Why Are There Orphans

The Orphan in Eighteenth-century Law and Literature

Examining novels by authors such as Haywood, Smollett, and Inchbald, and uncovering new manuscript and print case records, Cheryl Nixon compares tales of fictional orphans to narratives of legal orphans. Focusing on the eighteenth-century construction of the valued orphan, her book shows this figure's centrality to the development of new novelistic subgenres, new ideologies of the individual, and new understandings of property, family, and gender.

Brief Narrative of Facts Relative to the Orphan Houses (to the New Orphan Houses ... on Ashley Down, Bristol) and Other Objects of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution for Home and Abroad

The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction explores how the figure of the orphan was shaped by changing social and historical circumstances. Analysing sixteen major novels from Defoe to Austen, this original study explains the undiminished popularity of literary orphans and reveals their key role in the construction of gendered subjectivity.