Chosen family and belonging

Chosen family and belonging in the novel emerge through repeated acts of care among people who have been deprived of reliable kinship. Sunday Small’s abandonment makes her acutely aware of what it means to grow up without a parent; her friendships with Daisy Branning and Tommy Branning, her place in Biddy Spooner’s household, and her continuing wish to shelter foundlings offer forms of belonging that blood and institutions have failed to provide. The idea is not a simple replacement for loss: it is made through practical responsibility, and remains vulnerable to separation.

Abandonment and the need for kinship

Sunday’s earliest model of family is the one she does not have. Left on the steps of the workhouse, she spends her childhood imagining that her mother will return and that they will leave together. In time, she accepts that her mother may be dead or may never have wanted her. That history gives emotional force to her response when Daisy, pregnant after Albert Pinnegar’s assault, recoils from the child because it will carry a connection to its father. Sunday argues against treating the baby as responsible for the violence that preceded its conception. She draws on her own experience of being left to explain the lasting pain a child may feel when a parent rejects them, even while recognizing that Daisy’s despair cannot simply be argued away. The exchange makes Sunday’s compassion personal: she is not speaking from an abstract belief in motherhood, but from the memory of a child who longed to be claimed.

The workhouse makes belonging precarious by design. Its women, boys, girls, and men live in separate sections, and inmates are occupied by divided routines of labor: men and stronger boys pick oakum, crush bones, or work in the gardens, while women and girls sew, cook, clean, and launder. The residents rarely come together except for Sunday church services. Sunday has seen how this separation harms families, so her later attachments form in opposition to a system that allocates people by category and labor rather than sustaining their ties. Her childhood longing for a family is shaped both by personal abandonment and by institutional arrangements that make separation ordinary.

Care as a practice of belonging

Sunday’s attention to the workhouse babies shows how chosen kinship begins before she can offer anyone a home. In the nursery, an intoxicated caregiver uses sloe gin to quiet the infants and leaves them hungry and in dirty binders. Sunday changes them, finds their skin sore and bleeding, and warms their milk before feeding them from glass bottles with rubber teats. The babies’ immediate physical needs—not a formal bond or promise—call forth her care. Her conduct contrasts with the institution’s neglect and anticipates her dream of a home where abandoned children would be clothed, fed, and educated.

At Biddy Spooner’s home, care becomes part of a household shared by people with different histories. Biddy agrees to take Nell from the workhouse because Sunday is overburdened, and Nell arrives shy but willing to work. Sunday prepares a room for her in the servants’ quarters rather than moving her into Daisy’s room. That room remains as Daisy left it, because Tommy is not ready to let anyone disturb it; Sunday understands that it is a place where he can still feel close to his sister. Her welcome to Nell therefore does not require erasing the dead or rushing the bereaved. Belonging makes room for a new member while respecting the attachments that came before.

A family chosen, and the grief of separation

Sunday regards Biddy and Jacob Bartlett as the nearest thing to a family she has ever had, alongside Daisy and Tommy. Her bond with the Spooners gives her security and affection, but does not cancel her grief for her friends. After Daisy’s death, Tommy eventually leaves Whittleford Lodge. Sunday hides her pain, remembers the hope she once placed in a mother’s return, and feels that the two friends who had become her family have now both left her. She waits for news from Tommy, then has to accept that he is not writing yet. Mickey later joins the household in Tommy’s place, but a new arrival does not make the absent person interchangeable: Sunday’s earlier loss and her continued concern for Tommy remain part of her experience of belonging.

Her London visit sharpens this understanding. Thinking of Daisy’s grave and the imprisoned queens at the Tower of London, Sunday reflects that wealth and fame matter less than good friends, a safe home, and people one loves. She recognizes that Biddy’s household and the people at Whittleford Lodge may be the closest family she will have. Biddy responds to Sunday’s sadness by squeezing her hand. The gesture does not undo the losses or restore the mother Sunday once imagined; it shows a present relationship answering sorrow with uncomplicated physical reassurance.

The limits and reach of the found-family ideal

Sunday’s wish to open a home for foundlings grows from her experience in the nursery, but she knows that a benevolent intention is not enough. She would need to afford a suitable property and secure the means to provide children with food, clothing, and education; even a lifetime of her wages would not be sufficient. Her dream therefore registers both an ethical commitment and the material limits imposed on someone in her position. She remains grateful for the home she has found with Biddy while recognizing that gratitude cannot fund the larger refuge she imagines.

The novel also presents care as something that can extend beyond Sunday’s own circle. When Lavinia Huntley rescues Cissie Burns, she intends to place the exhausted young woman in the care of Verity Lockett and Zillah, whose kindness she trusts. After Lavinia gives birth prematurely, Zillah brings her son to her, while Molly Worthington feeds the fragile baby every hour, including through the night. These relationships are not all the same as Sunday’s found family, but they reinforce its central logic: safety and attachment are sustained by people who take responsibility for another person’s needs. Against abandonment, enforced separation, and neglect, the novel makes family visible in what people do for one another—and in the care taken not to treat the vulnerable as disposable.