Family Loneliness and the Orphan Motif in the Narrative Structure of Nineteenth-Century British Prose

Drawing on the novels of Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, David Copperfield), Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), Lewis Carroll's fairy-tale novella Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, the article examines family loneliness as one of the forms of childhood loneliness and orphanhood as a motif that organises the plot, the system of characters, and the narrative perspective. Three types of orphanhood are identified (factual, secondary, functional), the role of "false" and "true" parent substitutes is shown, and a link is traced between the type of narration and the way the hero makes sense of the loss of a family.