Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850-1929 (review)

Comparing the 1885 poem, "Little Orphant Annie," by James Whitcomb Riley, with the 1924 comic strip, "Little Orphan Annie," by Harold Gray, Claudia Nelson notices an interesting phenomenon. Orphans and adoptees in the early twentieth century enjoy a far more comfortable status in American culture than those depicted in the mid-nineteenth century. While later waifs appear both adaptable and inspirational, earlier displaced children are suspect and adrift, steered towards hard labor where they might receive redemption through industry and perseverance.

In Little Strangers, her third book on this period in literature, Nelson unpacks the shift in rhetoric between 1850 and 1929 as the displaced child evolves from a source of cheap labor to the emotional hub of the family, perhaps even the nation.¹ This connection between the identity of the displaced child and national identity is suggestive, rather than conclusive but adds dimension to Nelson's provocative cultural analysis.

Working chronologically, Nelson foregrounds her discussion of non-fictional primary texts—legal documents, agency reports, popular commentary, and reportage—with trends in "middlebrow" fiction, mainly adolescent novels and stories. The fact that children and adolescents are reading the fiction and adults are reading the nonfiction is never fully explored, but raises provocative questions about audience and the influence of children's literature in forming cultural images.

Nelson concentrates on two "grown-up" texts from the 1850s in her first chapter, comparing and contrasting the fictional representation of Ellen Montgomery in Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World with writings by "child-saver" Charles Loring Brace. Though these texts differ in significant ways, each portrays displaced children as scrappy individuals, lucky if they can better their own lives, let alone the lives of others. The antebellum period, in other words, was unsentimental when it came to homeless kids.

Chapter 2 emphasizes the role of class, and the division between "adoptable" and "unadoptable" children from 1860-1885. Here Nelson cites a range of children's literature by such authors as Mary Mapes Dodge, Horatio Alger, Lucy G. Morse, Louisa May Alcott, and Mark Twain to describe the different fates of rich and poor orphans. The latter are depicted as self-sufficient, industrious heroes, while the former are embraced as lost heirs. Although they are expected to earn their keep, "waifs in fiction," she finds, "are treated more positively than their counterparts in nonfiction commentary, which often views the displaced child as a threat to the country, a carrier of crime and lack of enterprise" (45). Agency publications, newspaper articles, and other public documents during this period waver from a desire to protect society from potentially dangerous children to a desire to protect the children from potentially dangerous foster parents.

By the late 1880s (Chapter 3), displaced children become popular subjects of melodrama where they represent "the embodiment of goodness" (66). The rise of popular magazines, muckraking journalists, and photographers like Jacob Riis stirred sympathy for children wronged by society. Adoptees were more charming than ever, and fictional children began selling "a new kind of parent-child relationship," one which recognizes the emotionally "uplifting" spirit of the displaced child (68). In this milieu, Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote several adoption tales, including two versions of A Little Princess, one published in 1888 and one in 1905. Nelson observes that Burnett's female protagonist evolves from a "spoiled and willful" child to an uncomplicated sentimental darling (74). This shift is not yet universal, however. Novels by Annie Fellows Johnson, Kate Douglas Wiggins, and Gene Stratton-Porter address the continuing tendency to view older displaced boys, particularly, as suspect.

By this time, Progressive Era reformers are using displaced children as metaphors for other social problems (Chapter 4). One of these is the effect of the machine-age on the individual. Homeless waifs, especially if institutionalized, resemble dehumanized workers: "denizens of orphanages are being represented as casualties of mass production, but also as extreme examples of a malaise that seemed to be affecting society as a whole...