In a photograph circulated by the Anglo-Irish philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo in 1874, a young girl, costumed to appear as a newspaper seller, peers out from under a nest of dishevelled hair, an unkempt dress bunched in the rear exposing her bare legs and feet (Fig. 6.1). The image depicts Florence Holder (Murdoch 13; Barnardo, Florence), one of over 100,000 poor and orphaned children who overwhelmed the streets of London in 1867, a year after Barnardo opened ‘Dr Barnardo's Homes’ for ‘absolutely destitute’ children who wandered ‘homeless, frequently diseased, and usually starving’ without ‘parents or friends’ (Barnardo, ‘Volume’ 4). Although Florence clutches a white pamphlet in her hand, her smudged face diverts the viewer's gaze. One of nearly a dozen doctored images distributed by Barnardo to solicit fiscal contributions to his ‘welfare charities’ (Mile 261), this photograph reveals the nineteenth-century orphan's power to elicit ‘Pity and Compassion’ (Mile 261) from the upper and middle classes who feared contracting homelessness, physical filth or moral disease. Nineteenth-century reformers drove a philanthropic movement aimed at helping orphans by persuading well-off patrons, who feared a fall from social grace, that fiscal contributions could distance them from the aura of dirt, hunger and death surrounding orphans.

The threat of death does not discriminate along class lines, however, and parents of every class feared being plunged into penury. In both cities and rural areas, every class of family was susceptible to contracting a number of highly contagious illnesses (‘diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, pneumonia, and small pox’) caused by unsanitary living conditions, poor nutrition and a lack of hygiene (Davin 17). The reality of death in the mid-nineteenth century ensured that the upper classes were surrounded by an increasingly visible class of street children who had lost parents due to death, abandonment or illegitimacy. Thus surrounded, the more comfortable middle and upper classes developed a fear of orphans who served as reminders of the lower class's high birth rates and overcrowding. In the hierarchy of children, orphans thus remained at the bottom, but wielded enormous power over the upper classes who feared them.

In the nineteenth century, the loss of a parent due to illness, neglect or accidental death radically reclassified children, situating them farther beyond the domestic and social rituals of the traditional family. In both images and descriptions of Victorian England, orphans wander independently beyond the reach of adults.