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Dickens's Wild Child: Nurture and Discipline After Peter the Wild Boy

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Dickens's Wild Child: Nurture and Discipline After Peter the Wild Boy Dickens's Wild Child: Nurture and Discipline after Peter the Wild Boy Rae X. Yan Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, Volume 48, 2017, pp. 45-58 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707286 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Dickens’s Wild Child: Nurture and Discipline after Peter the Wild Boy Rae X. Yan This essay argues that Charles Dickens models Oliver Twist after popular wild child figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Peter the Wild Boy and Victor of Aveyron. My analysis of the scientific accounts of wild children written by physicians John Arbuthnot and Jean Marc Gaspard Itard illuminates the significance of wild children within Victorian popular culture. Nineteenth-century accounts about wild children were laden with anxieties surrounding the effectiveness of disciplinary sys- tems. Wild child caretakers felt the need to civilize and train their charges, but the public records of their work suggest that their positivistic notions of such discipline were fraught with self-doubt. Exploring Dickens’s portrayal of the “wild child” articulates his own ambivalence toward the development of his “wild child”-like protagonists. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), John Jasper and the stonemason Durdles find themselves harassed by the figure of a small, wild boy who follows them through the crypts. Exasperated by the boy’s barrage of stones and taunts, Jasper asks, “Do you know this thing, this child?” (73). Durdles replies with the boy’s name, “Deputy,” but he also clarifies that the child is the “[o]wn brother, sir . own brother to Peter the Wild Boy!” (73). Dickens’s readers would have been very familiar with the reference to Peter the Wild Boy, a feral child who was found in the woodlands outside Hamelin, Germany in 1725 and very publicly brought Dickens Studies Annual, Volume 48, Copyright © 2017 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved. 10.5325/dickstudannu.48.1.0045 45 46 DICKENS STUDIES ANNUAL to the British royal court in 1726 as entertainment for Caroline of Ansbach, the Princess of Wales. After the discovery of Peter, popular newspapers, serials, and periodicals became rife with stories about other wild children like Peter: bear boys from Lithuanian caves, a sheep-boy from the Irish grasslands, a blood-drinking wild girl from the champagne regions of France, and scores of wolf-children from the jungles of colonial India.1 Dickens was also caught in the fervor for news of these half-mythical spectacles. He published stories on wild children like Peter over the next several decades in Household Words and incorporated them into his major novels.2 While The Mystery of Edwin Drood is Dickens’s only novel to make direct reference to a specific wild child, this essay argues that Dickens’s fas- cination with wild children like Peter suggests much more than a passing interest in the sensationally strange. By taking up the story of the “wild child,” Dickens tapped into a charged narrative about nurture and discipline that is relevant to understanding his ambivalence toward the development of the “wild child”-like protagonists in his own bildungsromans. I begin by positing Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–39) as a “wild child” story and then reexamining the original scientific discourse surrounding historical wild chil- dren, such as Peter the Wild Child and Victor the Wild Boy, a wild child found in the southern province of Aveyron, France in 1800. Critics such as Laura C. Berry, Hugh Cunningham, and Katharina Boehm have studied historical representations of the London street child as wild or savage. Besides showing the ways in which such street children were compared to “savages,” they attend to what Boehm calls the “medicalization of the children of the poor,” or the ways in which middle-class social workers regarded poor or working class parents and environments as unfit- tingly brutish and savage, while advocating the salutary role and space of rescue institutions, such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (153). While social workers and rescue institutions may have seen street children as wild and savage to validate their rescue work, the main focus of this essay spe- cifically attends to the epistemological assumptions inherent in studies of “wild children” as a nineteenth-century phenomenon and how “wild child” narratives affected Dickens’s works. His novels do not just suggest that the street child is wild; he particularly implies that children like Deputy are brothers to Peter the Wild Child, that the street child is a wild child and thus cannot be trained and disciplined by nineteenth-century institutions. In studying the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific accounts of wild children as they were recorded and publicly proliferated, I find that the actual focus of many wild child narratives concerns the wild child’s assimilation into the civilized world. Such interest undermined the initial inquiries made by the child’s benevolent caretakers into the effects of nature and nurture on the devel- opment of the child. Analysis of these accounts of assimilation illuminates an entirely different perspective on the significance of wild children within popu- lar culture and study, since the wild children’s caretakers and saviors expressed increasing anxiety and unease about their own roles and the ultimate effect of their Dickens’s Wild Child 47 interventions. Dickens’s taking up of this other narrative about the wild child in his text(s) emphasizes a critical reluctance to perform the role of the benefactor himself, which involves forcing his characters through a similar form of systemic discipline. Like the narratives of other wild children, Oliver’s story seems to represent a conflict about the effects of nature and nurture in human development. The doc- tors John Arbuthnot (1667–1735) and Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (1774–1838), who closely studied the characteristics and habits of Peter and Victor, their respec- tive wild child charges, are not dissimilar to Oliver’s own caretakers, Fagin and Brownlow, who eagerly observe Oliver for indications of his tendency toward wildness or civility, violence or innocence. However, an examination of the sci- entific studies of wild children reveals that the wild child’s caretakers made few conclusion about the child’s arrested development. The same could be said of Oliver’s own story. For a novel nominally about a parish boy’s progress, Oliver Twist features one of the few Dickensian boy protagonists who does not get a chance to grow up and become a young man. The reason for his arrested develop- ment has become a significant formal concern within critical work about the text. Patrick Brantlinger, for example, suggests that Oliver’s arrested development is a result of his role as a sort of archetypal hero of melodrama, folklore, and fairy tales; Oliver represents a Lockean tabula rasa whose unchanged purity and ascension to middle-class bliss with Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie is a singular miracle (45). Brantlinger argues that Dickens’s novel symbolizes the Benthamite theory that institutions determine conduct, despite a “deeper pessimism” within the work that “[t]he reformer must always feel the urge to make a specific evil seem important, dangerous, universally threatening, and he must always feel the contrary urge as well—to make it seem inorganic, unnecessary, and correctible by obvious, practical measures” (46, 48). In such readings of Dickens’ work, heavy emphasis is laid upon the role of institutions—not just workhouses, but the middle-class itself as an institution of correction, nurture, and control, as a determinant and producer of change, participating in rhetoric about the need for the right kind of education and progress that Dickens seems reluctant to pre- scribe. Moreover, the idea of Oliver as unchanging because he is an innocent archetype discounts an aspect of the “deeper pessimism” to which Brantlinger alludes regarding the “unnecessary” role of the institution and also Dickens’s more ambivalent attitude toward the “corrective” nature of institutions and the people who run them. The idea of Oliver as archetypical of folklore or fairy tales seems an incomplete interpretation of Dickens’s response to child developmental theory during the era and to the bildungsroman as a genre. Dickens may depict Oliver as a tabula rasa, angelic and meek, capable of speaking clearly-enunciated Queen’s English as an indicator of his goodness and bourgeois bloodline, but he also strikingly marks Oliver as a wild child by show- ing his paradoxical robustness and ferocity. Oliver’s lamblike innocence is juxta- posed with a surprising, almost preternatural hardiness that allows him—weak, 48 DICKENS STUDIES ANNUAL barely fed, and improperly clothed—to survive a several days’ journey by foot from the small parish of his birth to London. Even before this trying journey, how- ever, Oliver and his workhouse peers are depicted as having animalistic strength and tendencies. The boys’ starvation and neglect in the workhouse make them “so voracious and wild with hunger . that one boy . hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he should some night eat the boy who slept next him” (26–27). Like Mary-Angélique Leblanc, the French wild girl found in 1732 who allegedly consumed rabbit blood and raw frogs, the boys’ bloodthirstiness renders them just as hardily monstrous as they are supposedly innocent (Douthwaite 29). In his early life, Oliver is able to survive despite “a systematic course of treachery and deception” in being brought up “by hand,” a systematic course that, at Dickens remarks, ironically lacks any hands to supervise, nurture, or protect (OT 19).
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