12 - Orphans, Money and Marriage in Sensation Novels by Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman

Summary

The orphan frequently appears in mid-nineteenth-century fiction as pathetic, fragile and helpless in a worldly sense. Archetypal Victorian orphans of this species include Charles Dickens's Little Nell and Jo (1841 and 1853), the motherless Helen Burns in Jane Eyre (1847; Jane herself, though a full orphan, is more tenacious of life), and the fatherless title character in Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer (1865). These iconic figures lack both natural protectors and natural defences, and thus, as Elisabeth Wesseling observes, ‘Orphans are ideally suited to melodramatic sentimentalism, as they embody the powerless and meek that the reader should take pity on’ (211). Yet just as Jessica's drunken mother and Helen's distant and lately remarried father illustrate that the Victorian understanding of ‘home’ encompassed much more than the kind of home idealised within sentimental domestic fiction, the sentimental orphan is of course not the only kind of orphan to be found in Victorian settings. Studies such as Laura Peters's Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (2000) and Elizabeth Thiel's The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal (2008), among others, explore alternative visions of nineteenth-century orphans, with Peters arguing that parentless children ‘played a pharmaceutical function in Victorian literature: the orphan embodies a surplus excess to be expelled to the colonies’ (19) and Thiel that stories of the ‘transnormative’ household, a family missing one or both of the original parents, ‘are often subtly subversive’ and ‘challeng[e] the verisimilitude of the domestic ideal’ (10, 8).

The idea of subversion and challenge is one that I take up in this chapter, but with a specific focus on how stories of Victorian orphans may function to highlight the subversive interplay of domesticity and money. The novelistic genre dominant during much of the Victorian period, namely domestic fiction, tends to see finance and domesticity as adversaries or at least opposites, so that Silas Marner, say, cannot possess his hoard of gold during the time that he is bringing up the golden-haired adoptive daughter who replaces it. Yet this vision is far from unitary, especially once one leaves the boundaries of that genre. Sensation fiction, in particular, often posits that cold cash and warm domestic idylls are two sides of the same coin – and counterfeit coin at that, since the form specialises in revealing the shocking secrets, often financial by nature, lurking within seemingly respectable homes.