"...in reality they posed a significant social problem for poor law authorities and philanthropists."

"... the Victorians needed, indeed created, orphans as scapegoats threatening the family."

"The family, Peters argues, was for the Victorinas the becrock of society, and if it functioned properly, loyalty to it. Orphans posed a threat because they were without family, displaced persons, outsiders."

"We may be inclined to think of an orphan as a child whose parents have died,but the word was also used to describe those who had lost only one parent, and those who had been deserted by their parents"

"Children who have been deserted three years to be considered orphans..."

"In imagination they (the orphans) became linked with other outsiders, Gypsies, criminals, and colonized subjects, none of

whom were thought to be properly rooted within English society."