ABSTRACT
THE CONSIDERATION of the unassimilable figure of Heathcliff does raise another issue: what happens to the orphan children of the poor who are not ultimately recouped into families? This marginalised figure without family ties dominates juvenile literature, specifically popular orphan adventure narratives - the legacy of which is to be found in The Pirates of Penzance written in 1879. In this literature, the orphan becomes the sailor who, in finding employment on the seas in either the merchant navy or marines, does the work of empire. Whether working in the imperial economy or defending the empire on the high seas battling foreign enemies and pirates, the orphan sailor is crucial to the defence of the empire, the centre of which, ironically, is the very Victorian family structure in which he could not find a place. This section will examine a representative sample of such imperial juve nile literature in order to explore the role of the orphan in imperial endeavours.
