ABSTRACT
This chapter describes representative of the street-Arab genre inasmuch as each is loyal to the formulaic structure peculiar to the street-Arab tale; commonly focusing on a child who is rescued from destitution and relocated to a caring, moral, and religious transnormative family environment where a "safe" future is assured. The stories of street-Arab children took the salvation of the poor child as their theme and were seemingly genuinely philanthropic in their desire to elicit sympathy for such children and raise funds for the numerous charities that homed and educated street waifs. A popular children's author whose oeuvre included a number of tales about middle-class Victorian family life, Brenda is nevertheless consistently remembered as a writer of street-Arab stories. The street-Arab tale would thus appear to reinscribe middle-class ideology by insisting that its protagonists can achieve happiness only within a setting that attempts to mirror the domestic ideal.
