Classic Orphan Stories Free Online: 18 Books Built on the Same Plot
The orphan is the most-used device in nineteenth-century fiction, and the reason is structural rather than sentimental: a child with no parents can be moved anywhere, owes nothing to anyone, and has to be judged on what they are rather than on where they came from. Every question the Victorians wanted to ask about class, character and luck fits inside that setup. It is also, less comfortably, what a great many actual children were.
Eighteen of these are free to read in the library, and they split into four quite different books wearing the same premise.
The ones where the orphan changes the household
The dominant form, and the most durable. The child arrives somewhere cold and the place thaws.
- Anne of Green Gables — 1908, and the best of them. Montgomery's trick is that Anne does not reform Marilla by being good; she does it by being exhausting, and the softening happens off to the side where neither of them will admit it. Followed by Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne's House of Dreams, Rainbow Valley and the stories in Further Chronicles of Avonlea.
- Heidi — Spyri, 1881, and the purest version of the plot: a child is delivered to a grandfather nobody speaks to, and the mountain does the rest. Short chapters and enormous emotional swings; a five-year-old can follow all of it.
- The Secret Garden — Burnett, 1911, and the one that inverts it. Mary Lennox is not lovable, is not grateful, and is actively unpleasant for the first sixty pages, which is why the book works. Nothing thaws her but work.
- Pollyanna — 1913, and the book whose title became an insult. Worth reading past the reputation: the "glad game" is explicitly a coping mechanism invented by a child who has nothing, and the novel knows that.
- Understood Betsy — Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and the underrated one. An over-protected orphan is sent to a Vermont farm and discovers she is competent. Fisher had studied Montessori and the book is quietly an argument about education.
- Eight Cousins — Alcott, and the comic variant: Rose has too many relatives rather than none, and a guardian with theories.
The ones about being poor, told without comfort
- Oliver Twist — 1838, and the book that made the orphan a political argument. The workhouse chapters are still shocking and were meant to be; Dickens was attacking a specific piece of 1834 legislation. Fagin is a genuine antisemitic caricature and there is no reading around it.
- David Copperfield — his own favourite and half autobiography. The bottling-factory chapters are the closest Dickens came to writing about himself directly.
- Great Expectations — the most sophisticated book on this page, and the one that takes the orphan-made-good plot and demonstrates that it corrupts the orphan. Pip gets everything Oliver gets and is ruined by it.
- A Little Princess — Burnett's other one, and structurally the reverse of the usual: Sara starts rich and is orphaned into poverty. The attic chapters are why children reread it. Her earlier, shorter version of the same story is Sara Crewe, and reading both is an unusually clear look at a writer improving her own book.
The Horatio Alger machine
Alger wrote over a hundred novels on one plot — a penniless boy in New York, an act of honesty in front of a rich stranger, respectable employment — and he is the reason "rags to riches" is a phrase. Reading one is a curiosity; reading three is an education in how formula fiction works, because the seams are completely visible.
Eight are here: The Cash Boy, Paul Prescott's Charge, The Errand Boy, Try and Trust, Cast Upon the Breakers, From Farm to Fortune, Walter Sherwood's Probation and The Young Explorer, plus Fame and Fortune, which is the sequel to the one that made him famous.
Start with The Cash Boy. The interesting thing about Alger is what he cannot say: every hero's rise depends on a wealthy patron noticing him, which means the books preach self-reliance and demonstrate patronage on every page. More on him in Horatio Alger books free online.
The odd ones out
- Kim — Kipling, 1901, and the best-written book on this page. An orphan on the Grand Trunk Road who belongs to no community and is therefore useful to a spy service. It is a great novel about India and an imperial document at the same time, and both facts are load-bearing.
- The Children of the New Forest — Marryat, 1847, orphaned by the English Civil War and hiding in the forest. The oldest survival-skills children's novel in English.
- Clematis — an obscure 1918 reader, very plain prose, and included here because it is the exact plot stripped to its bones with nothing else going on. Genuinely useful for a child reading their first chapter book.
- A Little Girl in Old Quebec — Amanda Douglas, and the historical-setting version; the seventeenth-century Quebec detail is the draw.
Where to start
Anne of Green Gables if the reader is eight to twelve. The Secret Garden if they are the kind of child who dislikes sweet books. Great Expectations if they are fifteen and ready to see the plot taken apart. And Kim if what they actually want is a great novel and the orphan was incidental.
The shelf is browsable in one place as orphans in children's fiction and orphans in adult fiction, and the broader children's canon is in classic books for kids free online.