At the beginning of Christie's Old Organ, or, ‘Home Sweet Home’ (1874), a man known as old Treffy sits alone in his attic, turning the handle of his barrel organ. A little ragged boy called Christie creeps up the lodging-house stairs to listen, drawn by the strains of the familiar tune: ‘Home, Sweet Home’. This is the last song his mother sang to him as she lay dying, before uttering her final words: ‘I’m going home, Christie’ (Walton 6–7). The parentless child, cheerless lodging house and identification of death with home situate Christie’s Old Organ within a strand of children's literature known as the ‘waif’ or ‘street Arab’ novel, which flourished from the mid-1860s until the early twentieth century.

Most waif protagonists are orphans; either literally parentless or, following Laura Peters’ definition: ‘deprived of only one parent [or] “bereft of protection, advantages, benefits, or happiness, previously enjoyed” (OED)’ (Peters 1). There has been limited critical attention paid to this fertile genre of orphan literature, despite waif books having been the bestsellers of their age, with continuing readerships persisting through the twentieth century (Rose 2001) and, among evangelical groups in particular, into the twenty-first. For the purposes of this chapter, I will consider the following (non-exhaustive) group of thirteen books as exemplifying the genre. They are: The Story of Little Cristal (1863) by Mary Howitt; Jessica’s First Prayer (1865), Pilgrim Street (1867) Little Meg's Children (1868) Alone in London (1869), and Lost Gip (1873) by Hesba Stretton; Nothing to Nobody (1873) and Froggy's Little Brother (1875) by ‘Brenda’ (Mrs Castle Smith); Christie's Old Organ by Mrs O. F. Walton (1874), Scamp and I by L. T. Meade (1875), Her Benny (1879) by Silas Hocking; Dust, Ho!, or, Rescued from a Rubbish Heap by Mabel Mackintosh (1891) and Mollie's Adventures by May Wynne (1903).

The books I have selected are from a range of waif authors, with due weight given to the prolific and popular Hesba Stretton, along with examples from other well-known writers within the genre (‘Brenda’, Mrs O. F. Walton and Silas Hocking), and from authors who seem to have produced just a single waif narrative (Mary Howitt, L. T. Meade, Mabel Mackintosh and May Wynne). Most waif novels are set in London but I have included novels set in Liverpool (Her Benny), and Manchester (Pilgrim Street).