Alone in the world

Orphans are everywhere in literature — Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, Oliver Twist, Daniel Deronda, and onwards to the present day. They are obviously useful to storytellers, and particularly to the writers of children’s books, who naturally want their heroes to undertake adventures without the controlling eye of ordinarily caring parents. The parents of Roald Dahl’s James have to be killed by a rhinoceros for his satisfyingly swashbuckling adventure in a flying giant peach to take place. L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy, living with an aunt and uncle, is, we know, an orphan, but no trouble at all is taken over her loss — we just like to know that there’s no one keeping an eye on her. They have to make their own way in life, brushing aside neglectful or brutal guardians. Although they are most readily associated with genres of literature close to folk tales, such as fantasy, surprisingly serious works of literature find orphans very useful. Thomas Mann’s Castorp in The Magic Mountain shows how full of potential the necessary initiative of a young adult in orphanhood can be. Of course, frequently the figure of the orphan is used for heartbreaking ends – poor Eppie in Silas Marner, or Jo in Bleak House. But there is also the question of the briskly sensible orphan, unsentimental about his or her fate. Mildred, in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, assures the lachrymose Julian, sighing over his fiancée’s condition: ‘Well, of course, a lot of people over 30 are orphans. I am myself. In fact I was an orphan in my twenties.’ Other novelists take a sharply cynical view of the condition — the appalling Connolly children in Waugh’s Put Out More Flags, for instance. When, in Our Mutual Friend it becomes known that the millionaire Boffins are searching for a suitable orphan for adoption, excitement breaks out:  

It is shocking to hear that in an orphanage in the 1930s ‘you were not known by a name, only a number’

The instant it became known that anybody wanted an orphan, up started some affectionate relative of the orphan who put a price upon the orphan’s head.