The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body by Cheryl L. Nixon (review)

Cheryl L. Nixon undertakes a multi-level investigation into territory both new and familiar to students of the eighteenth century. Building on the work of Lennard Davis and others, the book importantly extends and deepens our understanding of the reciprocity between fact and fiction in the eighteenth century, the historically unique place of the novel in private and public life, and the ways in which the individual was regarded in that period. This book is most valuable for its focus on the orphan, who, as Nixon observes, has been understudied in both literature and history. Drawing on fictional orphans in novels and on factual orphans in legal documents, the book contributes to existing scholarship in both fields of study.

The orphan in eighteenth-century fiction is often regarded and even dismissed as an incidental and convenient plot-enabler for the real substance of a novel about female conduct or family romance. Nixon’s book demonstrates that, to eighteenth-century readers, a protagonist’s orphan status was anything but incidental or convenient. Not to be confused with their affecting nineteenth-century fictional counterparts, eighteenth-century factual and fictional orphans alike were multivalent creatures, possessed of both significance and possibility in their own right.

For one thing, orphans were extremely common. In the eighteenth century, more than 50 per cent of children had lost at least one parent by the age of 21, but under some circumstances a child labelled an orphan could have one or even two living parents. Through foundling hospitals and workhouse and apprenticeship programs, poor orphans once seen only as social problems became a focus of social reform and advancement in the public realm, a moral panacea for a society in progress. Middle-class and wealthy orphans with property came to be seen as figures of self-determination and possibility. Legal and judicial structures existed to regulate and protect underage orphans, both rich and poor, but those same structures could be used to victimize and disenfranchise.

The greatest strength of Nixon’s book is its integration of legal and court documents regarding orphans. Comparing actual case histories with the orphan plots of novels allows Nixon to demonstrate an extraordinary degree of reciprocity between fact and fiction. For readers familiar with the dilemmas of fictional eighteenth-century orphans, it is fascinating to find novelistic plotlines in factual court transcripts. Moreover, these factual orphans’ plots are narratively and rhetorically geared to appeal to representatives of the legal and judicial system as well as to public sympathy in precisely the same manner that novels are intended to evoke certain responses from readers. In cases where legal narratives conflict, the fictionality of at least one side of the argument becomes obvious, corroborating a central point made by law and literature theorists such as Peter Brooks. Nixon also demonstrates ways in which factual orphan stories are incorporated into novels, autobiographically in the case of Delarivier Manley, and word-for-word in the use of the official court transcript of an actual case as the third volume of Memoirs of an Unfortunate Nobleman, an anonymous fictionalized version of that case. Through these telling examples, Nixon builds a strong implicit case for the power of the novel in the eighteenth century.

Nixon also examines the implications of the common ground between fact and fiction in order to comment on other areas of interest to eighteenth-century scholars, especially the family, gender, class, and individualism. The differences in the ways in which male and female orphans constructed their court cases are both familiar and enlightening: for example, female orphans are shown to be considerably more concerned about the effects of their stories on others than are male orphans. A case brought by three sisters against a guardian is fundamentally about money but is framed as a case crying out for moral justice, relying on the combined fictional stereotypes of the wicked...