Cast Adrift
1872
A young mother wakes from childbirth asking for her baby. Her mother refuses to answer. This is the opening of Cast Adrift, an 1872 temperance novel that pulls no punches in its depiction of Victorian America's hidden horrors. Edith Dinneford has made what her mother considers a disastrous marriage to a man beneath their station. Now, weakened from labor, she is at her mother's mercy. Mrs. Dinneford sees only the marriage's damage to her social standing. What follows is a ruthless calculation: the infant is taken, hidden, its fate concealed from a mother desperate to hold her child. Arthur's novel functions as both unflinching social document and moral argument, exposing how ambition, class prejudice, and intemperance corrupt family bonds. Written during the height of the temperance movement, this is a story about what happens when the vulnerable become obstacles to be managed rather than people to be loved. It endures because its core remains painfully contemporary: the children who suffer for their parents' choices, the coldness that masquerades as propriety.
