I wanted to sit down and write a moving literary essay about adult orphanhood, but I am not in my office or near my books. I’m on the road, doing a mix of book promotion, holidaying, and visiting family in the United States. However, a self-imposed deadline is a self-imposed deadline, so I’ll just do what I can in the time that I’ve got.

I have orphans on my mind because I am one. On this trip, I’ve returned to where I grew up and my parents are no longer there. My father died in 2021, and my mother in 2023, and as sad as this makes me, I can’t help but recall the famous words of Lady Bracknell in the Oscar Wilde play The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’ Indeed, as modern life progresses and longevity increases, people may well expect their parents to live into their 90s, or even beyond. And, really, can a person call themselves an orphan when they’re pushing 50 years old? Or is this only a condition that can be experienced as a child? 

Certainly, losing one or both parents in childhood used to be far more common in a world overrun with disease and poverty. In trying to find some numbers on orphans in the United States  I came across a piece in the New York Times archive from 1955 which, even then, noted a precipitous drop in children without parents. According to the piece, in 1920 there were 800,000 orphans in the US, or 100 in every 5,000 children. By 1955, that was down to six per 5,000, with overall numbers at 90,000. And that was more than 70 years ago. The epidemics that so quickly took parents have been eradicated in much of the world, and now it is far more common to have parents living well into ages that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. 

I’m also back in the US at the moment to promote my latest book, The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas, and it’s impossible not to think about the millions of people who were ripped from their families during the four centuries that slavery and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade existed in the Americas. One particular story that I write about in my book is that of Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama. He was born to a free African woman, Luísa Mahin, in Bahia, Brazil. She later moved to Rio de Janeiro and abandoned Gama for reasons that are not clear. His father was from a prominent Portuguese family in Bahia, and he sold the young Gama into slavery in 1840 to pay his gambling debts. This meant that at the age of 10, despite having been born free, Gama became a slave, first in Rio and then in São Paulo. He also lost both of his parents, despite their being alive. Over the course of a difficult and painful adolescence, he learned to read and write and became interested in the law. Indeed, he was able to prove the illegality of his own enslavement and returned to freedom by around the age of 18.

Gama joined the military and continued to study law, as well as to develop his wider literary writing and poetry. He built a public profile, and in the late 1850s he was involved in legal battles to help enslaved people gain their freedom. For this work, he was known as the ‘Wretcheds’ Advocate’ and was believed to have helped at least 500 people out of slavery, despite never having obtained formal legal training because of the prejudice and ridicule he experienced when he made an initial attempt to study at the Academy of Law. Gama became a prominent voice in the Brazilian abolition movement and his writings in the newspapers O Ipiranga and Radical Paulistano were widely read and increasingly influential. ‘I want to be as mad as John Brown, as Spartacus, as Lincoln,’ he once said.

The world of slavery created many orphans, as did the larger imperial worlds around that system. Another story, this one from my childhood, is that of the spoiled Mary Lennox in the 1911 novel The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (whose novels often featured parental loss in childhood). Mary starts the book as quite unlikeable, though today such a traumatised little girl might receive a bit more sympathy. She was mostly raised by servants in India before her parents died in a cholera outbreak. After this, she was sent to live with a reclusive uncle in the Yorkshire Moors, who was nursing his own deep grief over the loss of his beloved wife, while also ignoring his bedridden son, Colin, who was the same age as Mary. The book had been a favourite of my mother, who had lost her own father at the age of 12, and as I first turned the pages of my her battered edition, I was transported into the twilight days of the British empire, though I could have hardly known the implication of that at the time. Tropical India was as equally foreign to me as the north of England. 

Orphans also have a place in the wider US public imagination. The same New York Times piece quoted above called orphans the ‘indomitable hero of much of our folklore’. In my case, this hero was Nancy Drew who, technically, was not an orphan, as she had only suffered the loss of her mother. Without a mom to nag her, the teenage sleuth was constantly zooming around River Heights in her convertible with her chums Bess and George, getting in and out of scrapes and solving crimes. Her busy but affectionate lawyer father employed a housekeeper named Hannah Gruen, who provided a maternal presence for the young Nancy but not the authority of a mother. 

Nancy, like so many of her contemporaries in young adult fiction, was able to have a wide range of adventures because the absence of a mother gave her a certain latitude and independence in the world. It’s not clear if this was by the author’s design, or if it was simply far more common in the 1930s, when the first book in the series appeared, to have suffered bereavement at a young age. (I can’t recommend highly enough the excellent biography of Nancy Drew and the women who wrote the series.)

However a loss comes about, the pain of losing one or both parents is profound. It can also be isolating, at whatever time in life. The opposite of being alone in the world — or feeling alone, without parents — is connecting to others. Some of this happens organically. We reach towards siblings, extended family, or friends when our parents are no longer with us. The young Mary Lennox in the Secret Garden learns this lesson: she helps her cousin, she makes friends with some of the estate’s staff, discovers the mystery of the eponymous garden, and in the process, stops behaving like a brat. 

The world of slavery, although filled with the pain of separation, is also full of stories about finding connection amid a cruel and unforgiving system of bondage. New relationships were forged, and people moved forward the best they could, creating their own families and networks as they lived in uncertain presents. In the case of Luís Gama, his troubled and painful past propelled him to becoming a national figure, renown for his work on abolition. When his life came to a sudden and early end, the city of São Paulo, where he lived, went into mourning as the news spread — flowers were placed around the city and along the funeral route. When the procession started, 4,000 people joined in, walking behind Gama’s casket. They represented his life’s work: enslaved people and those he had been able to help reach freedom, lawyers, journalists, and grateful readers of his writings. 

The lesson, perhaps, from both literary and real stories is that orphanhood may be permanent, but building community and making connections is one way to navigate those losses. 

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What I’m …. doing

Full confession: being on the road and seeing so many people means I have been talking a lot and consuming very little in terms of books, podcasts, or movies. However, there has been baseball, beer, and old friends. So, this fortnight’s recommendation is to put down your screen, get in touch with an old friend, and have a proper catch-up.