ORPHANS

A HISTORY

JEREMY SEABROOK Hurst, 344pp, £20, Oldie price £15.58 inc p&p

‘To lose both parents,’ said Lady Bracknell, ‘looks like carelessness’ – hence, perhaps, the punishment inflicted on orphans for hundreds of years. Their predicament ought to invoke pity, but all too often, as Jeremy Seabrook relates, they have been neglected, exploited and abused, often in the name of charity. This was particularly true of those who suffered ‘philanthropic abduction’: forcible separation from parents who were regarded as unfit. Transported to the ‘dominions’, these waifs endured exile as well as bereavement.

Seabrook’s chronology ‘is a bit rackety’ said Jackie Annesley in the

Sunday Times, ‘but what the book lacks in rigorous editing it makes up for in dates, detail and passion’. Annesley was staggered to learn that as late as the 1920s two-year-old Hetty King, consigned to an orphanage, was ‘denied the dignity of her own name and known only as a number, G80’. And as Sophie Mcbain noted in the New Statesman, ‘historic injustices’ linger on. ‘Orphaned streetchildren are still treated with callous disregard in many countries of the developing world. And in the West, young people “in care” rarely recover from their childhood disadvantage. In the US, a quarter of foster care leavers end up homeless.’

Describing this as ‘a gruellingly miserable book’, the Spectator’s Philip Hensher regretted that ‘the voices of the infants themselves only rarely sound out with any individuality’. He supposed that they were parroting ‘the approved phrases of the day’. Consequently, ‘It is almost impossible now to reach these people’s lives. Their voices were stifled from the start.’