Once identified as the cornerstone of society, the family has been the subject of extensive and productive critical inquiry which has challenged its mythical status, extended its boundaries, and transformed our understandings of what is often referred to as the social building block. In a similar spirit, this collection examines the orphan figure in the long nineteenth century, from a range of perspectives, in order to explore the challenges such a figure posed for notions of kinship, inheritance, memory, the body, social reform, genre and the constitution of the human subject. In Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Isobel Armstrong argues that ‘illegitimacy becomes a nexus for democratic imagination because it challenges cultural certainties’ (Armstrong 5). Illegitimacy and orphanhood are often intertwined: the lack of parents was often interpreted as symptomatic of a repressed scandal with regards to origins resulting in the orphan being ostracised from familial structures. This collection seeks to explore both the radical potential embodied in, and the shared problematic genealogy of, being outside heredity. The specific focus on orphanhood, whether legitimate or illegitimate, emphasises one whose existence is on the margins of familial and kinship structures and whose challenge is to develop relationships and an alternative family/kinship circle in order to see themselves recognised as human. As such the chapters, through a reading of orphan figures, illuminate the cultural, legal, social, emotional, scientific taxonomies that require negotiating well into adulthood. The chapters ensure the orphan is represented in larger current debates such as family law and inheritance, kinship studies, gender and writing, children's literature, memory, ethnicity and national belonging, neo-Victorianism and posthumanism.