SOURCE: Weinstein, Cindy. “‘A Sort of Adopted Daughter’: Family Relations in The Lamplighter.” ELH 68, no. 4 (winter 2001): 1023-47.

In the following essay, Weinstein shows how Gerty's story in The Lamplighter is itself a paradigm of the production of domestic-relations laws, specifically those of adoption, which were formulated and debated concurrently with the novel's publication and which legally reconstituted “family” from a biological basis to that of choice based on domestic stability.

My title comes from a passage in Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854). Throughout the novel, Gerty, the main character, has no stable place in any one family. She is alternately Trueman Flint's “adopted child” or the child of True and Emily Graham who have “adopted her jointly.”¹ She is both a “doubly-orphaned girl” (176), according to Mr. and Mrs. Arnold, and she is an “orphan child” of the “good foster-mother world” (278). Exactly what it means to be an adopted child...