The Hampdenshire Wonder is a 1911 novel by J.D. Beresford, describing the early life of the Child Prodigy Victor Stott.
The Hampdenshire Wonder contains examples of:
- Acting Your Intellectual Age: Victor judges the whole human culture an "elementary, inchoate, disjunctive patchwork" at age four and a half.
- Career-Ending Injury: Victor's father, George "Ginger" Stott, was a cricket player who enjoyed two years of incredible success before he cut his finger on the seam of a ball. The cut became infected, and Ginger didn't see a doctor until it was too late and the finger had to be amputated. Ginger decided to get married as quickly as possible in order to have a son he could raise into a great cricket player, although once Victor was born it quickly became apparent that that wouldn't happen.
- Child Prodigy: Victor has a superhuman intellect, able to read and memorize the whole dictionary and encyclopedia in less than a day, at the age of four, and even before gaining all current human knowledge was smarter than any adult he meets.
- Creepy Child: Victor has a highly unsettling stare that makes people feel like they're being sized up and rejected.
- Direct Line to the Author: The narrator is an unnamed journalist who was acquainted with Ginger during his time as a cricket star and years later decided to research Ginger's son.
- Disappeared Dad: Ginger walks out shortly after Victor's second birthday because he can't stand living with the "freak." Victor never sees him again.
- Elective Mute: Before his second birthday, Victor never speaks to anyone, instead communicating in grunts. Once his parents hear him talking to himself in the garden, showing that he is capable of speech but chooses to remain silent. He finally starts speaking in sentences after his father leaves.
- Free-Range Children: When Victor is four, his mother already lets him wander about unsupervised. When he looks at her, she finds herself unable to stop him from doing what he wants. This leads ultimately to his death by drowning.
- Maternal Impression: Ginger's plan was for Victor to have no exposure to cricket until the age of fourteen so that Ginger could train him properly, without any bad playing habits forming in his childhood. The narrator thinks that Ginger's desire for Victor to have no preconceptions caused him to be born without any instincts at all - he had no heartbeat at birth, and had to be taught everything that other infants know instinctively. The narrator thinks that it is this lack of instincts that allowed his mind to become so advanced.
- My Brain Is Big: Victor's head is so huge that during his infancy, everyone who sees him thinks he has hydrocephalus.
- No Infantile Amnesia: When Victor is an infant, Challis tells his mother, "It is very necessary that the child should have air." When Victor is four, he tells Challis, "It is very necessary to have air." Challis is shocked, thinking that Victor remembers what he said back then, but Lewes thinks it's just a coincidence.
- Old Maid: A fate narrowly avoided by Victor's mother, Ellen Mary Jakes, who is so plain that she is still single at forty-two. She has resigned herself to spinsterhood when she learns that Ginger is looking for a wife. She goes up to him and makes her case for why he should marry her, and Ginger, who is borderline asexual and willing to marry any woman who can give him a child, agrees.
- Omniglot: Victor can pick up new languages almost instantly, and has read the Bible in the original languages.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: Victor Stott, the world’s first superhuman intelligence, leaves no impact on the world because he drowns in a pond at the age of eight.
- Super-Speed Reading: When Henry Challis and Gregory Lewes first take Victor to a library, he can already read at an adult's pace. He starts to read the dictionary, and within days has improved to the point where he can read as fast as a normal person would count lines on the page. In fact, his tutors suspect he is merely pretending to read, until they test him and find out that he retains and understands every word.
