ABSTRACT
This chapter charts these orphan characters body-centered plots, and connects those plots to a larger cultural plotting of the mobile orphan. It investigates how the fictional representation of the upwardly mobile orphan encourages the real-world activity of expressing charity toward the orphan, arguing that Smollett's orphans encourage a form of cross-class empathy that offers the possibility of real cross-class mobility. Smolletts novel, and indeed all eighteenth-century orphan fictions, can be read against the backdrop of this factual debate concerning the charitable creation of orphan institutions; the eighteenth-century pamphlets, histories, and reports debating the efficacy of public Poor Law institutions are explored. The scene reveals a charitable act toward an orphan and presents it as a secret that must be solved; the solution to the mystery depends upon reading the orphan's body carefully and correctly.
