ABSTRACT
The children’s literature of the nineteenth century depicted a myriad of family types, from the destitute of London's East End to the wealthy of the city's Eaton Square. Incorporating images of exemplary and incompetent parenting, fostering and adoption, it nurtured and perpetuated the myth of the domestic ideal in all its aspects, largely vaunting the “natural” family as the superior form, although such emphases were variable and essentially class-related. For the street-arab child, a transnormative family environment with middle-class mores was generally portrayed as preferable to a squalid home inhabited by a destitute, often dissolute, natural parent, but for the children of the middle classes, the domestic ideal of mother, father, and offspring continued to represent the desirable norm, although authors strove to emphasize the viability of recreating the domestic idyll within transnormative family units.
