Savage girls and wild boys: A history of feral children by Michael Newton,
Faber and Faber, £12.99, ISBN 0571201393
IN HIS search for wild children, Michael Newton looked “in the fault line
between disgust and desire”, and discovered children raised by animals or locked
away for many years in solitary confinement. They had all been deprived of adult
human contact.
When “saved”, they become mirror images of Robinson Crusoe, savages
shipwrecked in the midst of civilisation. The romantic ideal of the noble savage
from a vanished Eden, for example, Tarzan, “Hollywood’s all-American savage
Englishman”, contrasts starkly with the reality of…
