The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature (review)

Cheryl L. Nixon’s ambitious study, The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature, draws together a wealth of information from disparate sources: demographic and historical scholarship; contemporary legal documents; literature, sub-literature, and ephemera from the long eighteenth century; and nonfiction and archival materials about the design and founding of orphanages. At its best, Nixon’s text exhibits the rich understanding that can be achieved through a multidisciplinary study of the past, but the wide disparities between the types of work being analyzed can be somewhat disorienting to the reader. Scholars from many disciplines will find this a useful work—particularly for the way that it raises questions that can be addressed in future studies—but Nixon’s interest in incorporating perspectives from legal to literary prevents her from making a concise, overarching statement about either the status of orphans in the eighteenth century, or their depiction in literature and nonfiction sources.

Curiously, although this book belongs to the Ashgate Studies in Childhood series, most of the orphans discussed—in the court documents and the works of literature—are actually adults. As a result, the text would seem to have little to do with the study of children’s literature as it is traditionally studied, but it does have much to say about the depiction of young adult characters prior to the twentieth century. Although all of the works of literature Nixon discusses were intended for mainstream/adult audiences, they also all focused on young people making their “Entrance into the World” (to borrow a phrase from the subtitle of Frances Burney’s 1778 novel, Evelina). Like the protagonists of more modern young-adult novels, each of the orphaned heroes or heroines—who range from their late teens to late twenties—must find a way to integrate concerns about family identity and social expectations with their own personal strengths and desires. Nixon’s work shows that “orphan plots” are central in a wide range of eighteenth-century literature: early proto-novels like Delarivier Manley’s 1709 The New Atalantis and Eliza Heywood’s 1726 The Distress’d Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse; canonical texts such as Burney’s Evelina, Tobias Smollett’s 1771 Humphry Clinker, and Henry Fielding’s 1749 Tom Jones; and previously unstudied anonymous texts. This wealth of material vividly illustrates the extent to which books depicting the lives of privileged orphans on the cusp of adulthood captured the imagination of the eighteenth-century reading public.

Part of the reason for the proliferation of orphan-centered texts during the eighteenth century may have been that so many young people shared the experience of being parentless. Nixon’s first chapter, “The Poor Orphan: Factual/Fictional Institutions and Statutory Law,” gives an overview of the demographic work on orphans and concludes that during the eighteenth century, “25 percent of children had lost a parent by age 10 and 53 percent had lost a parent by 20” (52). Nixon does an excellent job of integrating scholarly and primary source material, which allows her to provide a clear and detailed explanation of the various mechanisms that were put in place (or proposed) during this time for the support of the orphaned children of the poor, including parish-based home care provided by the Poor Laws, work-houses, charity schools, and apprenticeships. This chapter should be of special interest to anyone who needs to understand the history of the British attitude toward orphaned children, or the history of institutions like the orphanage or the workhouse, which are dealt with in more depth in nineteenth-century literature. This material also points to the need for more scholarship connecting this historical information explicitly to early children’s literature like The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (whether John Newbery’s or other popular versions) or didactic narratives such as James Janeway’s 1671 A Token for Children that depict the lives (and deaths) of poor orphan children for an audience of child-readers.

The aspect of this book, most likely...