In 1820s and 1830s literary annuals—a very popular from of middlebrow family publishing that saturated the print market in the early decades of the nineteenth century—we find a striking preponderance of poems, stories, and images featuring displaced children. Usually pictured on their own, these children are often from abroad, and often from a different continent. Many appear in picaresque adventures, and they are usually the object of intense pity and concern on the part of readers.
Why are there so many of these characters?
And what reality do they represent?
In this talk, I will examine the representation of transnationally displaced children in nineteenth-century literature and art and track the children in history whose lives were uprooted in the migrations that reshaped the nineteenth-century world.
How do these cultural representations and the lived experience of children intersect?
How does the reality of child migration impact the nineteenth-century history of childhood?
From Mignon to Heathcliff, from the child apprentices in the cotton mills of England to the enslaved children of African descent who find themselves washed up on the streets of London, spectres of displaced children infiltrate the nineteenth-century imagination, contributing to ideas about destitute childhood that persist even today.

Josephine McDonagh is Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Chair of the Development of the Novel in English and Distinguished Service Professor, Department of English and the College, University of Chicago. In Hilary and Trinity 2025, she is Visiting Fellow at All Souls College Oxford. She is a scholar of nineteenth-century British literature whose work has increasingly focused on the global circulation of literature and the impacts of European colonialism in the rest of the world. Her most recent book, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876 (2021), reevaluates the significance of demographic mobility and settlerism in the British literary imaginary. She is now co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Literature and Migration. Her current work thinks about children and migration, in particular, the persistence of figures of displaced children within print cultures of the nineteenth century.

Further Details and Contacts:

This is an in-person event and will not be recorded.

Registration is required and will close one week before the event (5:30 pm on 9 May). Confirmations of successful registration will be sent out one week before the event.

Please note that this event is exclusively open to current members of the University of Oxford. Workshop places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to members of the English Faculty.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.