ABSTRACT
In Oliver Twist (1838), a friendless orphan falls in with a gang of child pickpockets; he is mothered by a fellow criminal, Nancy, who is beaten to death by her lover. In The Woman in White (1859), a young woman must save her sister, who has been confined to an asylum under a false identity by her evil husband. In Adam Bede (1859), a desperate young woman kills her newborn baby and is to be hanged, but has her sentence commuted to transportation at the last minute thanks to the intervention of the remorseful young aristocrat who seduced her. In Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), a beautiful and innocent-looking young woman, who claims to be an orphan, marries a wealthy widower; in truth she is already married, has faked her own death, and is determined to remain Lady Audley at any cost, even if it means killing her real husband when he returns from gold-prospecting in Australia. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), a young women is seduced by a thoughtless young aristocrat; she suffers terribly for the rest of her life, until years later she stabs him, spends a few days of happiness with the man she loves, and is then hanged for her crime. In the early twentieth century in the Sexton Blake stories, the detective is assisted by a streetwise orphan, fights the Chinese villain Wu Ling, and pursues a criminal who turns out to be his brother.
