'He frightened me': Peter the Wild Boy of Hanover
Attitudes to the strange or 'other' is a fascinating subject, particularly as it pertains to the English nation and our island identity. Perhaps that is also what makes the diaries of tourists to England and especially London so fascinating; they record many of the things Londoners took for granted.
César de Saussure is one of the better known visitors to London during the 1725-30 period, when he visited the city and recorded his observations. His letters are fascinating as he recorded the minutiae of London life, but one of the more unusual details is the tale of Peter the Wild Boy. According to César, Peter was found by George Ist's huntsmen near Hamelin (the Pied Piper's sinister little town) in 1725. He was estimated to be between fifteen and sixteen, and could 'not articulate a single word'. His appearance was completely wild, with long, broken fingernails and he was apparently very hairy, which seems to be a theme with 'feral' children. George I ordered 'Peter' as he was named, returned to England as some sort of pet, with ideas of transforming him into the perfect human. It was in London, in St James's Park, where César (who would watch thirteen men hanged without flinching) saw him soon afterwards and was moved to write about the boy, 'whose clothes seemed to hinder his movements', and who would not keep his hat upon his head, but continually threw it upon the ground.
He frightened me.
George showed Peter off to the assembled Court, where he was not intimidated by the 'fashionable assembley' and the Princess of Wales amused him by showing him how her watch worked and letting him examine the jewels sewn into her dress. Sadly, he could 'not be taught good manners and had to be removed'.However risible Peter's manners, he had plainly touched the King and Caroline of Ansbach, who ordered him to be removed and cared for at a school where the master was 'kind and patient'. It was falsely reported soon afterwards that Peter had died, and Jonathan Swift, a man more interested than most in what was 'Other' wrote a biting piece involving Peter with the Yahoos and Houynyhmns of his frankly rather tedious Gulliver's Travels. By 1728, it was accepted that Peter would never make any academic progress and he was taken out of school (he was also probably at least 18 by that stage, which could have got a bit awkward). He was 'retired' to a farm near Northchurch in Hertfordshire with a Crown pension for his care (of 35 pounds a year, which was quite a sum of money). He liked music, and sometimes gin, but was given to absconding and after making it to Norwich, was fitted with a leather collar upon which was embossed:
Peter, the Wild Man of Hanover. Whoever will bring him to Mr Fenn, at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, will be paid for their trouble.
Peter would go on to be cared for by the Fenns until he died in his seventies in 1785. For the thinkers of Georgian London, Peter emerged from the forest into the storm of early 18thC thought about the nature of self, the basis of 'us and them'. For some, like Defoe, he was the evidence of a man without a soul. For others, he was proof of the blank slate of human nature, reliant wholly upon nurture. For yet others, he was proof for their theories about childhood development.
The likely reality was Peter, whose tongue and palate were deformed and whose fingers were webbed, had ceased to develop mentally at a young age, progressing little further than a toddler. Rather than having lived his life in the wild, it is now thought Peter was abandoned in those Hamelin forests, when puberty and sheer size and strength made him unruly and difficult to care for. It is tempting to see Peter as a freak, used by London's callous fashionable and intellectual set to amuse themselves for a short while before being cast aside. Yet Peter would live to see three kings occupy England's throne, living at the expense of each of them with a family who seem to have cared for their silent, once-famous farmhand. When he died he was buried by the church door, a prime spot, and his gravestone bears all that was ever really known about him.
