When Jo was eating at Mr. Snagsby’s he stopped in the middle of his bite and looked petrified, because Guster patted him on the shoulder. “It was the first time in his life that any decent hand had been so laid upon him.”

In The Haunted Man the six-year-old child was described as “a baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.”

Hugh, the splendid young animal who was John Willet’s stable boy in Barnaby Rudge, was as deficient of most intellectual and spiritual apperceptive centres as poor Jo. When Mr. Chester asked him his name he replied:

“I’d tell it if I could. I can’t. I have always been called Hugh; nothing more. I never knew nor saw, nor thought about a father; and I was a boy of six—that’s not very old—when they hung my mother up at Tyburn for a couple of thousand of men to stare at. They might have let her live. She was poor enough.”

Little George Silverman’s mind was almost a blank when his mother and father died. He had been brought up in a cellar at Preston. He hardly knew what sunlight was. His mother’s laugh in her fever scared him, because it was the first laugh he had ever heard. When discovered alone with the bodies of his father and mother in the cellar, one of the horrified bystanders said to him:

“Do you know your father and mother are both dead of fever?” and he replied:

“I don’t know what it is to be dead. I am hungry and thirsty.”

After he had been supplied with food and drink he told Mr. Hawkyard that “he didn’t feel cold, or hungry, or thirsty,” and in relating the story in manhood he said:

That was the whole round of human feelings, as far as I knew, except the pain of being beaten. To that time I had never had the faintest impression of duty. I had no knowledge whatever that there was anything lovely in this life. When I had occasionally slunk up the cellar steps into the street, and glared in at shop windows, I had done so with no higher feelings than we may suppose to animate a mangy young dog or wolf cub. It is equally the fact that I had never been alone, in the sense of holding unselfish converse with myself. I had been solitary often enough, but nothing better.

Redlaw, in The Haunted Man, said to the poor boy who came to his room: