In Victorian fiction, orphans embody vulnerability, while dramatising personal growth within a changing social panorama. They express social and cultural anxieties in an age of increasing mobility and uncertainty, define a need for good homes and families by exemplifying the effects of their absence, and in becoming adopted into unusual households, they question conventional domestic arrangements. The literary orphan's mystery of origins becomes channelled into investigations of early memories, child development and campaigns for the protection of children. Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838) influentially transforms traditional foundling tales into an account of child rescue, and yet Oliver's incorruptibility remains an incongruity in the text's social criticism. The complex narrative situation of Dickens's Bleak House (1853) self-consciously engages with the resulting epistemological impasse, addressing the orphan's shifting meaning in Victorian culture, while externalising the simultaneity of the Bildungsroman and the social panorama in the nineteenth-century novel. Esther Summerson describes herself as an unwanted child, ‘orphaned and degraded from the first of these evil anniversaries [her birthdays]’ (Bleak House 26), in juxtaposition with the omniscient narrator's metaphors of orphanhood to describe a society of disconnected individuals. ‘No Thoroughfare’ (1867), co-written by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, hinges on mysteries of origins in a convoluted plot of mistaken identities and sensationalised doubles, and yet it is also one of the notably few narratives that feature the Foundling Hospital centrally in the text and one of the first to describe the difficulties of adoption before its legalisation.

Whereas Dinah Craik's thesis novel about adoption, King Arthur (1886), becomes oddly fissured by the sustained narrative power of the orphan's mysterious origins, late-Victorian sensation novels challenge this plot device in order to dismantle readers’ expectations. Thus, in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Fatal Three (1888), the secret of an adopted child's parentage destroys families across generations. Yet with a direct intertextual reference to Bleak House, Braddon also critically reworks the orphan's role as a potential threat in sensation fiction. The ambiguities of the vulnerable, yet often mysterious, Victorian orphan still determine persistent clichés surrounding both the Victorians and orphans in literature.