centuries it has been thought that wild children hold the key to one of the profound mysteries our lives – what is it that makes us human? They are, the reasoning goes, the living embodiment of our primitive state: the call of the wild writ upon our own visage.
In his absorbing book Savage Girls and Wild Boys, author Michael Newton analyses in detail five cases of feral children: not so much to prove their veracity – for Newton is a believer – but to uncover what they tell us about our own nature stripped to its essence.
It doesn’t always make for pleasant reading (for centuries such wild people have been ‘freak-show’ fodder of a high order), but the details of the day-to-day life of a human who has lived as an animal combined with Newton’s keen insight make for fascinating and thought-provoking reading.
Underlying it all is the absorbing thought that but for human contact we are as wild as they come – able to live as a wolf, monkey or bear, and thrive.
jeremy@wordonbooks.com
www.wordonbooks.com
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