Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Rereading Orphanhood
- 1 The Legal Guardian and Ward: Discovering the Orphan’s ‘Best Interests’ in Mansfield Park and Mrs Fitzherbert’s Notorious Adoption Case
- 2 Orphanhoods and Bereavements in the Life and Verse of Charlotte Smith Richardson (1775–1825)
- 3 ‘Like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming’: The Literary Orphan and the Victorian Novel
- 4 Adoptive Reading
- 5 No Place Like Home: The Orphaned Waif in Victorian Narratives of Rescue and Redemption
- 6 Bodily Filth and Disorientation: Navigating Orphan Transformations in the Works of Dr Thomas Barnardo and Charles Dickens
- 7 The Limits of the Human? Exhibiting Colonial Orphans in Victorian Culture
- 8 Getting the Father Back: The Orphan's Oath in Florence Marryat's Her Father's Name and R. D. Blackmore's Erema
- 9 Girlhood and Space in Nineteenth-Century Orphan Literature
- 10 ‘The accumulated and single’: Modernity, Inheritance and Orphan Identity
- 11 ‘Something worse than the past in not being yet over’: Elizabeth Bowen's Orphans, Exile and the Predicaments of Modernity
- 12 Orphans, Money and Marriage in Sensation Novels by Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman
- Coda: Rereading Orphanhood
- Index
3 - ‘Like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming’: The Literary Orphan and the Victorian Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Rereading Orphanhood
- 1 The Legal Guardian and Ward: Discovering the Orphan’s ‘Best Interests’ in Mansfield Park and Mrs Fitzherbert’s Notorious Adoption Case
- 2 Orphanhoods and Bereavements in the Life and Verse of Charlotte Smith Richardson (1775–1825)
- 3 ‘Like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming’: The Literary Orphan and the Victorian Novel
- 4 Adoptive Reading
- 5 No Place Like Home: The Orphaned Waif in Victorian Narratives of Rescue and Redemption
- 6 Bodily Filth and Disorientation: Navigating Orphan Transformations in the Works of Dr Thomas Barnardo and Charles Dickens
- 7 The Limits of the Human? Exhibiting Colonial Orphans in Victorian Culture
- 8 Getting the Father Back: The Orphan's Oath in Florence Marryat's Her Father's Name and R. D. Blackmore's Erema
- 9 Girlhood and Space in Nineteenth-Century Orphan Literature
- 10 ‘The accumulated and single’: Modernity, Inheritance and Orphan Identity
- 11 ‘Something worse than the past in not being yet over’: Elizabeth Bowen's Orphans, Exile and the Predicaments of Modernity
- 12 Orphans, Money and Marriage in Sensation Novels by Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman
- Coda: Rereading Orphanhood
- Index
Summary
In Victorian fiction, orphans embody vulnerability, while dramatising personal growth within a changing social panorama. They express social and cultural anxieties in an age of increasing mobility and uncertainty, define a need for good homes and families by exemplifying the effects of their absence, and in becoming adopted into unusual households, they question conventional domestic arrangements. The literary orphan's mystery of origins becomes channelled into investigations of early memories, child development and campaigns for the protection of children. Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838) influentially transforms traditional foundling tales into an account of child rescue, and yet Oliver's incorruptibility remains an incongruity in the text's social criticism. The complex narrative situation of Dickens's Bleak House (1853) self-consciously engages with the resulting epistemological impasse, addressing the orphan's shifting meaning in Victorian culture, while externalising the simultaneity of the Bildungsroman and the social panorama in the nineteenth-century novel. Esther Summerson describes herself as an unwanted child, ‘orphaned and degraded from the first of these evil anniversaries [her birthdays]’ (Bleak House 26), in juxtaposition with the omniscient narrator's metaphors of orphanhood to describe a society of disconnected individuals. ‘No Thoroughfare’ (1867), co-written by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, hinges on mysteries of origins in a convoluted plot of mistaken identities and sensationalised doubles, and yet it is also one of the notably few narratives that feature the Foundling Hospital centrally in the text and one of the first to describe the difficulties of adoption before its legalisation.
Whereas Dinah Craik's thesis novel about adoption, King Arthur (1886), becomes oddly fissured by the sustained narrative power of the orphan's mysterious origins, late-Victorian sensation novels challenge this plot device in order to dismantle readers’ expectations. Thus, in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Fatal Three (1888), the secret of an adopted child's parentage destroys families across generations. Yet with a direct intertextual reference to Bleak House, Braddon also critically reworks the orphan's role as a potential threat in sensation fiction. The ambiguities of the vulnerable, yet often mysterious, Victorian orphan still determine persistent clichés surrounding both the Victorians and orphans in literature.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rereading OrphanhoodTexts, Inheritance, Kin, pp. 56 - 80Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020