Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (review)

There has been a curious neglect of orphans in studies of the Victorians, while in literature they confront us everywhere, and in reality they posed a significant social problem for poor law authorities and philanthropists. Laura Peters's study of orphans, part social history, part literary criticism, part cultural theory, is to be welcomed for putting them on the agenda in a lively and thought-provoking analysis. Her argument is that the Victorians needed, indeed created, orphans as scapegoats threatening the family, which reaffirmed itself by "the expulsion of this threatening difference" (2). The family, Peters argues, was for the Victorians the bedrock of society, and, if it functioned properly, loyalty to it spread outwards to encompass nation and empire. Orphans posed a threat because they were without family, displaced persons, outsiders; they did not belong. In imagination they became linked with other outsiders, Gypsies, criminals, and colonized subjects, none of whom were thought to be properly rooted within English society. Peters elaborates this idea of the orphan as scapegoat by reference to Sigmund Freud's essay on the uncanny, and, more extensively, to Jacques Derrida, from whom she borrows the idea of the pharmakon, something containing both poison and cure. The orphan, for Peters, "plays a pharmaceutical function in Victorian culture: the orphan embodies a surplus excess to be expelled to the colonies. This expulsion works to reinforce notions of belonging in Victorian culture" (18-19).

Such a claim places a heavy interpretative burden on the neglected figure of the orphan. We may be inclined to think of an orphan as a child whose parents have died, but the word was also used to describe those who had lost only one parent, and those who had been deserted by their parents: "Children who have been deserted three years to be considered orphans," wrote Maria Rye, one of the chief organizers of child emigration to Canada (qtd. 144). Orphanages housed children who had been neglected or in other ways inadequately parented as well as those who were technically orphans or half- orphans. Peters uses the census returns to make some half-hearted attempts to estimate how many orphans, however defined, there were, but her interest is much more in the perception of them than in their numbers. Poor orphans were seen as much more promising subjects than children whose parents' poverty brought them only intermittently under the state's care. With a proper upbringing they could become useful citizens; hope as well as fear could be invested in orphans. Peters links this belief to the policy of sending children out as emigrants to the empire. How many of them, and in what senses, were orphans is not clear, but the export of so many children in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries is testimony to the belief that the futures both of nation and of empire were closely bound up with the removal of surplus children from the mother country and their successful deployment as white settlers. Peters correctly devotes most of her discussion of this topic to Canada, but unfortunately she is unaware of (or at least makes no reference to) extensive work done on this, most notably by Joy Parr in Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869-1924 (1980). In the parts of the book which come most obviously under the heading of social history, Peters's grasp does not always inspire confidence; she commits herself to the comments that "orphans furnished 60 per cent of the criminal population" (9), and that "the destiny of most orphans [was] to become criminals" (37). Neither proposition sounds at all plausible, and neither is properly referenced.

In literature the orphan is a key figure both in canonical texts and in more popular literature, with a telling symbiosis between the two. Peters skilfully links Charles Dickens's notorious 1857 Christmas...