Although it might sometimes seem as though children can behave like wild animals, they are not generally portrayed as such in mid-century modern to contemporary literature. In Victorian England, though, as Darwinism gripped the imagination of the literati, a popular notion became that of children as a microcosm of Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Because of this, literature suddenly began to feature children who were positively beastly, and almost feral, in nature, as authors from Rudyard Kipling to Lewis Carroll portrayed children who were raised in the jungle by animals, thereby personifying the theory of evolution in the course of their short lives so far.
In her book on the subject, Jessica Stanley contends that Victorian children's literature not only adopted the new "animal child" but also came up with remedies and suggestions for completing the child's full evolution. In the Victorian age, when science was revered, and nothing was really taken very seriously unless it could be validated by a renowned scientist first, authors started to suggest that the one thing necessary to complete a child's evolution was their imagination - ironically something completely un-scientific and utterly unquantifiable in a laboratory setting.
