Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the orphan that predates this nineteenth-century construction of the figure, emphasizing the centrality of the valued orphan to eighteenth-century fact and fiction. It focuses on three social foundations of the individual, estate, blood, and body, that seem to be particular obsessions of the eighteenth-century novel. The book uses legal records to locate such individuals and to examine them from a literary perspective, uncovering cases that provide richly detailed narratives of the orphans experience and featuring records that come as close as possible to capturing the individuals voice, actions, and emotions. It revises current understandings of the orphan by reading the fictional orphans ideological complexity in conjunction with the complexity of the real orphan's legal actions and material conditions.