Nobody’s Children: Orphans and their Ancestors in Popular Scottish Fiction after 1945

Abstract

The first stanza of the last canto of Byron’s Don Juan was written in 1823, in Genoa, and was followed by fourteen more, the last one scored out. Byron took them with him to Greece, but wrote no more. He died in April 1824. These, then, are poignant fragments: close to the last things the bad Lord ever wrote. The pathos is unavoidable. Byron continues: ‘if examined, it might be admitted / The wealthiest orphans are more to be pitied. // Too soon they are parents to themselves’.¹

The world is full of orphans: firstly, those

Who are so in the strict sense of the phrase

(But many a lonely tree the loftier grows

Than others crowded in the forest’s maze);

The next are such as are not doomed to lose

Their tender parents in their budding days,

But merely their parental tenderness,

Which leaves them orphans of the heart no less.