Child Characters of Classic Literature
The Trend of Main Character Foundlings
Perhaps due to the commonness of illness and many children experiencing the death of a parent, many authors of nineteenth and early twentieth century novels seem to write stories about foundling boys and girls.
Authors and Orphans
The subject of deceased parents was very prevalent and greatly effected lives. Even Jane Austen, who wrote about mainly grownup characters, pointed out the affects on position and resulting reduced circumstances of dead parents. This is perhaps best exhibited in her novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811). However, the worry of a father’s death motivates much of the plot of Pride and Prejudice (1813), and it is indirectly implied in Emma (1816) that the title character may have come to have so many selfish ways due to her not having the guidance of a living mother.
The Brontë sisters also wrote about orphaned children. Charlotte created Jane Eyre and Emily dreamed up the gypsy foundling Heathcliff, adopted by a widower and his motherless children.
Many authors featured characters who no longer had two living parents.
Their motivation may have been to explore the stigma and connected unhappiness associated to being an orphan, but perhaps, orphaned child characters also proved more scope not only for conflict and drama, but also for unusually mature children with specific and less adult-influenced views.
Oliver Twist and David Copperfield
Charles Dickens featured a number of orphaned children in his writing, including young Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), but perhaps his best known orphans are Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.
Oliver Twist is a famed orphan, who, having been cast out from the workhouse for asking for more food, accidentally falls in with the Artful Dodger and Fagin’s gang of child thieves. David Copperfield is born after his father’s death, but has a happy upbringing until the remarriage and eventual early death of his mother.
The story of Oliver ends while Oliver is still a child, but Dickens follows David through early manhood and its tribulations. Yet, Dickens writes happy endings for both boys, each of whom finds a home with previously lost blood relations, but the theme of parentless and ill treated children run throughout Dickens’ works from Pip in Great Expectations (1860-61)to the young Ebenezer Scrooge of A Christmas Carol (1843).
The Secret Garden of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Orphaned Child Characters
Frances Hodgson Burnett continued the theme of the ill-treated child being orphaned and eventually finding happiness with the character of the neglected Mary Lennox, who having lost her parents is brought to live with her hunchbacked uncle and hidden motherless cousin, Colin, but the relations are united in renewed happiness by the growth of The Secret Garden (1911).
In Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), Burnett writes about a little boy who experiences the death of his father, and in The Little Princess (1905), Burnett tells the story of Sarah Crewe, who already motherless, loses her father and becomes financially reduced to poverty resulting in Sarah becoming abused by her school headmistress, until salvation comes through kindly friends.
Anne of Green Gables and Other Optimistic Female Foundlings
Canadian author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, wrote about the perpetually optimistic Anne Shirley, who orphaned through both of her parents dying during an epidemic, becomes mistreated until she is accidentally adopted by the elderly brother and sister who own Green Gables farm on Prince Edward Island, making her Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Pollyanna (1913) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), written by female American authors each depict sunny-disposition girls, who inspire those around them through their cheeriness. These books seem to return to the idea of the Romantic poets that children are born good and are only corrupted by the world.
Tom Sawyer
By contrast, Mark Twain’s orphaned Tom Sawyer is a natural rapscallion, who causes his respectable Aunt Polly a good deal of worry.
More Recent Literary Orphans
Harper Lee wrote of the experiences of motherless jem and Scout in her masterpiece To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) and as recently as the late 1990s, J.K. Rowling created the orphaned wizard Harry Potter.
Parentless children may seem a sorrowful topic, but since it would seem that it continues to be used by authors, although early death has become less common, loss of a parent is something which serves as either plot motivation or useful to storytelling.
Perhaps, orphaned children have remained a popular subject matter because they are not only automatically sympathetic but empathetic. Ideally, parents protect and guide, thereby the removal of parents seems to remove safety, and who has not felt insecure or alone at some point? Or, perhaps, the idea of independent adventure from as early as childhood simply captures the imagination.
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