Rereading Orphanhood

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd i 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Recent books in the series:

Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence Lizzy Welby and Celtic Identity The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons and Michael Shaw Dowson Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Kostas Boyiopoulos Victorian Press British India and Victorian Literary Culture Iain Crawford Máire ní Fhlathúin Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Clare Walker Gore Literary Form The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Frederik Van Dam Literature, 1843–1907 Dark Paradise: Pacifi c Islands in the Nineteenth-Century Giles Whiteley British Imagination The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry Jenn Fuller Reza Taher-Kermani Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 Diane Warren and Laura Peters Jonathan Cranfi eld

The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity Forthcoming volumes: Marion Thain Gender, Technology and the New Woman Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism Lena Wånggren in Florence Marryat’s Fiction Self-Harm in New Woman Writing Tatiana Kontou Alexandra Gray The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image Sexualities Lucy Ella Rose Patricia Pulham Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Olive Schreiner and the Politics of Print Culture, 1883–1920 Thought and Place Clare Gill Kevin A. Morrison Victorian Auto/Biography: Problems in Genre and Subject The Victorian Male Body Amber Regis Joanne-Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt Gissing, Shakespeare and the Life of Writing Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Thomas Ue Literature and Art Women’s Mobility in Henry James Fariha Shaikh Anna Despotopoulou The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism Michael Field’s Revisionary Poetics Eleonora Sasso Jill Ehnenn The Late-Victorian Little Magazine The Americanisation of W. T. Stead Koenraad Claes Helena Goodwyn Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century Literary Illusions: Performance Magic and Victorian Matthew Ingleby and Matt P. M. Kerr Literature Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Christopher Pittard Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development The Ideas in Stories: Intellectual Content as Aesthetic Joanna Hofer-Robinson Experience in Victorian Literature Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Patrick Fessenbecker Literature and Science Pastoral in Early-Victorian Fiction: Environment and Philipp Erchinger Modernity Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical Mark Frost Caley Ehnes Edmund Yates and Victorian Periodicals: Gossip, Celebrity, The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage and Gendered Spaces Renata Kobetts Miller Kathryn Ledbetter Dickens’s Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and Literature, Architecture and Perversion: Building Sexual the Pantomime of Life Culture in Europe, 1850–1930 Jonathan Buckmaster Aina Marti Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle and Culture Deaglán Ó Donghaile Patricia Cove Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Lisa Robertson Nineteenth-Century Britain Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel Melissa Dickson Jessica Valdez Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Manufacturing Female Beauty in British Literature and Nineteenth-Century Realism Periodicals, 1850–1914 Mary L. Mullen Michelle Smith

For a complete list of titles published visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ECVC Also Availab le: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, ed. Diane Piccitto and Patricia Pulham ISSN: 2044–2416 www.eupjournals.com/vic

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd iiii 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Rereading Orphanhood

Texts, Inheritance, Kin

Edited by Diane Warren and Laura Peters

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd iiiiii 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© editorial matter and organisation Diane Warren and Laura Peters, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020

Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 6436 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6438 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6439 0 (epub)

The right of Diane Warren and Laura Peters to be identifi ed as the Editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd iviv 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Contents

Acknowledgements vii Series Editor’s Preface viii Notes on Contributors x

Introduction: Rereading Orphanhood 1 Laura Peters 1. The Legal Guardian and Ward: Discovering the Orphan’s ‘Best Interests’ in Mansfi eld Park and Mrs Fitzherbert’s Notorious Adoption Case 10 Cheryl L. Nixon 2. Orphanhoods and Bereavements in the Life and Verse of Charlotte Smith Richardson (1775–1825) 33 Kevin Binfi eld 3. ‘Like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming’: The Literary Orphan and the Victorian Novel 56 Tamara S. Wagner 4. Adoptive Reading 81 Kelly Hager 5. No Place Like Home: The Orphaned Waif in Victorian Narratives of Rescue and Redemption 101 Harriet Salisbury 6. Bodily Filth and Disorientation: Navigating Orphan Transformations in the Works of Dr Thomas Barnardo and Charles Dickens 121 Joey Kingsley

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd v 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM vi Contents

7. The Limits of the Human? Exhibiting Colonial Orphans in Victorian Culture 142 Laura Peters 8. Getting the Father Back: The Orphan’s Oath in Florence Marryat’s Her Father’s Name and R. D. Blackmore’s Erema 167 Peter Merchant 9. Girlhood and Space in Nineteenth-Century Orphan Literature 186 Jane Suzanne Carroll 10. ‘The accumulated and single’: Modernity, Inheritance and Orphan Identity 206 Diane Warren 11. ‘Something worse than the past in not being yet over’: Elizabeth Bowen’s Orphans, Exile and the Predicaments of Modernity 231 Ann Rea 12. Orphans, Money and Marriage in Sensation Novels by Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman 248 Claudia Nelson Coda: Rereading Orphanhood 268 Diane Warren

Index 270

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd vivi 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Acknowledgements

Without the support of a number of people this volume would have remained an unrealised possibility. Thanks to Roehampton Univer- sity, particularly Lynn Dobbs and Anna Gough-Yates, for a period of research leave which enabled this volume to be completed. Immense thanks to colleagues Jane Kingsley-Smith, Ian Haywood and Clare McManus for their support, feedback and endless cups of coffee. Many thanks to my co-editor Diane Warren for keeping faith in the project and being such a delight to work with. Finally, many thanks to my ‘boys’, Azzedine, Adam and Sami for their encouragement, patience and unlimited love. This volume represents a tremendous collective effort. I should like to thank Alexandra Gray and Jennifer Jones for their work on the early stages of the project. I very much appreciate the intelligent, supportive and critically informed comments of Paráic Finnerty and Ben Dew. I should also like to thank my co-editor (Laura Peters) for her great insight and unfl agging enthusiasm, as well as our con- tributors, for their persuasive and engaging chapters. Last (but most certainly not least) immense thanks are due to Richard and Daniel for their love, support, formatting help and their good-humoured tolerance of the family disruption caused by this project.

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd viivii 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term at once indicative of a strongly determined con- cept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all mean- ingful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institu- tional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal defi nition, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unrefl ective perception of the so- called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an inter- rogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innu- merable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientifi c, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate among Victorianists, pur- sued with as much fervour as the affi rmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nineteenth century. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd viiiviii 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Series Editor’s Preface ix

the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplin- ary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and iden- tity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar, and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth cen- tury, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd ixix 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Notes on Contributors

Kevin Binfi eld is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Stud- ies in English at Murray State University (Kentucky, USA). Most recently, he is co-editor, with William J. Christmas, of Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Modern Language Association, 2018). Most importantly, he is father to two adopted sons.

Jane Suzanne Carroll is the Ussher Assistant Professor in Children’s Literature at Trinity College Dublin. Her teaching and research interests centre on nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s lit- erature, spatiality and material culture in children’s fi ction. Her fi rst monograph, Landscape in Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2012) traces the development of literary landscapes in twentieth-century children’s fantasy. She has also published on Susan Cooper, Terry Pratchett, J. R. R. Tolkien, M. R. James and Jules Verne.

Kelly Hager is Professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts, where she teaches Vic- torian literature, children’s literature and the history of feminism. She is the author of Dickens and the Rise of Divorce (2010) and of essays on Tennyson’s The Princess and the school stories it inspired, Char- lotte Mary Yonge, and canon formation and children’s literature.

Joey Kingsley is a PhD student in English literature at the University of Rochester in New York state. She holds a BA in English from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Salamander, The Adirondack Review, Unsplendid, and elsewhere.

Peter Merchant is Principal Lecturer in English at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, with interests in nineteenth-century fi ction

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd x 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Notes on Contributors xi

and in the fi eld of literary juvenilia. He was a convener in 2012 of the bicentenary conference ‘A Tale of Four Cities: Dickens and the Idea of “the Dickensian”’, and then the co-editor, with Catherine Waters, of one of the volumes of essays resulting, Dickens and the Imagined Child. Among his more recent publications is the fi rst critical edition of Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s neglected novel The Statement of Stella Maberly (Valancourt Books, 2017); and he has work forthcoming on Anna Bonus Kingsford.

Claudia Nelson is Professor Emeritus of English at Texas A&M Uni- versity. In addition to having produced six critical editions or co-edited collections of essays, she is the author of six books, most recently Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Literature: Palimp- sests, Maps, and Fractals, co-authored with Anne Morey (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Her monograph Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850–1929 (Indiana University Press, 2003), won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award.

Cheryl L. Nixon serves as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fort Lewis College, Colorado. Her research explores lit- erary representations and legal structurings of the family, focus- ing on the eighteenth-century rise of the novel. Her publications include The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body (2011), Novel Defi nitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688–1815 (2009), and the entry on ‘Orphans’ for Oxford Bibliographies. Working with students, she has curated rare books exhibitions for Boston Public Library, including ‘Crooks, Rogues, and Maids Less than Virtuous: Books in the Streets of 18th-Century London.’

Laura Peters is Professor of English Literature and Head of the School of Humanities at Roehampton University. Specialising in Dickens, Vic- torian childhood and empire, she is the author of Dickens and Race (2013), and Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (2000), as well as numerous articles, and the editor of Dickens and Childhood (2012).

Ann Rea teaches twentieth-century British and Irish literature, the nineteenth-century novel and Jane Austen at the University of Pitts- burgh at Johnstown. Her research interests include middlebrow fi ction,

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd xixi 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM xii Notes on Contributors

as well as spy fi ction and Elizabeth Bowen. She has recently published an article about spy novels focusing on Kipling’s Kim alongside several of Eric Ambler’s novels, as well as John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. She has another forthcoming article about Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontës Went to Woolworths in the context of the early twentieth-century craze for spiritualism, as well as a piece about the 1930s aviatrix in the popular imagination. Her edited collection, Middlebrow Wodehouse has just been issued in paperback.

Harriet Salisbury is in the second year of a practice-based PhD in Creative Writing, authoring an illustrated young adult novel set in the East End of London in the 1880s. This is conceived as a revision- ist waif novel, exploring working-class communities and the rise of collective action. She studied Children’s Literature under Michael Rosen at Goldsmiths University of London, and her interest in work- ing-class experience stems from authoring an oral-history based book, The War on Our Doorstep (Ebury Books, 2012), researched and produced in collaboration with the Museum of London.

Tamara S. Wagner is Associate Professor at Nanyang Technologi- cal University, Singapore. Her books include Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English (2016), Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction (2010), and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the Brit- ish Novel, 1740–1890 (2004). She has also edited collections on Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand (2014), Victorian Settler Narratives (2011), and Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009). Wagner currently works on a study of Victorian babyhood entitled The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture.

Diane Warren is a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth (UK). She is interested in modernist literature, especially work by Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf, as well as echoes of modernism in the work of contemporary women writers. She is also interested in contemporary and early twentieth-century children’s literature. She is the author of Djuna Barnes’ Consuming Fictions (Ashgate 2008).

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd xiixii 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Introduction

Rereading Orphanhood Laura Peters

How was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and his mother? (Eliot 51)

A character whose origins are unknown, [is] as a man without ‘belongings’. He does not mean ‘belongings’ as property, but the record of birth and affi liation that affi rms your legal and social status. Your genealogy ‘belongs’ to you and shows others where you belong. Without its guarantee of family history you have no identity or standing. (Armstrong 11)

Once identifi ed as the cornerstone of society, the family has been the subject of extensive and productive critical inquiry which has chal- lenged its mythical status, extended its boundaries, and transformed our understandings of what is often referred to as the social build- ing block. In a similar spirit, this collection examines the orphan fi gure in the long nineteenth century, from a range of perspectives, in order to explore the challenges such a fi gure posed for notions of kinship, inheritance, memory, the body, social reform, genre and the constitution of the human subject. In Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Isobel Armstrong argues that ‘illegitimacy becomes a nexus for democratic imagina- tion because it challenges cultural certainties’ (Armstrong 5). Ille- gitimacy and orphanhood are often intertwined: the lack of parents was often interpreted as symptomatic of a repressed scandal with regards to origins resulting in the orphan being ostracised from familial structures. This collection seeks to explore both the radical potential embodied in, and the shared problematic genealogy of, being outside heredity. The specifi c focus on orphanhood, whether

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd 1 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM 2 Laura Peters

legitimate or illegitimate, emphasises one whose existence is on the margins of familial and kinship structures and whose challenge is to develop relationships and an alternative family/kinship circle in order to see themselves recognised as human. As such the chapters, through a reading of orphan fi gures, illuminate the cultural, legal, social, emotional, scientifi c taxonomies that require negotiating well into adulthood. The chapters ensure the orphan is represented in larger current debates such as family law and inheritance, kinship studies, gender and writing, children’s literature, memory, ethnicity and national belonging, neo-Victorianism and posthumanism. While there has been critical work on the literary orphan fi gure, notably in studies by Laura Peters, David Floyd, Diana Pazicky and Maria Holmgren Troy et al., it is timely to revisit and reassess the sig- nifi cance of this fi gure. Since the publication of Peters’ Orphan Texts, areas such as kinship, marriage and family studies have seen a surge in critical activity. Challenging the mythical status of the family has put every aspect under examination, Rereading Orphanhood both complements and extends this new work. Looking at the nature of the adult partnership at the heart of the family, Talia Schaffer’s Romance’s Rival offers a model of familiar marriage (companionate marriage) which is based on ‘rational esteem’. Companionate marriage, fi rmly focused on the long-term future, offered an alternative to the model of desire-based romantic love that was primarily rooted in the pres- ent; companionate marriage challenges the desire model with one of caring and, at times, platonic partnership. Leonore Davidoff’s Thicker than Water, explores ‘alternative models of kinship’ in order to decen- tre linear structures which advance patriarchal principles and genetic ties. Davidoff argues for family as ‘a process’ rather than a fi xed set of relationships and pre-determined roles. Rachel Bowlby’s A Child of One’s Own seeks to foreground the act of parenting examining different concepts of parents beyond the biological arguing for par- enthood as vital for community membership. Mary Jean Corbett’s Family Likeness advocates a rethinking of Victorian family relations especially with regards to love within the family and incest. Other notable work by Eileen Cleere (Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy and Nineteenth-Century English Culture) and Holly Furneaux (Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities) seek to extend the under- standing of family through notions of affi liation which read queer and/ or extended kinship within the realm of the family. As Kelly Hager and Talia Schaffer argue in their introduction to an ‘Extending Family’ special issue of Victorian Review: ‘The Victorian construction of fam- ily occurred in the wake of a long history of networks of affi liation

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd 2 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Introduction: Rereading Orphanhood 3

that included cousins, friends, servants, neighbours, and connections’ (Hager and Schaffer 19). Schaffer’s Romance’s Rival gestures towards how orphans may make use of such relationships to ‘recover’ from ‘dangerous solitude’ (Schaffer 170). Rereading Orphanhood demon- strates how this debate may be extended to allow for a more fully developed focus on the orphan fi gure. Read collectively the chapters illustrate how the orphan fi gure, and cultural discourses concerning orphanhood, complement these alternative readings of family and kin- ship structures by examining the ways in which orphan fi gures neces- sarily focus on the nature and limitations of kinship structures as they attempt to position themselves in social relations. Nina Auerbach’s ‘Incarnations of the Orphan’ published in ELH over forty years ago positioned the marginal, mutable and, at times, subversive orphan fi gure at the centre of literary endeavour, align- ing orphanhood with the development of the novel as a genre. The orphan fi gure continues to intrigue both readers and writers. These chapters investigate the extent to which orphan fi gures can be under- stood as offering a radical and subversive cultural assessment: an analysis which extends Auerbach’s initial investigations while also complementing recent work on the novel. Building on analyses of illegitimacy by Jenny Bourne Taylor and others, Isobel Armstrong examines the challenges illegitimacy poses to the family and the opportunity it offers for radical readings of nineteenth-century nov- els. Armstrong argues that illegitimacy disturbs notions of geneal- ogy and inheritance which often perpetuated patriarchal and social power, frequently leading to perceptions of the novel as a bourgeois form. Illegitimacy and orphanhood were often confl ated although there was not always a direct equivalence. Both fi gures embody a disruption of familial structures. Akin to the developing novel in the long nineteenth century, orphanhood problematises notions of gene- alogy and inheritance central to the genre in the form of infl uence, intertextuality and radical possibilities. The chapters in the collection explore the cultural and social ram- ifi cations of orphanhood; it is much more than a biological issue. The extent to which orphan fi gures make visible the cultural role of inheritance, allied with their interest in self-invention and determina- tion, locates them at a point of transition in many cultural exchanges. Orphans are critical in refl ecting on the operation and limits of the family, especially in relation to memory and inheritance, and in mak- ing visible new kinship structures. This questioning is also apparent in analyses of the exchanges between orphan fi gures, the legal system and the nation.

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd 3 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM 4 Laura Peters

While covering different literary forms across the long nineteenth century, the chapters coalesce around key themes of:

• gender, law and the body • origins and originary narratives, including (il)legitimacy and being human • memory, inheritance and recovering the past • literacy, the novel and textual strategies • the relationship of the past to colonisation and national identity • construction of parenthood through adoption • notions of community and kinship.

The focus of the collection is primarily on British and Ameri- can writing but consideration is also given at times to writing from Canada and Switzerland. The collection traces the development of the orphan motif in both adult and children’s literature, probing the genealogy of this fi gure from various perspectives, both canonical and non-canonical, and across a wide variety of genres. The opening chapter, Cheryl L. Nixon’s ‘The Legal Guardian and Ward: Discovering the Orphan’s “Best Interests” in Mansfi eld Park and Mrs Fitzherbert’s Notorious Adoption Case’, examines Jane Austen’s Mansfi eld Park and the contemporary legal case Seymour v Euston to chart the changing perceptions in what constituted the best family for the orphan fi gure. Was the greatest importance to be given to family lineage and fi nancial maintenance or to emotional care? By exploring the high-profi le case of Seymour v Euston, Nixon’s con- sideration of orphans from wealthy or landed families highlights the provisions made for these orphans, unlike those from poorer classes. Yet orphans from all classes have emotional needs; Nixon establishes how, increasingly, the love of a child was considered of paramount importance, even more so than the fi nancial guardianship model. In examining Chancery cases and legal treatises, Nixon identifi es that the guardian is responsible in law for the physical well-being, edu- cation and fi nancial preservation of the orphan and their estate. In doing so, Nixon considers how a female orphan would have to nego- tiate with her guardian to ensure her own independence in these mat- ters. Nixon charts how Austen’s character Fanny, in Mansfi eld Park, negotiates a guardianship model in a family who do not love her, ultimately creating a new family defi ned by love. In doing so, Nixon’s chapter identifi es an increasing interest at the time in the ‘best inter- ests’ of the orphan charting how guardianship evolves from an exer- cise of power to a duty to do well by the orphan.

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd 4 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Introduction: Rereading Orphanhood 5

Kevin Binfi eld’s ‘Orphanhoods and Bereavements in the Life and Verse of Charlotte Smith Richardson (1775–1825)’ charts how another female orphan, Charlotte Richardson, negotiates her own orphanhood and the bereavement such orphanhood embodies in her writing. Considering a range of her verse, including little-known works, and archival records, Binfi eld explores the extent to which, for Richardson, orphanhood was an affective state and a social pro- cess. Ultimately orphanhood, for Richardson, was a lens through which to view others. Binfi eld argues that Richardson’s works, both poetic and charity, are processes by which she supplants familial rela- tionships she has lost. Tamara S. Wagner’s ‘“Like some of the princesses in the fairy sto- ries, only I was not charming”: The Literary Orphan and the Victorian Novel’ explores how Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon experiment with the form of the orphan narrative, based on the traditional foundling tale imbued with social criticism, such as exemplifi ed in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. At the heart of this narrative is the mystery of the orphan’s origins as seen not only in Oliver Twist but also in Esther Summerson in Bleak House; the narrative then revolves around an exploration of family, kinship and relationships both in order to solve the mystery and to under- stand the extent to which the orphan remains outside these structures and to which the orphan’s existence poses a threat to these structures. Wilkie Collins’s ‘No Thoroughfare’ plays on the mysterious origins in multiple mistaken identities and doubles. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Fatal Three revisits the narrative of Bleak House, reworking the orphan as a threat and as a challenge to simplistic containment of the illegitimate within family structures. Kelly Hager’s ‘Adoptive Reading’ considers child orphans as read- ers whose reading helps them not only to survive but also to fi nd belonging in imagined communities of readers. By exploring Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Wouldbegoods, Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, all considered Golden Age classics, Hager looks at how the fi ctional orphan readers negotiate the ideology of the family. Enacting scenes from the texts, the children are shown to develop a reading strategy, ‘adoptive reading’ (Stauffer 86), which enables them to survive. In addition, the reading strategy also highlights the construction of an ideal concept of family which is rarely achieved. Rather these texts celebrate families which do not conform to this ideal, families which are adoptive, non-blood relation and inclusive.

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd 5 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM 6 Laura Peters

Hager highlights how children’s literature challenges and extends notions of both the family and childhood through a focus on the agency of the child readers. Harriet Salisbury’s ‘The Orphaned Waif in Victorian Narratives of Rescue and Redemption’ considers the link between family and class. Examining fourteen children’s novels published by the Reli- gious Tract Society (RTS), including well-known works by Hesba Stretton, ‘Brenda’ (Mrs Castle Smith), Mrs O. F. Walton and Silas Hocking alongside little-known authors such as Mary Howitt, L. T. Meade and others, Salisbury argues that these novels invert working- class structures of family, kinship and community by creating a larger religious familial group, the role of which is to embrace death. Fol- lowing on from the children’s domestic novel, what Salisbury terms ‘waif novels’ enhance our understanding of family and kinship struc- tures of the impoverished classes in the urban centres by foreground- ing how parental roles were assumed by siblings acting as ‘parenting children’. These waif novels ultimately posit that poor families have chosen their marginalisation and that existing outside social struc- tures puts their very presence within civilisation under threat. Sharing the focus on the urban poor, Joey Kingsley’s ‘Bodily Filth and Disorientation: Navigating Orphan Transformations in the Works of Dr Thomas Barnardo and Charles Dickens’ explores how Thomas Barnardo and Charles Dickens both focus on the bodily neglect of the poor orphan to highlight the loss of the family, in physical and moral terms. The dirty, uncared-for body of the poor orphan is a visual tool to point to the loss of resilience and Chris- tian morals; Barnardo’s photographs and Dickens’s dramatic literary depictions create an image of a poor, uneducated, homeless child, verging on criminality and with an uncertain future. Redeeming this impoverished child body through appeals to middle-class charity and philanthropy, both Barnardo and Dickens work to recuperate this fi gure within a larger network of the larger Christian family and civilisation. Ultimately, Kingsley argues that Dickens and Barnardo differ in the agency demonstrated by the orphan fi gure they portray to achieve rehabilitation and moral transformation. Also combining the visual and literary representation, Laura Peters’s ‘The Limits of the Human? Exhibiting Colonial Orphans in Victorian Culture’ explores the concerns raised in Kingsley’s chapter about the nature of civilisation through an examination of the defi - nitions of being human in circulation at the time. By analysing the human zoos, with a specifi c focus on the exhibition of orphans from around the world and their literary counterparts, Peters explores discourses surrounding human/non-human/sub-human which were

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd 6 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Introduction: Rereading Orphanhood 7

in circulation at the time in the developing discourses of evolution and scientifi c racism. Displaying orphans of other races alongside animals and the displaying of the lumpenproletariat within English society, calls into question the human status of these orphans. With- out a traceable genealogy, these orphans fall outside the family of humans, highlighting how precarious the Victorians felt their evolu- tionary status was. Peter Merchant’s chapter, ‘Getting the Father Back: The Orphan’s Oath in Florence Marryat’s Her Father’s Name and R. D. Black- more’s Erema’, explores how female orphan fi gures in Florence Mar- ryat’s Her Father’s Name and R. D. Blackmore’s Erema, liberated from the restraints of family and gender, undertake extensive travels to clear their deceased father’s reputation. Through a consideration of how the dead are remembered and their reputations inherited, Merchant explores the importance of lineage and family reputation. Merchant also considers how the developing genres of detective story and sensation fi ction provide an opportunity to reveal family skel- etons and tainted inheritance through a narrative movement which inverts the orphan narrative’s formulaic move from margins to social mainstream. Instead, the empowered female orphan protagonist, through cross-dressing, stage performance and impersonations, not only challenges gender norms but restores the public reputation of the patriarch, changing the way they are remembered. The reinstate- ment of the patriarch results in the orphans rejecting the ‘mother’ country choosing to return to other countries in a move from social mainstream back to peripheries. Focusing also on female orphan protagonists, but those who remain in the domestic realm, Jane Suzanne Carroll’s chapter, ‘Girlhood and Space in Nineteenth-Century Orphan Literature’, considers the female orphan fi gure in children’s literature of the nineteenth-century as liminal fi gures, existing outside heteronorma- tive family structures. Unlike Merchant’s adult female protagonists, Carroll argues that because of their gender, child female orphan fi g- ures tend not to undertake lone adventures, rather they gain their knowledge and agency to affect wider society while in the domestic space in a family household. Carroll argues for the centripetal force of the narrative which draws the orphan girl into the still centre of the home space. The struggle these fi gures face is internal not only played out in the domestic space but of a personal and emotional nature. Considering six classic novels, Joanna Spyri’s Heidi, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon, and Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna, Carroll argues that ultimately the

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd 7 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM 8 Laura Peters

female child orphan fi gures of the time, particularly those on the cusp of adulthood, are marginal fi gures whose liminality manifests itself both spatially, with the female protagonist continually drawn to borders and marginalised spaces, and spiritually as a fi gure bor- dering on the supernatural and/or sublime. Diane Warren’s ‘“The accumulated and single”: Modernity, Inher- itance and Orphan Identity’ considers how the orphan fi gure, located at the interface of biology and culture problematises the issues of modernity and inheritance. Focusing on Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times, Warren explores how the past functions as both a burden and a resource, complicating the (cultural) orphan’s search for kinship and a sense of home. The chapter also demonstrates that the infl uence of the long nineteenth century still infl ects the experiences of twentieth-century orphan char- acters, undermining any attempt to break with the past. Rather, these adult orphans need to negotiate actively the role of inheritance to fi nd kinship and an imaginative and emotional sense of home. Ann Rea’s ‘“Something worse than the past in not being yet over”: Elizabeth Bowen’s Orphans, Exile and the Predicaments of Modernity’ considers Elizabeth Bowen’s orphan protagonists in The Last September, The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart and The Heat of the Day as representative of characteristics of both the fractured nature of modern experience and the Anglo-Irish commu- nity at the time, namely a disrupted inheritance, problematic rela- tionship to the past and the struggle to determine a future. In doing so, Rea draws parallels between orphanhood and modernism in that both embody a larger loss of culture and community. Rea traces how Bowen’s own orphanhood is mirrored in her protagonists’ disloca- tion and sense of loss. Ultimately, however, Rea demonstrates how Bowen’s work embraces uncertainty and separation from older, now seen as false, belonging. Paradoxically, this state of uncertainty and dislocation is the necessary state enabling the forging of new connec- tions. Often associated with modernity, Rea explores the legacy of imperialism on notions of memory, community and nation. Working the fi elds of Victorian sensation and neo-Victorian lit- erary studies, Claudia Nelson’s ‘Orphans, Money and Marriage in Sensation Novels by Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman’ reads Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart trilogy against Wilkie Collins’s No Name in order to highlight the way female orphan fi gures negotiate the world of fi nance in order to ensure domestic security. In these texts, domesticity is commodifi ed and the female protagonists need to become entrepreneurs to secure the domestic space. In this, the ties

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd 8 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM Introduction: Rereading Orphanhood 9

of family to money are made explicit and the diffi culties for female orphans are foregrounded. In this Nelson, like Nixon, explores how female orphans navigated a traditionally male space while illumi- nating problems with our inheritance, fi nancial and memorial, of the past.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Isobel. Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth- Century Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2016. Auerbach, Nina. ‘Incarnations of the Orphan.’ ELH vol. 42, Fall 1975, pp. 395–419. Bowlby, Rachel. A Child of One’s Own. Oxford University Press, 2013. Cleere, Eileen. Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy and Nineteenth-Century English Culture. Stanford University Press, 2004. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Cornell University Press, 2008. Davidoff, Leonore. Thicker than Water. Oxford University Press, 2012. Eliot, George. Silas Marner. Penguin, 1985. Floyd, David. Street Urchins, Sociopaths and Degenerates: Orphans of Late-Victorian and Edwardian Fiction. University of Wales Press, 2014. Furneaux, Holly. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford University Press, 2013. Hager, Kelly and Schaffer, Talia. ‘Introduction: Extending Family’, Victorian Review, vol. 39, part 2, Fall 2013, pp. 7–21. Pazicky, Diana Loercher. Cultural Orphans in America. University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Peters, Laura. Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire. Manchester University Press, 2000. Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival. Oxford University Press, 2016. Stauffer, Andrew, ‘An Image in Lava: Annotation, Sentiment, and the Traces of Nineteenth-Century Reading.’ PMLA, vol. 134, no. 1, January 2019, pp. 81–98. Troy, Maria Holmgren et al. Making Home: Orphanhood, Kinship and Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Novels. Manchester University Press, 2014.

66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd 9 331/03/201/03/20 10:3510:35 PMPM