THE ORPHANS

The Orphan

The Orphan

This paper deals with the treatment of the welfare of children in fiction, particularly in nineteenth century English and American literature. Novels and stories depicting the social condition of children and exploring their psychological problems played an important role in arousing concern for children at a time when childhood was virtually without rights or protection. The works discussed are worth recalling because they reflected prevailing attitudes and practices in child care, inspired sympathy for and understanding of children, and contributed to a hostile stereotype of adult child welfare workers. The authors' favorite remedy for children's problems — keeping them with or getting them back to their own parents or, if that was impossible, placing them in a loving family — accords with current policy objectives that are easier to attain in fiction than in real life.

Most of the children who are the principal characters in the novels under consideration are foundlings, orphans, or half-orphans. Except in rare instances, as in Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke [1850], the surviving parent is away or too weak to exert positive influence. Dandy Mick, a 16-year-old factory worker in Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil [1845] has a bedfast mother; her friends say she is dying; he says she is only drunk. The mother of one of Mick's friends went back to work two weeks after the boy was born. She put him out to nurse with an old woman who provided day care and a diet of treacle (molasses syrup) and laudanum (an opium-based sedative) for three pence a week. When the mother disappeared and the money stopped coming, the nurse thrust the two-year-old boy into the streets "to 'play' in order to be run over." He did not exactly thrive but of all his barefoot and half-naked playmates, he was the only one to survive. He slept on mouldering straw in a damp cellar, "a dung heap at his head, and a cesspool at his feet." Nameless in infancy, he was christened Devildust when at age five he went to work in a textile mill [Disraeli 1845].

In Sybil, subtitled The Two Nations — the rich and the poor — Disraeli presents imaginary characters against a factual depiction of English social and industrial conditions in the 1830s and 1840s. In a passage about girls and infants working in the mines, Disraeli incorporates materials from an official Report of the Commissioner on the Employment of Young Persons and Children issued in 1842 [quoted in Coveney 1967].

Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of

leather runs between their legs clad in canvas trousers,

while on hands and feet an English girl, for twelve,

sometimes for sixteen hours a day, hauls and hurries

tubs of coals up subterranean roads, dark, precipitous,

and plashy. [Disraeli]

"Trappers," boys and girls four and five years old, were the first workers to enter the mines and the last to leave. Their work — opening gallery doors for coal wagons and keeping the doors closed after each wagon's passage — ...