Strays--foundlings, bastards, foster-children, runaways, and street children--have obsessed the modern European novel. From the expansion of the novel’s place in the literary market in the late seventeenth century and especially with the rise of the bourgeois reading public during the Englightenment and Revolutionary era, the novel has taken form around losing and finding children and adolescents. The novel’s families seem almost fated to be broken. The novel notoriously postpones its promised scenes of reunions between parents who have lost children and their progeny. Marivaux’s Marianne never does get her reunion. Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge discovers the child he hopes to reclaim as his own to be actually the offspring of another man. Some parents, like Esther’s mother in Bleak House, are divided about what finding their lost child might do to their reputation or social prospects. Some children, like Huck Finn, are depicted by their novels as better off without their abusive blood relatives in the picture. More paradoxically, the carelessness of parents will only rarely be compensated in nineteenth-century novels by a narratorial presence who prioritizes familial unity. Instead, broken bonds and lost connections are privileged as places from which the novel enlists its readers in critical perspectives on society, the family, and state institutions. Foundling hospitals, orphanages, reform schools, and prisons populate novelistic worlds where readers are enlisted into charitable perspectives, but often with little more than lip-service given to social change. Who do these novels represent and how? What kind of straying are we as twenty-first-century readers invited to identify with and to what extent are we asked to invest in the impossibility of reconnection? Our course will take up a collection of novels (and one autobiographical work) that are as likely to defer closure as to offer happy ends. Students will be encouraged to read beyond our chosen syllabus, both in historical and literary texts, as we concentrate--in the iteration of this course in Topics in the Modern Novel--on the period between 1789 and 1900. Readings will include historical research on foundling hospitals and orphanages, adoption and foster-family policies, and the theorization of legitimacy. The novel’s designations of ‘nobody’s children’ and ‘blank children’ will invite us to explore the tensions in social and literary texts that contained and displayed those who are represented there as unwanted and unclaimed.

Feuerbach’s powerful analysis of the life of the abused and abandoned Kaspar Hauser will let us think about the Enlightenment theorization of the child without a past. Oliver Twist by Dickens will let us explore the policies of mid-nineteenth-century England in a broad historical context as well as invite us to visit the Foundling Hospital near UCL (when possible) and discover their collections and related archives. The most popular novel of the nineteenth century in France, Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris (of which students will be required to read the first third of the new Penguin translation) will let us follow several strays from their lives on the street in and out of institutions such as prisons, brothels, factories, and asylums while also thinking about how the novel’s very success depends on their waywardness. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park will give us a unique perspective on how the bourgeoisie--as well as its predilections in reading and playacting--uses the plights of unwanted children as a touchstone for its fantasies of proper family life. To do this, we will also take up the play by Kotzebue that the characters of that text prepare to stage, Lovers’ Vows (Das Kind der Liebe), about a so-called ‘natural child’ and his adulteress mother. Next, two short novels will frame antipodal pathways for “fallen women” and their illegitimate offspring: Gaskell’s Ruth and Huysmans’s Marthe. Finally, the most popular children’s novel in French history, Hector Malot’s Sans famille, will set us on the roads of Europe with itinerant musicians and foundlings.

Readings will include:

Ludwig Feuerbach, Kaspar Hauser in The Lost Prince, trans. Masson
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Norton or Penguin)

Eugene Sue, The Mysteries of Paris, ed/trans. Jonathan Loesberg for Penguin (original: Les Mysteres de Paris, ed. Robert Lafont or Gallimard)

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Norton or Penguin)

August von Kotzebue, Lovers’ Vows (Das Kind der Liebe), trans. Mrs. Inchbald

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (Oxford World Classics)

J.-K. Huysmans, Marthe, English trans. Brendan King, Dedalus (original French in ed. 10/18)

Hector Malot, Sans famille in Folio, 2-volume illustrated children’s book edition, English translation available at Archive.org online.

Please note: This module description is accurate at the time of publication. Amendments may be made prior to the start of the academic year.