Joan Aiken on American orphans

I recently came across a website devoted to the work of the children's writer Joan Aiken (1924-2004).

Here she is writing in the London Review of Books in 1980:

American orphans, on the whole, did have to work extremely hard. The log-cabin-to-White-House fable was implicit in all their stories: if only you chopped up enough kindling and shooed the chickens off the porch with sufficient vigour, you would end up putting yourself through college and at least become a teacher, if not President. 

My comfortable family-buttressed childhood was cheered by comparison with the hardships of a whole series of American orphan sagas. There was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, who had to slave for her harsh aunt Miranda Sawyer in order to pay off the mortgage on her home. Fleda, in Queechy, had the same problem; the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. 

There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There was Tom Sawyer, painting the fence for Aunt Polly. 

Boys did not seem to work quite so hard as girls. Huck Finn, of course, is the Orphan that Got Away. That is his charm. No one can harness Huck, or put him to work: "No one is going to sivilise me. I been there before."