Jason:
Hello everybody, welcome back to the Mother's Choice channel. Today we are here to interview our very own IB teacher, Miss Alice Mumby. We are very honored. As hosts today, I'm Jason, and this is Javan, both in our very immaculate costumes. This is called color blocking, by the way, because it's blue and yellow.

Ms. Mumby:
Lovely.

Jason:
Thank you, thank you. So, the topic of choice for today, I believe, is adoption and its representation in literature because Miss Mumby is an avid reader and connoisseur of literature, so who better to ask?

Ms. Mumby:
I am indeed both of those things. I'm also an English teacher, so hopefully I can help you learn something about the representation of adoption in literature. So, one of the things I think that's quite interesting when you start looking into this topic is that a lot of the issues related to adoption in literature come into novels and other types of literature in the 19th century. So, I don't know how much you know about the history of adoption in places like the UK at that time.

Jason:
Not very much.

Javan:
Yeah, not very much. Would you care to elaborate?

Ms. Mumby:
So, it's quite interesting, really, because obviously the UK, like many countries in Europe, went through an industrial revolution, and with that, a lot of people moved from the countryside into urban areas. With that as well, with the moving workforce and also the rise of child labor, many people were living outside of the communities they had lived in previously. It also meant that in those urban populations, wealth was quite a big factor in why people moved and also when they had children. A lot of the time, people had to think about their situation financially. What happened in the 18th century was that a lot of people started noticing in cities like London that there were many children on the streets, including many babies left to die on the streets, and it became quite a big urban issue. Obviously, this actually started to come into literature as well, because literature often represents some of the issues that are happening at the time. So, we see it in novels by people like Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters and things like that.

Javan:
I think one of the first books we would like to talk about as a major point would be Oliver Twist, because, as you just said, kids were on the streets very often, and they might end up being involved with gangs. Could you talk about how you think adoption is represented in Oliver Twist?

Ms. Mumby:
Yeah, so Charles Dickens is an interesting one because he wrote his literature mostly as a form of social commentary. He was a big philanthropist. So what that means is he's interested in giving, right? He's interested in giving to people who have less, but he's also very interested in poverty in London. In Oliver Twist, what we see in that novel is a young boy who ends up on the streets. He's orphaned, like many Victorian children, and he's taken in by this gang of criminals. Obviously, we would prefer not to see adoption in this kind of way today in terms of modern representation, but actually, Dickens has quite a nice ending to this story, which is that Oliver Twist is taken in by a kind, benevolent older gentleman, and he ends up living quite a nice life. So, we see a positive view of adoption in Oliver Twist, but we also see a lot of the troubles that young children experienced during this time as well.

Jason:
Absolutely agree, yeah. The gangs were a very big part of that. Adding on to that, aside from the gang part, what other troubles do you think could befall orphaned children or children who need to be adopted?

Ms. Mumby:
Yes, so the concept of adoption, at least in Western literature, changed over time, and adoption itself in the UK in particular changed over time as well. Originally, adoption was something that tended to happen within families. It would be a child whose parents died because of sickness, war, or whatever, who was then taken in by other family members. Usually, we see the representations of this in literature as being quite traumatic for the child. For example, in Jane Eyre, when Jane is a young girl, she's orphaned, and her aunt begrudgingly takes her in, and then she has quite an unhappy childhood. Often the portrayal of adoption in Victorian literature is to do with children who are left perhaps to another family member; they then may be treated unkindly and have quite a difficult time. Victorian literature, interestingly, perpetuates a lot of these, hopefully, myths about adoption as well, because the way we see adoption now would perhaps be something much more positive than how it is portrayed in earlier forms of literature. Having said that, though, one thing I do think is really interesting is that often we see characters maybe have some initial struggle but then come to some kind of happy resolution where they find their own family in different ways, and that family is not necessarily the adoptive family. It could be that they marry someone when they get older, and they start their own family. So, we see lots of positive depictions of adoption as well.

Javan:
Straying a bit away from the literature theme that we have going on, adoption has also been represented adequately in movies as well. One particular example I'd like to talk about is Meet the Robinsons, where the main character is eventually adopted by a very eccentric family. Have you ever watched that movie?

Ms. Mumby:
I have not watched that movie, Javan.

Javan:
Maybe we'll have to move our focus somewhere else.

Ms. Mumby:
I would still be interested to hear what kind of view of adoption you get in that.

Javan:
The movie puts its emphasis on two different children, one of whom gets adopted because he's very good at science, and then he grows up to be this entrepreneur and innovator in the near future, while the other one, who does not get adopted, grows up to be the evil supervillain that does everything to take down the original main character. It really just shows the two sides of how adoption can sometimes save the child from dire situations like this. Do you have anything to add, Jason?

Jason:
Well, I think on top of that, adoption can absolutely save children, and beyond that, I think adoption introduces them to new families, and family, as Ms. Mumby has stated, is what they make of it. Oftentimes, the good ending they end up getting can come from many different people, people they've never met. It can be extended family. It could even be people of their own age. For example, one of the staple books in our primary school literature lessons was The Boxcar Children. That story entails four orphaned children who survive on their own without the help of adults. To me, I feel like they are their very own family.

Ms. Mumby:
Yes, yeah. I think that idea of the creation of family is quite interesting and definitely a theme that runs through other texts. So, in Jane Eyre, for example, she has quite an unhappy childhood as she's adopted by her aunt, and she's treated very poorly compared with her cousins. But then, as she grows up, she finds her own family in the form of Mr. Rochester and the new life that she leads. What's interesting about some of these storylines is, although we see a certain element of struggle and sometimes, unfortunately, trauma as well, we also see some positive representations of the future that adoption can offer, and also new families as well, and the potential for that. Another thing that I've read about more recently—and this is a contemporary novel, but it's based on the Regency, so the Georgian period—is they actually created the first Foundling Hospital in London. So, in London in the late 18th century, a philanthropist actually established a hospital because he saw so many babies on the street, and it was a place where mothers could leave their children if they couldn't take care of them. From there, those children would be adopted. This hospital continued for many, many years, and it saved many children's lives. It was born out of obvious need, poverty, and things like that. But the novel, which is called "The Foundling," and it's by Stacey Hall, tracks one child who's left there and who is actually reunited with her mother as well. So, I think that's also another interesting portrayal of a story that perhaps begins with struggle and this kind of impoverishment but then becomes something a lot more hopeful.

Jason:
Yeah, that's a beautiful story, I think, and definitely worth checking out. It's also very much akin to the work done by Mother's Choice, the organization, where they do try to help children find adopted families and just have their own families, just generally. Yeah. Do you have anything to say, Javan?

Javan:
You also mentioned "The Secret Garden" as one of the books that you think relates to the topic, and, having not actually read it in its entirety, would you mind giving us a quick synopsis of it?

Ms. Mumby:
So, I absolutely adored this novel when I was young. I have to admit, it's one of those ones that's so interesting because I don't know if you've read many novels that were written at this time. It's written around 1911, I think, so it's kind of the beginning of the 20th century. You have also "A Little Princess," which is from a similar kind of time. And it actually begins in colonial India, which is quite interesting. So, when you read texts such as "Mansfield Park" by Jane Austen or "The Secret Garden," one of the things you get is a bit of an insight into the British Empire. You see how this young girl is orphaned because her parents die in colonial India. They die of—I think it's cholera—and then she has to move to the UK. Similarly, in "A Little Princess," she has to leave India; her mother dies, and she goes to boarding school in the UK.

And so, you get this kind of movement of people, which must only exacerbate going through adoption as well because you have displacement of people. And then in "The Secret Garden," the young girl is put into the care of her uncle, and she has to adapt to England. She has to adapt to a new family. But also, her portrayal as a character at the beginning is quite unforgiving. She doesn't seem to be a very nice person, and initially, you don't really identify with her very much as a character. Her uncle who's adopted her is very absent. But she grows as a character; she kind of transforms. She makes friends with the other children near where she lives. She becomes a very kind figure. She's very kind to one of the boys who lives near her, and he's in a wheelchair. At the end, she and her uncle have formed a really close bond. So that's interestingly, again, kind of like a story of adoption where it seems almost quite fraught and troubled at the beginning but has quite a positive ending in terms of how she forges that new family life. That's quite an interesting one, and I absolutely love that story. I would definitely recommend it to anyone.

Javan:
If adoption is like a struggle in some depictions, would you say that finding a found family would be the solution or the conclusion to the story?

Ms. Mumby:
Wow, that's a really tough question. I mean, I think that, as with any big change that happens to people in their lives, there are often initial difficulties that we experience. One thing that I'm not always keen on in terms of some of the Victorian representations is how adoption and the adopted children are often mistreated or quite poorly treated. I think that sometimes that's quite negative, and obviously, you would really hope that's definitely not the case in modern adoption situations. However, I do also think, as you were saying, new families represent potentially a completely new life, so many opportunities that wouldn't otherwise be available, and family is so important for children. So, I would like to think that at least we see that in all of these texts, even though some of the portrayals might be dated or sometimes a little bit harsh—maybe set very much in the context of their time and place—hopefully, we still get a positive view of the optimistic potential of adoption.

Jason:
I think that's great. Another thing we could bring attention to would be, as you mentioned, for example, in the "Little Princess" story, how at the start she is not very likable or she can be a little troublesome. That could point out the fact that children who have not been raised with parents or have not been given a proper childhood may end up being more troubled, especially the ones that don't get adopted until adulthood, which could mean that they characteristically fail to develop as much as other people would. So, what do you think this says about the issue of children needing to be raised properly?

Ms. Mumby:
That's quite an interesting one because a lot of these books, since they're older, depict children in a quite different way anyway, because the Victorian and Edwardian view of children was quite different to perhaps how we would see children now. We know a lot more about child development. We know a lot more about psychology. We hopefully have a better understanding of children and how they should be treated when they're young. Victorian and Edwardian society saw children very much often as little less than small adults. So, they were expected to work. There was an expectation that they should be able to behave themselves properly very quickly; there weren't many allowances given to children. I think some of this partly comes from the quite unforgiving attitude that writers at this time probably had towards children, but also the idea of environment and how children need that kind of care to be properly appreciated and understood. I think "Jane Eyre" actually tackles this quite well because we feel sorry for her when she's mistreated, and we do feel like it's an injustice when she's locked away in a room by her aunt for misbehaving. The reader understands this isn't something that's fair. Actually, that's quite a progressive view of how children should be treated as well. That's one of the reasons I like that text so much—because it is quite progressive in its views of children and women. I think Charlotte Brontë was a little bit ahead of her time, and now we can appreciate, of course, that we need to be patient and understanding of people who go through some quite difficult experiences, including children.

Javan:
You talk about children who have to grow up in these environments that may be hostile to them. That reminds me of the book Ms. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which I'm sure you guys have heard of, which is about peculiar children with superpowers who are ultimately adopted into a secluded home in the countryside because they believe the outside world would not accept who they are. So that really ties into the whole found-family trope, I guess. But ultimately, I guess we need to transition to the next part, which is a bit more personal, if you don't mind. You are a parent. Have you ever considered adoption?

Ms. Mumby:
Yes, I have. So, I have two daughters who are twins. They're seven years old. I know people who've adopted personally. I think adoption is an amazing thing. I think if I were to have more children, it would definitely be something that I would consider. I've seen many happily adopted children, and I've got many friends who've brought up adopted children, and I think it's really a positive thing. I suppose it's the same thing, though, with having a child; you always have to think about whether or not it's something—because it's a huge commitment, it's an investment. So you always want to make sure it's something you're going to be able to give your very best and your all in. Currently, I have no plans to have any more children, but I do think it's a really amazing and admirable thing. So my friends who've experienced it have experienced it in Hong Kong and also in Canada as well, and they have some quite interesting stories.

Jason:
That's great. Thank you so much for your insight. I'm afraid that is all the time we have for today, but I've had the most wonderful time, and once again, we thank Ms. Alice Mumby very much for her time and for helping out with the podcast today. We're very grateful. Were there some takeaways that we have from today's very insightful, deep, and thought-provoking discussion? For example, the concept of found family and how progressively adoption has been portrayed throughout history and literature as we get closer to modern times, and so on and so forth. Do not forget to support Mother's Choice, the Mother's Choice YouTube channel, as well as our DBS Mother's Choice Instagram, which you'll be seeing both of this on. So once again, thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll hopefully see you next time.