Rereading Orphanhood 66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd i 331/03/201/03/20 110:350:35 PPMM 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 331/03/201/03/20 110:350:35 PPMM Rereading Orphanhood Texts, Inheritance, Kin Edited by Diane Warren and Laura Peters 66293_Warren293_Warren & PPeters.inddeters.indd iiiiii 331/03/201/03/20 110:350:35 PPMM 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 iivv 331/03/201/03/20 110:350:35 PPMM 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 331/03/201/03/20 110:350:35 PPMM 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 vvii 331/03/201/03/20 110:350:35 PPMM 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 vviiii 331/03/201/03/20 110:350:35 PPMM 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