“Neighborly Adoption” examines the predominance of adoption narratives in canonical transatlantic novels and highlights their intervention in a relatively unknown and surprisingly contentious discourse on child adoption. In the 1840s and 1850s, American and British reformers, politicians, and authors were thinking through issues surrounding a growing population of abandoned children in metropolitan cities and the flourishing practice and legal codification of private adoption. While institutional care was still on the rise in this period, writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, and Maria Susanna Cummins criticized these methods, endorsing adoption as a more appropriate model of displaced child care. While critics like Carol J. Singley and Mark C. Jerng have read nineteenth-century adoption narratives as commentaries on whom might be included or excluded from national citizenship, I argue that the adoption plot should be understood as a thoroughly transatlantic phenomenon. American and British authors whose novels were popular on both sides of the Atlantic promote and interrogate what I call “neighborly adoption,” a practice in which a local community of individuals or families collectively raise a displaced child. In these narratives, varied members of the neighborhood—single, married, male, female, poor, and rich—have beneficial and empowering relationships with the children in their community, regardless of biological relation to them. Though adoption today is largely associated with individualistic values—i.e. completing one’s family, a child’s best interest—this project reveals the collective interests at the heart of adoption in nineteenth-century transatlantic literature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/47993 |
| Date | 01 February 2024 |
| Creators | Hadley, Sophia |
| Contributors | Rezek, Joseph |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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