Teaching the Terrible; or, Taking William Charles White's Orlando; or, Parental Persecution, a Tragedy, to School

Utterly amateurish and verbally clubfooted, inhabited by characters who behave in hilariously tragic ways and speak in tormented sentences, William Charles White's Orlando nonetheless: addresses changing relations between parents, children, husbands, wives, and friends; provides a useful contrast to other forgotten works from the period; supports discussions of literary quality, the value of literary traditions, and relations between art and society; and provides material for discussions of transatlantic literary imitation and innovation. Not despite but because of White's complex and amusing failure, Orlando should be taught for the doors it opens to understanding the challenges writers faced in the first decade after the ratification of the Constitution.