Peter the Wild Boy
Amongst William Kent’s depiction of George I’s court, which adorns the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace, is the above image of a smartly-attired but bushy-haired youth: the mysterious Peter the Wild Boy. Peter’s story is as sad as it is curious.
In Germany, in 1725, a ‘naked, brownish, blackhaired creature’ was found living in a woods near Hamelin. He walked on all fours and exhibited uncivilised behaviour. As an honoured guest at a banquet of George I, this feral boy aroused the curiosity of the king by gorging on vegetables and rare meats and eating noisily with his hands – behaviour which had him attributed with his title of Peter the Wild Boy. By royal request he was taken to England where he became an instant sensation, providing a remedy to the tedium of court life and inspiring such satirical works as The Most Wonderful Wonder that ever appeared to the Wonder of the British Nation (attrib. Jonathan Swift).
Peter appealed especially to the Princess of Wales, who essentially kept him as a pet. Though he was inclined to sleep on the floor he was dressed in a fine suit each morning, whilst vein attempts were made to properly educated him – though physically healthy “he could say nothing but his own name and a garbled form of ‘King George’. [Thus], Peter could not to live up to the popular interest invested in him and a fickle public quickly abandoned him in favour of the next unfortunate”1.
Consequently, in 1728 he was taken to live in the country. Here “He developed a taste for gin and loved music, reportedly swaying and clapping with glee and dancing until he was exhausted. But he never learned to speak and his lack of any sense of direction gave cause for concern”2.
He was also prone to wandering. On one occasion, in the midst of the Jacobite Rebellion, he was mistaken as a Highlander and arrested; in 1751, he went missing for such a period of time advertisements were placed appealing for his safe return. When a fire broke out in goal in Norwich, some 100 miles from the farm on which Peter lived, and the inmates were released, one aroused particular curiosity due to his remarkable appearance and the strange sounds he uttered, leading some to describe him as an orangutan. He was identified as Peter the Wild Boy, returned to the farm and fitted with a collar bearing the inscription: ‘Peter, the Wild Man of Hanover. Whoever will bring him to Mr Fenn at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, shall be paid for their trouble.’
Peter died in 1785 at the age of about 70. A portrait of Peter as an old man was published in Caulfield’s Portraits of Remarkable Persons, and matches the last description of him as having a full beard. He was buried at Northchurch and his grave can still be seen in the cemetery of St. Mary’s Church. A modern assessment of Peter’s condition might be read here.
[I wrote this myself (for a change) however I am heavily indebted to this, this and this. I’ve also had the pleasure of seeing Peter’s portrait with my very own eyes and I recommend it very much]
![Nocturnal Amusements of the 18th Century
No, not sex. It would seem people in the 18th century had better stuff to do. Like stabbing one another in the butt and slashing one another’s faces with knives…
According to Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, one “diversion practiced by the bloods of the last century” was Sweating:
these gentlemen lay in wait to surprise some person late in the night, when surrouding him, they with their swords pricked him in the posteriors, which obliged him to be constantly turning round; this they continued till they thought him sufficiently sweated.
Then, “somewhat like those facetious gentlemen some time ago known in England by the title of Sweaters,” were Chalkers. In Ireland Chalkers were “Men of wit … who in the night amuse themselves with cutting inoffensive passengers across the face with a knife.”
[Sources: Hypervocal | From Old Books]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/089c79c9c0c737d14636db3a43a452de/tumblr_mma7phgYwM1rnseozo1_250.jpg)
![Guillotine Toy
Following the bloody conclusion of the French Revolution “The toy shops put on the market little guillotines with which little patriots could behead figures of aristocrats. There still survive some specimens of this pretty and diverting machine, of which one bears the date 1794 [above].
In December, 1793, [one man] asks his mother in Frankfurt to get him such a toy guillotine for his son … and in her reply he certainly got some home-truths. In her decisive manner she wrote to him by return post: ‘Dear Son, Anything I can do to please you is gladly done and gives me joy;—but to buy such an infamous implement of murder—that I will not do at any price. If I had authority, the maker should be put in the stocks and I would have the machine publicly burnt by the common executioner. What! Let the young play with anything so horrible,—place in their hands for their diversion murder and blood-shedding? No, that will never do!”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/c7bedc327d2e56483a25225a9b1f8f20/tumblr_mmab68Ln1y1rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
![Peter the Great’s Dwarf Wedding
As was the vogue in the early 18th century, Peter the Great harboured a partiality for oddities and curiosities; a passion that lead to the establishment of his Kunstkamera, a cabinet of curiosities dedicated to preserving “natural and human curiosities and rarities.” The museum boasted an impressive collection of deformed human and animal skeletons, the tsar having issued a macabre proclamation demanding all deformed stillborn babies from every part of Russia to be sent for displaying as examples of accidents of nature.
This provides some context for Peter’s more disturbing fascination with little people, which culminated in his organising an elaborate wedding for the royal dwarf Iakim Volkov:
“The tsar … had instructed Prince-Caesar Romodanovsky to round up all the dwarfs in Moscow and send them to St Petersburg. Their owners were told to provide smart outfits for the dwarfs in the latest Western fashion, with plenty of gold braid and periwigs … On the day about seventy dwarfs formed the retinue for the wedding ceremony, which was accompanied by the stifled giggles of the full-sized congregation … a spectacle made all the funnier by the fact that most of the dwarfs were of peasant extraction with coarse manners. At the feast … the dwarfs sat at miniature tables in the centre of the room, while full-sized guests watched them from tables at the sides. They roared with laughter as dwarfs, especially the older, uglier ones who hunchbacks, huge bellies and short crooked legs made it difficult for them to dance, fell down drunk or engaged in brawls.
On one level, the dwarf wedding was just an entertainment. Being amused by the vertically challenged may offend modern sensibilities, but dwarfs were a standard feature of early modern European courts … The 6 foot 7 inch tsar loved his contingent of resident dwarfs, who were liable to surprise guests by leaping from pies (sometimes naked), dancing on tables or trotting in on miniature ponies, as well as performing domestic duties … But like all Peter’s mock spectacles, the dwarf wedding also operated on a more symbolic level. [It] suggested that the full-sized guests were watching caricatures of themselves, miniature ‘lords and ladies’ clad, like them, in unfamiliar Western dress. Peter’s courtiers … still had a long way to go before they were fully fledged, ‘grown-up’ Europeans.” (Peter the Great: A Biography by Lindsey Hughes, pp.90-2)
[Sources: Cabinet of Curiosities | Kuntskamera | Peter the Great: A Biography on Google Books | Image Source]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/93df378b47a21e7dbc86e2be605f02e2/tumblr_mkaa483twy1rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
![Cemetery Gun
In the 18th and 19th centuries, grave-robbing was a serious problem in Great Britain and the United States. Because surgeons and medical students could only legally dissect executed criminals or people who had donated their bodies to science (not a popular option at the time), a trade in illegally procured corpses sprang up. This cemetery gun, held in the Museum of Mourning Art at the Arlington Cemetery of Drexel Hill, Pa., was one dramatic strategy used to thwart so-called “resurrection men.”
The gun, which the museum dates to 1710, is mounted on a mechanism that allows it to spin freely. Cemetery keepers set up the flintlock weapon at the foot of a grave, with three tripwires strung in an arc around its position. A prospective grave-robber, stumbling over the tripwire in the dark, would trigger the weapon—much to his own misfortune.
Grave-robbers evolved to meet this challenge. Some would send women posing as widows, carrying children and dressed in black, to case the gravesites during the day and report the locations of cemetery guns and other defenses. Cemetery keepers, in turn, learned to wait to set the guns up after dark, thereby preserving the element of surprise.
Because the guns were rented by the week and were prohibitively expensive to buy, the poorer people most likely to end up beneath the anatomist’s knife—historian Michael Sappol writes that these included “black people, criminals, prostitutes, the Irish, ‘freaks,’ manual laborers, indigents, and Indians”—probably wouldn’t have benefited from this form of protection.
[The website that this is from also has a Tumblr, so go follow them!]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/b9e272d0b587cb4ec35719e6f4811488/tumblr_mi8dhtNMb51rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
![Peter the Wild Boy
Amongst William Kent’s depiction of George I’s court, which adorns the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace, is the above image of a smartly-attired but bushy-haired youth: the mysterious Peter the Wild Boy. Peter’s story is as sad as it is curious.
In Germany, in 1725, a ‘naked, brownish, blackhaired creature’ was found living in a woods near Hamelin. He walked on all fours and exhibited uncivilised behaviour. As an honoured guest at a banquet of George I, this feral boy aroused the curiosity of the king by gorging on vegetables and rare meats and eating noisily with his hands – behaviour which had him attributed with his title of Peter the Wild Boy. By royal request he was taken to England where he became an instant sensation, providing a remedy to the tedium of court life and inspiring such satirical works as The Most Wonderful Wonder that ever appeared to the Wonder of the British Nation (attrib. Jonathan Swift).
Peter appealed especially to the Princess of Wales, who essentially kept him as a pet. Though he was inclined to sleep on the floor he was dressed in a fine suit each morning, whilst vein attempts were made to properly educated him – though physically healthy “he could say nothing but his own name and a garbled form of ‘King George’. [Thus], Peter could not to live up to the popular interest invested in him and a fickle public quickly abandoned him in favour of the next unfortunate”1.
Consequently, in 1728 he was taken to live in the country. Here “He developed a taste for gin and loved music, reportedly swaying and clapping with glee and dancing until he was exhausted. But he never learned to speak and his lack of any sense of direction gave cause for concern”2.
He was also prone to wandering. On one occasion, in the midst of the Jacobite Rebellion, he was mistaken as a Highlander and arrested; in 1751, he went missing for such a period of time advertisements were placed appealing for his safe return. When a fire broke out in goal in Norwich, some 100 miles from the farm on which Peter lived, and the inmates were released, one aroused particular curiosity due to his remarkable appearance and the strange sounds he uttered, leading some to describe him as an orangutan. He was identified as Peter the Wild Boy, returned to the farm and fitted with a collar bearing the inscription: ‘Peter, the Wild Man of Hanover. Whoever will bring him to Mr Fenn at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, shall be paid for their trouble.’
Peter died in 1785 at the age of about 70. A portrait of Peter as an old man was published in Caulfield’s Portraits of Remarkable Persons, and matches the last description of him as having a full beard. He was buried at Northchurch and his grave can still be seen in the cemetery of St. Mary’s Church. A modern assessment of Peter’s condition might be read here.
[I wrote this myself (for a change) however I am heavily indebted to this, this and this. I’ve also had the pleasure of seeing Peter’s portrait with my very own eyes and I recommend it very much]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/f78e694e16f7b6e814185927674cf34f/tumblr_mhcjd85eEY1rnseozo1_1280.jpg)
![Valentina Vassilyev: The Woman with 69 Children
Valentina Vassilyev was an 18th century Russian peasant who sets the world record for the most children birthed by a single woman. Between 1725 and 1765 she purpotedly gave birth to a total of 69 children: 16 pairs of twins, 7 sets of triplets and 4 sets of quadruplets in a total of 27 births. 67 of the 69 children are said to have survived infancy. Valentina was the first wife of Feodor Vassilyev who had, between two wives, at total of 87 children.
The first published account about Valentina’s children appeared in a 1783 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine and states that the information “however astonishing, may be depended upon, as it came directly from an English merchant in St Petersburg to his relatives in England, who added that the peasant was to be introduced to the Empress”.
Several published sources raised doubts as to the veracity of these claims. For example, a 1790 book by B. F. J. Hermann did provide the claims about Valentina’s children but “with a caution”. The French Academy of Sciences attempted to verify the claims and contacted “the Imperial Academy of St Petersburg for advice as to the means they should pursue, but were told by him that all investigation was superfluous, that members of the family still lived in Moscow and that they had been the object of favours from the Government”.
However, despite both its seeming improbability, and the various distortions that have appeared in accounts from time to time, most commentators have concurred in the belief that there must be some truth to the story. Sadly, th[e] evasion of proper investigation seems, in retrospect, to have dealt a terminal blow to our chances of ever establishing the true detail of this extraordinary case. [Source]
[Image Source: The Swaddled Twins - The image is actually unrelated to the story apart from the fact it depicts twins in ‘the olden days’]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/b105cdbcebc1b92655a11844435d2e45/tumblr_mgms1lKPta1rnseozo1_500.jpg)
