[In the following essay, Jones examines the care and treatment of orphans in the late nineteenth century and the ways this is reflected in Anne of Green Gables.]

R.M.D., Route 3

Scotsburn Sta.,

Pictou Co.,

N.S.

Aug. 21st/17 [1917]

To Mayor Martin
Halifax City
Halifax Co., N.S.

Dear Sir,—

Kindly tell me the names of the Homes for boys in your city. I am desirous in getting a good boy (with decent parents) from ages 8-11 yrs inclusive, to bring up and of protestant religion preferably [sic] methodist. Let me know please by return mail. Find enclosed postage stamp for letter.

Also tell me the name of Homes for girls to bring up whether Catholic or Protestant, with address for each home. I mean for both boys and girls.

Answer please by return mail as I wish to inform my mother, who lives in Guysboro, of same. In fact I'm writing this letter for her, that is by her permission.

Wishing to hear from you by return mail

                    I close and remain
                                        Truly yours
                                        Mrs Ruth Sutherland.

(Courtesy of PANS: 113. 21 RG-35-102 5A.4)

Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote many stories about “lost children”; Anne is described in Rea Wilmshurst's introduction to Akin to Anne (p. 7) as the “culmination” of the author's wish to provide happy endings. In all her novels at least one orphan is near at hand, from Anne in 1908 to passive Jody, the heroine's neighbour in Jane of Lantern Hill (1937). Anne was based on a true incident: Montgomery's relative Pierce Macneill adopted a girl, Ellen, who though “one of the most hopelessly commonplace and uninteresting girls imaginable,” had a profile strongly resembling the 1908 cover illustration of Anne (SJ II [Jan. 27, 1911] 40).

Two facts emerge clearly from the historical background: The author tends to understate situations, resulting in subtle nuances that could easily be lost; and Anne is an exceptional, one-in-a-million orphan. She is, in Peter Rider's words (Conversation of Aug. 9, 1995), “articulate, optimistic, intelligent, well behaved, assertive”; in short, not the kind of person likely to come from the system. Over time, Montgomery became more realistic in her writings. In Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside, brash and bruised Mary Vance appears as Anne's rough, aggressive double, a kind of shadow side.

Questions about orphans arise from a reading of Anne. Why did orphans come from the Nova Scotia asylum, not from one in P.E.I.? Would anybody check on vulnerable children? Could Anne be transferred so easily to Mrs. Blewett? Answers to these and other questions can be found in a consideration of the historical context.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

One aim of Montgomery's stories about children, including Anne, was to change attitudes toward the vulnerable young, as valuable simply for themselves. She attempted to dispel attitudes, set in the eighteenth century and continued into her time, holding orphans and poor children as cheap labor.

Children had received little special care in the chaotic social systems of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Poverty-stricken people went to the workhouse if they were capable of working; if not, they were put in a primitive poorhouse. In the eighteenth century, children were to be found anywhere adults were. A century later, writer-reformer Charles Dickens describes children in poorhouses, workhouses, and jails. Eighteenth-century orphans had caretakers or fended for themselves. Orphanges did not exist in the eighteenth century, with two early, outstanding exceptions: the London Foundling Hospital for Infants, started by retired sea captain Thomas Coram in 1739; and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an orphanage that existed from 1752 to 1785, apparently failing for lack of financial support.

In the eighteenth century, poor children (whether orphans or not) generally received no formal training, since education was provided only by paying for private instruction or by the various churches. The Roman Catholics took care of their own through the work of nuns and priests. The Anglican and Protestant denominations began the English Charity Schools to teach the hordes on the streets; destined for hard work, these children learned only the basics. Religious people used Old Testament references to servants as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” (Deut. 29: 11) to justify keeping the poor in the lower classes.

Concern for animal welfare came earlier than concern for children's welfare, as shown through existing organizations and laws. Regulations protecting animals were in effect in Great Britain and Nova Scotia by 1822; the Nova Scotia Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) was founded in 1824. Concern for neglected children became general only in the 1850s and after. By 1880 a Nova Scotia provincial act dealt with abused and neglected children. There were no groups concerned with children generally. The SPCA, with its long experience in dealing with abuse, took on the task of rescuing children under sixteen. By 1888 two-thirds of cases concerned children and families. The SPCA secretary and solicitor, Judge R. H. Murray, led the group's efforts toward creating improved facilities, laws, and a separate branch of the society for children. A knowledge of animals' relative importance gives new meaning to Matthew's comment “I wouldn't give a dog I liked to that Blewett woman” (p. 95) and Mary Vance's complaint in Rainbow Valley, “I hain't had the life of a dog for these four years” (ch. 5).

In the literature of the late nineteenth century, “orphan” tales and, following a tradition as old as writing, animal stories were popular. Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877), a horse story, and Canadian writer Marshall Saunders's Beautiful Joe, considered its dog sequel, became international best-sellers. In 1893 Saunders's book won a two-hundred-dollar prize from the American Humane Education Society. Writers like Saunders combined a caring for animals and children.

Montgomery wrote at a time when the horse was an important aspect of the culture, especially in rural places like Prince Edward Island. Horses, having genealogies and special sets of names, were considered more a part of the family than other animals, and sometimes these animals were more valued than some family members. In dangerous work situations, P.E.I. inhabitants of Highland descent had more concern for horses' lives than for the safety of women and children. Horses' names were important. The lack of a name for Matthew's prized driving “sorrel mare” is an added, subtle signal, in the exposition of the first chapter (p. 40), to readers of the day that the child was to hold major interest. In Anne, unlike other writings of Montgomery, cats and dogs are not present. The orphan heroine, central to the book, goes around naming plants, trees, and places, but not animals.

In Canada, women's and church groups led the needed reform movement for the treatment of children. In the Halifax Poor House of 1832 seventy-four children slept with male or female adults. After 1900, children remained there, without locks or handles on the doors, among fifty-seven mentally unstable inmates roaming at large. The lines became blurred between the P.E.I. mental asylum and its poorhouse and jail. Space available was often the main determinant for where people were sent. Children could be found in the poorhouse.

Male occupations like sailing and mining were dangerous, and fatalities left orphans. Major epidemics also frequently left widows and orphans. By the 1850s, organizations of middle and upper-class women, under male boards, made their first attempts at social reform in setting up orphan asylums. Asylums were supposed to have the characteristics of a home and to provide maternal love for children in an institution. The Canadian Protestant Orphan Homes (POHs) were much better than the larger and more impersonal ones in the United States or England.

Anne's “Hopetown” orphanage refers to the Halifax asylum founded in 1857 by the Reverend Mr. Uniake and a Miss Cogswell. Children taken in between the ages of three and eleven wore uniforms. All the children worked at housekeeping jobs in the asylum. This orphanage depended upon gifts, many in the form of direct donations of goods and services. In 1874 a large brick house at Veith Street, on the waterfront, was acquired. It was destroyed and three staff members and twenty-four children died in the Halifax Explosion of 1917. Other specialized institutions opened, such as the Halifax Industrial School (1865) for boys who did not fit into regular schools, and the St. Paul's Almshouse for Girls (1867).

Supervision for orphans away from the asylum was not the norm. It is noteworthy that a Mr. Bayers, running the Halifax POH, traveled to visit children in 1869 and 1872. There was a real risk of losing track of children who moved to new places. Sending a yearly form out to ministers in the area of the children was one method of checking, but, of course, the form and follow-up had to be sent. Asylums usually depended on hearing complaints from those unwilling to meddle.

The rates of infant mortality were high, even among much-loved children living at home. Margaret Gray Lord's journal for 1876 mentions the deaths of five children aged three years and under. Babies in institutions were even more at risk. To combat high death rates among babies the Halifax Infants' Home was founded, although this institution's mortality rates were high: 35 percent in the first year (1875) and 26 percent in an average year in the 1890s. In Montgomery's Rilla of Ingleside, set in the time of World War I, Rilla's doctor-father Gilbert thinks the “war baby” will not survive at “Hopetown,” since “delicate babies” do not thrive in institutional care (ch. 8). His reference would be to the Halifax Infants' Home.

Prince Edward Island, a rural province always in need of farm workers, took orphans from other places and had no orphanage of its own until 1907. The expectation was that relatives or friends would make their own arrangements for destitute children, if not always appropriately or happily. In Emily of New Moon the orphaned heroine has the most grudging protection of her mother's relatives. The Murrays, however unwilling to take over the care of a child, are too proud to send relatives, even unwanted ones, to orphan asylums (ch. 6). But for the child with no such protectors there was no automatic response from social service agencies. When the woman who worked as the charlady to the educated Shirleys steps in and takes the baby, nobody registers this fact or makes any inquiries.

Such an informal arrangement was perfectly possible, even though there were some rough formal considerations of what was to be done for children without caregivers. A P.E.I. legislative act of 1845 states that an abandoned child between the ages of two and twelve was to be signed up formally as a working apprentice until the age of twenty-one. There was some effort to provide education for destitute children, including orphans. An Education Act of 1861, noting the number of orphans and children of destitute parents, set up a special school for children ages four to eleven in Charlottetown; this school was commended in an 1869 report. The first Protestant orphanage was founded in 1907. Roman Catholics were usually quick to provide service, but their asylum, St. Vincent's, did not begin until 1910.

The situation in the British colonies was complicated by the added factor of truly “imported” orphans, to adapt Mrs. Lynde's phrase (p. 47). These were considered the lowest of the low, “London street-Arabs,” in Marilla's slighting reference (p. 45). Dr. Barnardo's Home took in homeless children from the London streets and raised them in a practical orphanage environment; the objective was to have them earning their own livings as soon as possible. They were considered to be “reformed” and respectable, but their “street Arab” reputations clung to them. The British orphanage movement considered the colonies more “wholesome” than England's own cities and began the mass deportation of children to North America and Australia. Some of these children still had British relatives and ties to England, but they had no choice. Siblings, even twins, were separated, and once the children were placed there was a total lack of supervision. Girls, who were especially vulnerable, could readily be taken advantage of by employers or “hired men.” These children, sent out from the great slum-ridden metropolis to rural areas, were considered primarily as farm workers. From 1868 on, the movement of such children, exported, as it were, chiefly by Barnardo's Homes, continued despite protests as early as 1874. The last boatload left in 1939, just before World War II. The war and its shortage of manpower kept England's orphans in England.

Ideas about children and child care changed slowly throughout the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment of Locke and Rousseau had seen the child as highly responsive to education and to stimuli. Aristocratic rule had emphasized heredity, but the new republican and more egalitarian movements saw the child as the product rather of environment. The ideal citizen, who was going to participate in making his world, could be created through an education much pleasanter than the old birch-rod method. Such citizen-oriented ideas of education had less place for little women (who were not thought of as citizens) than for little men. The beginning of the nineteenth century saw a Romantic idealization of the child. Montgomery certainly inherited the Romantic Wordsworthian tradition, which views the child as a “seer blest,” gifted with spiritual knowledge lost in the bustle of socialization. But in general, and particularly in rural areas, before 1880 neither the Enlightenment nor Romantic ideas had penetrated. The old idea that the child was a repository of original sin, possessed of an “old Adam” to be beaten out of it, had a persistent hold. When not thought of as a limb of Satan, the child was to be a miniature adult and do its share of the work.

New ideas about the world had an impact on the treatment of children. Even before it was accepted, the theory of evolution had an impact. Ideas of adaptation and continuous modification affected psychology, and organic images abound. Frederick Froebel and his disciples represented the child as a seed or plant for nurturing. Anne's reassuring metaphor to Marilla, “I'm only just pruned down and branched out,” fits this principle (p. 358). Tensions between old and new thought in the community create interest. Matthew's quiet, prophetic statements are consistently Froebelian, while Marilla represents old thought to be converted.

One implication of this change is the perception that children needed settings suited to their educational and moral growth. The dangers menacing neglected children seemed more apparent. There was a more active response to taking care of and guarding neglected or destitute children. Reformers under J. J. Kelso founded the Children's Aid Society (CAS), the first such organization in Canada, in Toronto in 1891. In literature a new, sympathetic, burst of “orphan novels” at the turn of the century is symptomatic of new ideas about children and their relation to society.

By the 1890s orphan asylums were seen, in Patricia Rooke's term, as a “necessary evil” (Discarding the Asylum, 30). The Protestant Orphan Home directors were suspicious of the new CAS movement which, with professional social workers, tried to keep families together and used foster care. In Halifax, a short-lived CAS formed in 1905 lasted only until 1914, when the SPCA officially took over its powers. The first Children's Protection Act passed the Nova Scotia legislature in 1906. In 1909, a year after Anne, the P.E.I. CAS was founded, though it mostly dealt with delinquents. “An Act for the Protection of Neglected and Dependent Children” was passed in 1910.

EXCEPTIONAL ANNE FROM THE ORPHANAGE: APPARENT PROBLEMS

Anne's exceptional qualities of optimism, intellectual development, and “ladylike” behavior could have been crushed under the wrong circumstances. Her very survival would have been chancy. Conditions as a household drudge would not be good for the health, and modern readers might also wonder about the effects of neglect and malnutrition on intelligence. Anne at three months, in that era of high infant death, is in the care of Mrs. Thomas, a char-woman with a drunken husband. Later the girl looks after Mrs. Hammond's many twins, either a double blessing or burden, depending on the circumstances. Although overworked, Anne mentions no illnesses, in contrast to Mary Vance in Rainbow Valley, who gives blood-curdling accounts of serious illnesses and near death (chs. 3 and 5). Orphanages were particularly vulnerable to epidemics, so Anne would not have been entirely safe there.

Anne stands out as the kind of orphan the Protestant asylums preferred to have. The Roman Catholic asylums, run by nuns, had to take all the needy and were often overcrowded, but the Protestant Orphan Homes could be selective. They picked the best, that is to say, the “worthy” as opposed to the “unworthy” poor, the unemployed, the drunkard or the lazy. True orphans were preferred over children of a poor parent who might later challenge the institution's powers. The Protestant institutions had regulations specifying that relatives could not interfere with the home's arrangements. Legitimacy, meaning to have married parents, was an important qualification for admittance. (P.E.I. descendants of Highlanders considered unmarried mothers and their children to be servants for life.) Anne meets all three requirements, with very respectable parents, high school teachers who died of “fever” (p. 86). (Later, visiting the house where she was born in Anne of the Island, she learns that her parents loved each other and her, also an exceptional fact (ch. 21). Anne contrasts with the more realistic Mary Vance in Rainbow Valley: “‘My ma had hung herself and my pa cut his throat.’ ‘Holy cats! Why?’ said Jerry. ‘Booze,’ said Mary laconically” (ch. 5).

The prevalent attitude of looking down on orphans would make self-development difficult. Having no control of circumstances would promote either passivity or anger. In Jane of Lantern Hill, Jody's general passivity is more realistic than Anne's creativity. Jody plaintively writes, “Oh Jane, it isn't fair. I don't mean Miss West [sending her to an orphanage] isn't fair, but something isn't” (ch. 38). Rooke's description of the “taint” of public charity clinging “like mildew” to orphans (Discarding the Asylum, 163) applies to Marilla's first long speech (p. 45). Josie Pye at Queen's crushes a young man's interest in Anne: “I told him you were an orphan the Cuthberts had adopted, and nobody knew very much about what you'd been before that” (p. 363). More subtle remarks than these pass quickly and may escape an inattentive reader. Matthew's quiet comment “We might be some good to her” (p. 73) is revolutionary, an example of true Christian charity.

Marilla shows herself as decent by giving Anne an upstairs bedroom, although a kitchen chamber couch would have been good enough for the wanted boy. (Matthew also sleeps in the kitchen chamber, to be nearer his workplace in the barn.) Boys were generally more respected and could learn a trade. In the 1917 letter that opens this appendix, the reader will notice that a boy is preferred, who must be Protestant. A girl is clearly second choice, but her religion is not an issue.

Orphans' education was limited. Anne Shirley's experience was truly extraordinary. The reviewer for the New York Times in 1908 complained correctly that, with illiterate keepers and four months of school, Anne had “borrowed Bernard Shaw's vocabulary!” (see Reviews, p. 487). Marilla's statement in the first chapter (p. 46) that “We mean to give him a good home and schooling” signals that she is not going to hold the orphan back from school for the sake of work. (The author herself was held back by having to look after her half-brother during her year in Saskatchewan.) Orphans and the poor had to be kept in their class. When a shoemaker applied for an orphan boy in Hamilton in 1854 he was refused, on the basis that orphans were fit only for farm and domestic work. Anne comes in first in the province in her examinations, goes to Queen's for teacher training, and wins a scholarship. Even Montgomery admitted early (Sept. 10, 1908) to her pen friend Mr. Weber that Anne's success at school is “too good for literary art.” Anne, like Nellie McClung's Pearl, becomes a teacher and reaches the social heights in marrying a doctor (Purple Springs; Anne's House of Dreams). Lower-class Mary Vance does well to become a storekeeper's wife (Rilla of Ingleside, ch. 35).

There was little distinction between adoption, “farming out” (described below), and indenturing, which all meant hard work and sometimes abuse. Anne, however, does not have to work any more than her friends do in Avonlea. Without machines, the work of ordinary life was hard for everyone. Children in their homes had to work, sometimes beyond their strength. Despite New Thought, obedience and service were still important. Marilla approves Anne's competence as a housekeeper at age fourteen: “she's real steady and reliable now” (p. 325). For the unprotected, however, abuse and overwork were not uncommon. Orphans rescued from bad circumstances could be sent out again.

“Farming out,” as in Anne's history, differed little from adoption, under the system described by Vicki Williams “where no legal definition of the rights and responsibilities of the guardians existed.” Williams quotes a young girl, “'doption, sir, is when folks gets a girl to work without wages” (p. 127). Adoption did not necessarily mean a name change or becoming an heir. Indenturing provided a little more protection, due to having a contract. One of the problems of farming out was that the children's work remained unpaid until adolescence. Then the caretakers might simply return the children, so as not to pay them; or a relative who had thus far taken little interest might suddenly lay claim to this economically productive child. Anne could have gone to the “gimlet” Mrs. Blewett (p. 95), a fate more typical than coming under Marilla's care. Anne, however, had experienced only neglect and overwork. In Rainbow Valley, Mary Vance, showing bruises and telling of her guardian Mrs. Wiley's abuse, ran away before being sent to an even worse cousin: “I'd rather live with the devil himself” (ch. 5). (One may well wonder what the resentful orphans who set the house on fire and poisoned the well in Mrs. Lynde's accounts (p. 46) had endured!)

The orphan's option of running away was risky. Montgomery's “The Running Away of Chester” (1903) is a moral examination of the right to flee. Chester's neighbors are afraid to interfere and rouse the temper of the nasty Mrs. Elwell. His new, compassionate shelterers come close to admitting that he was right to leave. The 1845 P.E.I. act on apprentices (children working by contracts) includes in its provisions a punishment for anyone harboring a runaway apprentice. Protesting to a magistrate about bad treatment would depend on having witnesses with the courage to back up the complaints.

The prevention of cruelty is helped by supervision of the orphan's placement. Marilla made an extremely casual application. She had only “sent her [Mrs. Alexander Spencer] word by Richard Spencer's folks at Carmody,” upon which Anne was sent to an unseen caretaker (p. 45). At least in theory, Marilla could not have done this any later than 1882, when the Halifax orphanage rules included the obligation for applicants to have a certificate from a minister. By 1886 the application had to be in writing. However, unlike today's system using legal papers, social workers, and trial periods for adoption, there was then still little official process.

Attitudes toward orphans were changing from 1914, when children were still found in several Nova Scotia poorhouses. (That province's law supporting the poorhouse for two hundred years was rescinded only in 1958.) It was not until the 1920s that CAS became permanently effective there. World War I increased social change. How could one despise the children of heroes who had died for their country? In Rilla of Ingleside the heroine's determination to keep the boy if his father did not return hints at the need for looking after war orphans. Boatloads of Barnardo children came over after 1918.

Orphanages closed only in the 1960s, the Halifax one not until 1969. Recently, Republicans have suggested orphanages for “unwanted” children. We still need an exceptional Orphan Anne to remind us of the value of home and the need to care for the young and vulnerable.

Further Reading

Legislative Acts

[Nova Scotia.] “The Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the Ladies' Committee of the Halifax Protestant Orphans' Home” (1882). Halifax: Wm. Macnab & Son, 1883.

“The Twenty-ninth Annual Report of the Ladies' Committee of the Halifax Protestant Orphans Home” (1886). Halifax: Wm. Macnab & Son, 1886.

[P.E.I.] “An Act to repeal the several Acts now in force regarding apprentices, and to substitute other provisions in lieu thereof.” 8 Victoria C.14 (1845).

“An Act to consolidate and amend the several laws relating to education.” 24 Victoria C.36 (1861).

“An Act for the protection of neglected and dependent children.” C.15 (1910).

Critical Studies

Gail H. Corbett. Barnardo Children in Canada. Peterborough, N.H.: Woodland Publishing, 1981.

John Robert Cousins. “Horses in the Folklife of Western Prince Edward Island: Custom, Belief and Oral Tradition.” Unpublished M.A. thesis. St. John's, NF.: Memorial University, 1990.

General Bibliographies

Stan Fitzner. The Development of Social Welfare in Nova Scotia: A History. Halifax: Dept. of Public Welfare, 1967.

Michael Hennessey. The Catholic Church in Prince Edward Island 1720-1979. Charlottetown: Roman Catholic Episcopal Corp., 1979.

M[argaret] G. Jones. The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1938; London: Cass, 1964.

Heather Laskey. “A Victorian Orphanage.” The Atlantic Advocate. Nov. 1979: 26-29.

Margaret Pennefather Stukeley Gray Lord. One Woman's Charlottetown: Diaries of Margaret Gray Lord, 1863, 1876, 1890. Ed. Evelyn J. MacLeod. Hull, P.Q.: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1988.

Andrew Macphail. The Master's Wife. New Canadian Library No. 138. Intro. Ian Robertson, general ed. Malcolm Ross. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1939; repr. 1977.

Nellie L. McClung. Purple Springs. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1921.

Dorothy Marshall. Dr. Johnson's London. New Dimensions in History: Historical Cities. Series ed. Norman F. Cantor. New York: Wiley, 1968.

Claudia Mills. “Children in Search of a Family: Orphan Novels Through the Century.” Children's Literature in Education: An International Quarterly. 18:4 (1987): 227-39.

Mary Margaret Robb. Oral Interpretation of Literature in American Colleges and Universities: A Historical Study of Teaching Methods. N.p. H. W. Wilson, 1941. Rev. ed. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.

Patricia T. Rooke and R. L. Schnell. “Childhood and Charity in Nineteenth-Century British North America.” Histoire Sociale/Social History 15:29 (1982): 157-80.

———. Discarding the Asylum: From Child Rescue to the Welfare State in English Canada (1800-1950). Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America, 1983.

———, gen. eds. “Guttersnipes and Charity Children: Nineteenth Century Child Rescue in the Atlantic Provinces.” Studies in Childhood History: A Canadian Perspective. Calgary: Detselig, 1982, pp. 82-104.

———. “The Rise and Decline of British North American Protestant Orphans' Homes as Woman's Domain, 1850 1930.” Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal 7:2 (1982): 21-35.

“Welfare Reform: The Race to Look Tougher.” Newsweek (Nov. 21, 1994): 46.

Vicki L. Williams. “Home training and the socialization of youth in the sentimental novels of Marshall Saunders, Nellie McClung and L. M. Montgomery.” Unpublished M.A. thesis. Ottawa: Carleton University, 1982.

Personal Communications

Peter Rider, Ph.D., Atlantic Provinces Historian. Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa. Interview Aug. 9, 1995; written communication Aug. 10, 1995.