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Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire, by Laura Peters; pp. vii + 158. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000, £40.00, $69.95.
There has been a curious neglect of orphans in studies of the Victorians, while in literature they confront us everywhere, and in reality they posed a significant social problem for poor law authorities and philanthropists. Laura Peters's study of orphans, part social history, part literary criticism, part cultural theory, is to be welcomed for putting them on the agenda in a lively and thought-provoking analysis. Her argument is that the Victorians needed, indeed created, orphans as scapegoats threatening the family, which reaffirmed itself by "the expulsion of this threatening difference" (2). The family, Peters argues, was for the Victorians the bedrock of society, and, if it functioned properly, loyalty to it spread outwards to encompass nation and empire. Orphans posed a threat because they were without family, displaced persons, outsiders; they did not belong. In imagination they became linked with other outsiders, Gypsies, criminals, and colonized subjects, none of whom were thought to be properly rooted within English society. Peters elaborates this idea of the orphan as scapegoat by reference to Sigmund Freud's essay on the uncanny, and, more extensively, to Jacques Derrida, from whom she borrows the idea of the pharmakon, something containing both poison and cure. The orphan,...