Before the development of a public health system and before vaccinations, antibiotics and modern diagnostics became widespread, orphans were commonplace. It should come as no surprise then that the orphan figure has been a standard in children's literature since its modern inception with texts like Newbery's The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765) and that orphaned children continue to be stock characters throughout modern children's literature. Although there are some ensemble casts in children's orphan stories – for instance, the two waifs at the heart of Brenda's Froggy's Little Brother (1875) – the orphan in children's literature is most often a single child outside, or teetering on the margins of, family life. Even when the child protagonist is part of an established family group they may be symbolically orphaned or isolated from the core family unit for extended periods of time. In many cases, the child protagonist removes themselves voluntarily from the family home, as Jim Hawkins does in R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) and Huckleberry Finn does in Mark Twain's novels of 1876 to 1896, in order to experience life beyond the limits of the domestic space. In such cases, the absence of parents, or at the very least the absence of attentive, nurturing parents, is a neat narrative trick performed in the opening chapters of the book, allowing the child character unprecedented levels of freedom, increased agency and the opportunity to have meaningful adventures free from adult oversight. These adventurous orphans and pseudo-orphans are almost exclusively male and although they seem to turn aside from established social orders, their travels and experiences actually prepare them to attain a more secure position within society. Christopher Parkes has argued persuasively that ‘Treasure Island grooms its hero, Jim Hawkins, to take his place in [an] emergent class’ (332) of modern civil servants, clerks and imperial administrators. While these adventures initially appear to distance Jim from his homeland and his society, they ultimately prepare him to become even more tightly integrated within middle-class British society.

The ‘preparatory lone adventure’ narrative is not normally available to female protagonists, who must instead attain the knowledge, agency and awareness to become meaningful players within wider society while operating within the confines of the domestic space and the family circle.