Animals, Angels and Americans: Remediating Dickensian Melodrama in the Comic Strip Little Orphan Annie (1924-45)

It is no secret that the orphan narratives by Charles Dickens were a major source of inspiration for Harold Gray’s highly successful comic strip Little Orphan Annie (1924-2006). Gray had a predilection for histrionic Victorian melodrama in general, and for Dickens in particular.1 Gray’s newspaper strip may legitimately be regarded as a remediation of Dickensian melodrama. An analysis of this shift in medium and the various changes it entailed will reveal how Gray contributed to a distinctly American take on the orphan character, rearranging the connotations of the child-savage analogy that was foundational to the depiction of orphans in Victorian melodrama. I will confine myself to comparing Gray’s strip to Oliver Twist (1838), since this novel features an orphan who remains “ten-ish” from the beginning of the story to the end, just like Annie, who never seems to have grown a single day older in the 86 years of her existence.2