Lost Children of Georgian London (Part 1)
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Thomas Coram, ship's master, had recently returned home from America and was making his way from the docklands of Rotherhide to the centre of London. Walkers ran past him, shops opened, coaches rolled, carts shook the ground, the street rang with the cries of the city. Here and there, its inhabitants went about their lives.

A woman from Billingsgate carrying fish, a milkmaid chalking her bill on the door. The crash of barrels rolling into brewers' cellars, the creak of swinging signs in the wind that threatened rain.

From his carriage window, Coram saw it all. A black canal of mud burbling with sewage down the centre of the street. Chimney sweeps skulking along, marking sooty stains on heedless passers-by. Dustmen pushing carts with ashes flying off them and butchers with hands caked in blood. None of this shocked Coram. London life was dirty and hard. It always had been. So what?

But what made his brow furrow now, what he kept seeing and thinking about, were the children, the infants of this hard, busy city spat out onto mud-splattered street corners and down alleyways.

Boys and girls of eight or ten years of age starving amongst the throng like cats or dogs. Small faces huddled in shadows, older ones holding the little ones in their laps. Babies abandoned by the side of the road by mothers who could not care for them, dare not care for them. How could a city of such wealth accept this? Something needed to be done and he,

Thomas Coram, ship's master, would do it if no one else would.

Hello and welcome to After Dark. I, as ever, am Anthony. And I, as sometimes, am Maddy. And today we are in the 18th, well, mostly in the 18th century and a little bit into the 19th century.

to tell the story of the Foundling Hospital. So Maddy and I are in our historical sweet spot for this one. They're not directly related, but this has some similar issues that were raised in our Amelia Dyer episode. So if you haven't listened to that, go back and check that one out too. It's in the back catalogue there somewhere. But this specific one is a history that spans across decades and centuries in some ways because it still has an impact in our own time. It is a fascinating history with loads of personal stories.

But as Maddy was kind of saying there, there's also something that can sometimes be quite emotionally difficult or complex or tricky about this history. So it's an interesting one to delve into. We're going to encounter injustice and anger, but also hope and kindness, which will be right up against sorrow and cruelty in this history. This is a really complex saga, really.

It's a history that has affected all levels of society. And across these two episodes, we'll be hearing about some of the richest and then also some of the poorest people in British society. But more than anything, this is, I suppose, a history about human beings and their capacity to be both good and bad.

to do bad as well. And we'll encounter some of those difficult histories as we go through, as I'm saying. So this is a good one, Maddy. We're looking forward to this one. I've been really excited to do this for ages. And as you're going to hear in this episode, I went with one of our producers to the Foundling Museum, as it is now, on the site of the Foundling Hospital. And we're going to get into how much of the original building or buildings are left, what that site looks like now. But

Going there, and I've been before, but every single time I go, I feel it really deeply. I get really emotional about this. And I don't know if we're becoming hardened to this on After Dark, but there's not that many episodes now where it stays with me. The one that springs to mind is our Joseph Merrick episode where we did actually have a little bit of a cry during the recording of that.

But this one is a really delicate history and I really want to do it justice. So I'm very excited to do this today. Anthony, do you think it's fair to say the foundling history and the foundling museum is something of a, I suppose, a mecca for historians of the 18th century? It's a history that we all...

get taught. We're all kind of trained in, I suppose. Is it something that you connect with? It is, but for very practical reasons in many ways, because when I was preparing to do my PhD, my supervisor who ended up being my supervisor is Professor Helen Berry. And if you Google one of Professor Helen Berry's books, it is Orphans of Empire. And it is probably the most recent, most thorough, most celebrated history of the Foundling Museum and about one foundling in particular.

And from Helen's title there, you might gather that foundling was the term used in the 18th century, but not just in the 18th century, for a child who was orphaned, not necessarily orphaned, could have been abandoned, could have been given up. So it's a child who is basically put in care, as we would understand it.

And so in preparation for applying for my PhD with Helen, Orphans of Empire was one of the books that I poured over again and again just to try and get that tone of the 18th century right. And just was so fascinating to hear some of the things that Helen was able to share that didn't make it into the book, but that did, you know, she encountered in the archive, which she spent years in.

So, yeah, it is. And it's a very, as you say, Maddy, it's a great place to visit. It's one of the most interesting museums in London, I think. I agree. And I think hopefully listeners who haven't been before will hear these two episodes and then take themselves off to go and see it. And I think, you know, there's something so emotive about

about the idea of the foundling. It's deep in our culture. If you think of the literary or cinematic foundlings, we've got Harry Potter, we've got your Oliver Twist's Mowgli, Lyra, Anne Shirley, Tom Riddle, Matilda. I've been adding to this list as I've been preparing for this and our producer Freddie's written Heidi on there. Who is Heidi?

Heidi? You don't know who Heidi is? Who's Heidi? She's the girl with the goat and the, well, the pigtails and the... Yeah, it's like, I don't really know. She was on a TV show. I think it's books as well. I didn't know she was an orphan, to be fair. Well, you learn something new on this every day. So we have, on the one hand, this very kind of romanticised literary version in our heads of what a foundling might be. But the reality, of course, for...

people living in the 18th and the 19th century in London, that reality was quite difficult. Life for children living in poverty in particular could be very bleak, very dangerous, very difficult. And there wasn't really a safety mechanism in place for those children until the foundling. So that's the history that we want to talk about. Let's give a little bit of context, Anthony, and I'm going to share this with you because this is a time period that we both know intimately. But

I mean, that's very unfair. You're very much an early 18th century person. I'm more of a Regency person heading into the 19th century. So this is more your territory than mine. It is. But...

We're in London. We're beginning in the 1730s, the late 1730s. So George II is on the throne. The Hanoverian monarchy is in full swing. Now, the first decades of that century have been shaped, interrupted, challenged by the Jacobite rising. So the supporters of James II, who is ousted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688,

have these multiple risings against the Hanoverians that have taken over the throne. And the final one, of course, will happen in 1745-6 and we're not there yet. But it's a period when the British Empire is growing and

across the globe, but also we have these tensions and these potential dangers at home. So it's quite a volatile period, right? Yeah, and it's changing not just globally, but at home as well. The way we understand politics is changing. We're coming into the era of the first prime minister. So Robert Walpole is going to be changing how government is done.

England at this time. But as you've kind of been pointing at there, Maddy, this is also like a world of two halves, where you have this Enlightenment idea, which is finding its expression in print culture, which is growing and growing and growing exponentially at this time. And then you also have extreme poverty, and it's very much the haves and have-nots. And some of those conditions were

We're more aware of them from the 19th century because Dickens draws such attention to them, but they're there in the 18th century. They were documented certainly by the 1720s.

And the filth, the smells, the deprivation, often what was causing a lot of this was waste from growing industry. So for instance, offcuts from butchers that are just slung into the streets, animal waste because animals are wandering some of these streets too, depending on the area. If it's a well-heeled area, okay, you're not going to find pigs wandering through, but in poorer areas you will. So

So this is very much the setting for what we can see. And Maddy, I know when you were at the Foundling Museum, there were some interesting stats that you came up with that they had provided about just the amount of children who were abandoned or who were living in poverty. Yeah, so in this context of this terrible poverty and this divide between the rich and the poor, we get parents who, most often mothers, of course,

who can't look after their children. They literally can't afford to keep them or they can't keep their children. They can't even admit to having parented them within the hierarchies and the restrictions that they're living in. These aren't people abandoning their children because they simply don't care. There's a multitude of reasons. One of the statistics on the Foundling Museum website is that in the 1730s,

Every single year in London, a thousand babies were abandoned because of extreme poverty. And that's just a statistic that feels so removed and so alien to us. And it's really hard to visualize what that would mean in the societal context.

moral, human cost of that is so complicated. In one parish in London by the middle of the 18th century in the 1760s, 86% of those abandoned babies died in the first year. Some were, I suppose,

quite literally picked up and helped by the other children living on the street or other adults living on the street. And they might be the lucky ones to survive, to get help, to be fed. But 86% of them died in the first year abandonment. It's really shocking. So to give a sort of flavour of the conversations that were going on at the time around the

the cost of poverty and its effect on society, I want you to look at what I think is Hogarth's most famous image. And it is an image you are all going to know in your mind's eye. And that is the print cartoon of Gin Lane. So Anthony, for anyone who hasn't seen this or can't conjure it, and as soon as Anthony starts describing it, I think you will know what we're talking about. But tell us what we're looking at.

So there's so much going on in this image, which is called Gin Lane, as Maddy said, that all the codes, I won't be able to describe all of them. So I'm going to give you an overview of the picture as best I can, but there's just so much going on. You could spend hours on this. And indeed, lecturers do at university. At the centre of the image, you have a woman dressed in rags, sitting on some steps, and

And she is bare chested and she has, it seems, let a child fall from her care. The implication being that she is not a worthy mother because of substance abuse, etc. She's looking very disheveled. She's got cuts and bruises on her legs. As I say, her clothes are all torn.

And that child is falling over a banister down into the street below. You also have, if you just look up from her, there are bodies being placed into wooden coffins. There's an undertaker's advertising with a coffin that's a sign coming out from the shop. The buildings are crumbling literally down onto the street, onto the people below.

there is one section of another building that's missing and within that you can see that there is a body hanging from a rafter. There is no end to what I'm seeing here. A lot of it, of course, it says relating to Gin Lane and

And, you know, I've literally missed hundreds of symbols and hundreds of things out of here. But it's, oh, there's another woman there on the right-hand side and she's feeding her child what we presume will be gin as well. There's another very emaciated man on the right-hand corner down the front who's been drinking gin and he's passed out and he's, you know, skin and bone because gin has laid waste to his life, basically. So, yeah, it's an image of degradation. It's an image of poverty. It's an image of alcoholism. It's an image of

It's a critical image from Hogarth's point of view, where he's saying basically gin is ruining London. Anthony, do you remember when you were little and at Christmas, would you ever get the big fat copy of the Radio Times? I lived in Ireland, so no. So was there no Radio Times in Ireland? Okay, sad. Not the living in Ireland, the lack of Radio Times, of course. But inside that, there was a Hogarthian style sort of collaged scene that

that would have clues for every single show that was going to be on at Christmas and it would be like a street scene or something or the interior of a pub and every single item would be a clue.

And I feel like Hogarth is the original of that. Oh, of course. But incredibly bleak and pessimistic. So Hogarth himself is a really interesting character in the foundling hospital's history. And we will come on to talk a little bit more about his relationship with it. But he was very, very interested in the conversations around poverty, the sort of moral dilemma of do you...

help people out of these cycles of behavior. We see in this image the sort of hinting towards generational repetition that these parents, specifically mothers again, these women are being shamed for gin addiction or substance addiction, whatever it is, that their children, if they do survive, are fated to repeat that cycle. That's something that Hogarth is very interested in, this idea of

people being born to a certain fate and not being able to escape their social class and their circumstances. In this image in particular, there are so many children. I don't know if you can see to the right, just above the emaciated figure in the

And to the left of the breastfeeding mother who's dropped her child, as you say, down a flight of stairs, there are some children who, I mean, I think they're children, they're tiny. They are so emaciated, they have this really haunted expression. And one of them is gnawing on a bone that he's sharing with a dog, a stray dog. And you can start to see, of course, this is a very heightened story.

satirical image. This isn't necessarily a documentation of what the Georgian street life looked like if you stepped out of the door, but we start to get this flavour of the realities of poverty in London. So you can see why there's a need for some kind of

as I say, safety mechanism or charity that is going to maybe combat some of these issues that we see in the city. And in steps Thomas Coram. He is a remarkable figure. He

It's so fascinating to me because he's sort of unconnected. Other than being a citizen of London, he's unconnected to this poverty. He's not from a particularly wealthy background. And that's an interesting thing that goes on to shape his story with the Foundling Hospital and his efforts to get wealthy patrons. But he just looks around him and says,

someone needs to do something here and I'm going to be the person to do it. And I think that's a pretty inspirational stance to take. But it does take him 17 years from having that moment of realisation to actually getting there.

what will become the Foundling Hospital set up. That entire time he campaigns for funding, he approaches wealthy lords and ladies. Eventually in 1739, he achieves a royal charter from George II to set up the hospital. And he tries to attach patrons to it.

He finds that they're all really reluctant, not least because he isn't of their social class, so why would they want to help? Why would they want to help the children of poor, possibly substance-addicted mothers who, in the eyes of a lot of people, have failed morally and can't look after their own children? Why would anyone want to do that? The tactic that he uses is then to apply

to the wealthy wives, sisters, mothers of these rich men. And he starts to gain more traction with them. And soon they are coughing up and the hospital starts to get its funding. And then in comes Hogarth, who we know is so interested and so concerned with the poverty that he's seeing. And together they have this really great idea. And Hogarth

I'm always fascinated by whether this is a very, very clever marketing strategy that they come up with, or whether this happens a little bit more organically than that. It's never verbalised between the two of them. But what happens is Hogarth starts to donate his artwork, including a huge portrait of Coram himself, to the newly built hospital, built with the money from George II, and other paintings.

The composer, George Friedrich Handel, also comes on board and starts to...

do performances there. We know that the first ever performance of The Messiah takes place in Dublin, but the second, I believe it's the second, takes place in the Foundling Hospital for a London audience. And so people start to come to this space as almost a cultural hub. This is, in a lot of ways, it's certainly called this, if you do any research online, it's the first public British art gallery.

There are lots of private art collections in the 18th century, but this is the first time people can go somewhere publicly to look at an art collection that's growing. And when they get there, they then see these children who've been quote-unquote saved from the poverty that they found themselves in. And then they're persuaded to part with their cash. So it becomes quite a clever system, really.

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applies to online activations, requires port in and auto pay. Customers activating in stores may be charged non-refundable activation fees. But let's talk about the site itself that Coram first built because I want you to have a sense of what this space was like and what people coming to it, whether in desperation or as tourists coming to look at art, would have seen. I've given you another picture, Anthony. I'm making you work very hard this episode. This is a print, again,

of the early iteration of the foundling. So describe this building, please. And it is really complicated. I'm sorry in advance. No, this is very pleasing to my Palladian leanings, I have to say. So when I say Palladian, this is such a good example of Palladian architecture. Palladian architecture is huge in Britain at this time. So if you're thinking the Palladian style, you're thinking...

symmetry. You're thinking simple but classic lines. This is obviously a throwback to the classical age in Italy and in Europe.

And it is all columns and beautiful symmetry throughout the windows and everything's equal and equally spaced. And it's just all very grand. Think Burlington House, for instance, which was built within a few years of this same building. So it's grand. It's very symmetrical. Looking straight at the building now, there are three sections to it. There is the main hub, which is

is directly ahead. And then either side, it's got what I guess we can describe as wings, which match one another. So again, that symmetry, that matching, it's what you would come to expect from the Palladian style. It's then surrounded by a very simple but quite imposing wall, I suppose, some of which the outer regions look to be wooden in this, but the main pillars are also of stone to match the house.

And again, they're in the Palladian style. And actually, what's interesting about what I'm seeing in the forecourt, because there's another image which relates to the Foundling Hospital and it shows the children in the forecourt. But this forecourt picture shows very well-dressed 18th century women

Men and women? I'm looking for a woman. Yes, I see two women there. So men and women who are, oh yes, there's couples there as well. So they're doing what you were talking about, Maddy, and it seems very much like they're visiting. The gates are open, so it's very much inviting the outside in. There seem to be some stewards there as well. But this is a showpiece, without a doubt. Yeah, no, I think, I mean, amazing description.

We are now an architecture podcast. We are, we are. Anthony will now name every single Palladian building in Britain and Ireland. Go. No, I won't. No, I think you're absolutely right. The gates are open. This isn't designed for this particular audience as an imposing fortress. This is something soft and inviting and something for tourists to come and gawp at, I suppose.

So in the city, it's a stone's throw from the British Library and King's Cross Station. It's in that corner of London. And if you go there today, as I did recently with our producer, you can go and see. So a lot of the wings and the original buildings are lost to us now, but a lot of the actual rooms and some of the architectural features from the interiors have survived and

The building there today is modern build. I think it's 20th century. It might even be parts of it built relatively recently.

But there are entire rooms that have been recreated using the original artworks, the original plaster, the original materials, the fabrics from the interior of the building. And there's the original staircase as well from one of the wings. So the two wings that we're looking at in this image, there's the boy's wing and the girl's wing. And these children were kept separately. And I was listening actually to some audio recordings of testimonies from

children who were in the Foundling Hospital in the early 20th century. And they talked about how in the girls' wing, you would never set eyes on the boys apart from maybe Christmas Day at the church in the middle. You'd attend at the same time and that kind of thing. So they were kept very separate. But even though a lot of that space is lost, because there are these survivals and they've been reincorporated into the museum,

You do feel when you go there that you're stepping back into this space and you can kind of imagine, you know, all these little hands and feet going up and down the staircase and opening the doors and things. It is really evocative. Do you know what? And I totally, totally get what you're saying, Maddy. I never get it. It's one of those places that I'm always a little thrown by. And it's actually not the only one. I get this a lot. When historical places reclaim things or replicate things...

and it's been moved or it's been manipulated into another position or whatever. I always think it... I mean, this is just the purest of me and it's so trite and I shouldn't even bother saying it. But I always just... For some reason, it evaporates in that moment for me where I kind of go, oh, but it wasn't here. They walked up and down that...

literal wood yes and that's that's tangible and that's whatever else but you know the way in the vna there's a reconstruction of a room of a i think it's a 17th century room which looks absolutely stunning i'm always like yeah but who cares it's reconstruction i don't care see i love i love that i would have thought antony you're an actor as well in fact is that why does it feel like a stage set to you because that's what i love i feel like i'm entering an immersive world if something is recreated with the original materials

Does it just feel too theatrical for you? Is that it? Yeah, it does. It does. You're right. A feeling of artifice. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's so interesting. That's not to say there's not a very special place and I do still love visiting there all the time. I truly do. But yeah, I just, I hate that reconstruction, removing thing. Anyway, forget about my personal preferences about whether or not things are moved. Let's get back to, I suppose the people who are at the core of this history, and we've spoken about Coram, we've spoken about Hogarth, we've spoken about Handel. Gosh, it's a real...

Georgian ensemble, isn't it? It's quite... It's a who's who of 18th century society. But let's talk about the children themselves then. Who are they and who are the parents who left them there?

Yeah, that's, I mean, it's obviously a fantastic question. And that's the history that I really want to keep at the core of what we're talking about. So the hospital first advertises that it's going to take these children in through newspapers. And of course, immediately, that is then available to people who are literate.

or who at least know someone literate who can read them, those adverts. And also signs in the street, which is fascinating thinking about the sort of target audiences, I suppose, for these adverts. We know that the hospital is set up in 1739, but it admits its first children in 1741 on the 25th of March. And in that first wave, and it's immediately popular, they get 30 babies, these first 30 children.

There's 18 boys and 12 girls. And the influx of children never stops from that point. And within a few years, we're talking three or four years, Parliament itself is having to provide funds to the hospital because there are so many children being left at its doors whose parents are trying to gain entry for their offspring. There has to be this extra aid in place in those first few years alone.

between the hospital setting up and Parliament providing these extra funds, it's estimated that 15,000 children passed through its doors. So a bit more than the first 30 babies. So you can see just how desperate people were in the city that they really, really needed this. And of course, very, very quickly, there needed to be a system in place to sort through the applicants. It was not possible to

to just allow everyone in the city to bring the children they couldn't care for through the door. So there had to be something set up. They had to come up with a system that was fair, but that also would allow them to limit the intake in some way.

I'm smiling as you start to make this pivot towards this next bit, because I think what you're about to describe next is probably the most iconic moment, I think, in anything got to do with the Foundling Museum. And it is so visual that it just lends itself to the story of history, if that makes sense. And if you don't know this, if this is the first time you're ever encountering the Foundling Hospital, just listen to what Maddy tells us next. It's so 18th century. I'll just leave it there.

When she entered through the iron gates outside, she passed two statues. One of a winged goddess with the Wheel of Fortune in her hand. Another of a mother and her children clinging desperately to each other. She'd looked back at them as she was ushered inside, along with the others who'd waited at the gate, now in this room with its carved ceiling, golden picture frames and candlesticks.

Men and women in fine clothes told them to sit and wait their turn. So they sat, each holding a young baby in their arms. Some of the infants were well turned out. Others were wrapped only in a headcloth. Some cried. Some fed at their mother's breast. Some slept. Her own boy was wrapped under her shawl, tucked in tight, looking up at her face.

The woman beside our mother was called up to the centre of the room, instructed to approach the panel of finely dressed people sitting in judgment before her. A man held out a bag and explained what he'd explained to all the others, that there were balls of three different colours inside. The colour she picked would decide her fate. A white ball meant your baby was accepted.

A red ball meant you had to wait and see if a place would come up. A black ball was rejection. Take your baby and go. Our mother watched as the woman before her drew a black ball and was left to stare at it, hopeless and desperate. Now it was her turn to go up to the man with the bag. The fine women smiled sympathetically.

one leaning over the other's shoulder to get a better view, as she put her hand into the bag. Her heart was in her mouth, a breath catching, feeling so much and thinking all of a sudden of those statues outside, the wheel of fortune, the mother clinging to her child. She drew out her hand. The ball was white. The man congratulated her.

So there's that imagery that I was talking about that Maddy has just conjured up for us there. And I find it a really strange thing because you have these desperate women with poor children who are taken in to have their fate decided by a lottery ball draw. It's like bingo.

And they're there and they're hoping for a change in their children's lives, essentially, if they can, because the foundling hospital could supposedly offer more stability than they could at that particular moment in time. And then you have 18th century virtue signalers who are standing around, who are rich women usually, actually, who are standing around this room with these other poor women looking at them as if they're a zoo display.

And they watch them. They're whispering. You often see depictions of them with fans and they're covering their faces, but looking out over the fan, it's almost as if they dare not share the same air as these poor women in this hall.

And the red, the white and the black, those all just stick to me too, with me too, because it's just so, the imagery is just so clear. And all I ever, you know, there's so much going on, there's so much emotion going on in there. But what I always walk away with is anger from that description. I was just about to say this. I feel viscerally angry.

disgusted by the system. Like those, especially those women who are those upper class women who are aristocratic often women who are standing along the sidelines. It's just like, get out, mind your business. But they're the same patrons who are giving money to the hospital. In their mind, they're doing a good thing. And they are the financial foundation of this system that allows these poor women to come in. But it's so voyeuristic. It's such a display of hierarchy and, you know, know your place. And

The fact that it's left to chance, seemingly to chance, is so interesting because, of course, I suppose on a practical level, it is arguably a fair system in that it's not based on the mother's circumstances or backstory. Nobody asks them anything.

has this child been born out of wedlock? Or are you a servant working in a kitchen somewhere who simply can't afford to keep the child? You're not allowed to keep it under the roof of your employer, etc. Nobody asks for that information. In that regard, it is fair. But the horror is, as you say, this watching of the women, this judgment, and it's so performative. The drawing of the ball out of the bag,

the people watching, the having to step forward and do that in a room full of other women. And of course, if you get the red ball, you can wait and see if you can get a spot. So the women who get the white balls, whose babies are accepted, the children are then subject to a health check. And if they show any signs of disease,

They're handed right back to the mothers and the women with the red balls then get a chance to submit their children. But if you drew a black ball, you would look around that room and we can only imagine the feelings of jealousy of the women who've been successful when you haven't.

the feeling of being degraded in front of these wealthy people and then rejected, this would have taken a huge amount of strength and courage to even walk up the steps of the foundling hospital and give over your child who you love. These aren't women who just can't be bothered to look after their children. These are women who do not have a choice. They are desperate to get to that point and then be turned away.

It's interesting as well, because this is the image that lingers for historians when you're studying the Vanling Museum. But it's actually not in place that long, right? There's a new system that comes in shortly more than a decade later, is it? Yeah, so the lottery is only in place, as you say, for a few years. So it comes in in 1742.

only a few months after the first babies are admitted as a way of sort of reacting, I suppose, to that influx, that flood, that tsunami of babies. But then next we get something in 1756 called the general reception. And this is a new system that's introduced now.

This is parliament approved, there's extra funding given to it because there is this recognition that the lottery might actually not be helping as many people as are needed. There's more funding needed for more places they need to take more children in. And so they build a lodge on the side of the site.

and parents or guardians of children, it's not necessarily mothers anymore, can pass their baby through a hatch. That child is then assessed, and if you're the parent or the adult that's given this child over, you have to stand and wait. And

If the child is diseased or if it is too old, because they mostly want young babies, it will be handed back to you. If it's healthy and it's young enough, it will be taken. There are no questions asked and you, as the depositor of that child, just leave. You just go. Which, of course, is a system that is, I suppose, more open to people. Anyone can give their baby as long as it's not showing visible signs of disease. You can get your baby into the hospital. But

The problem with this system is that there's no way to validate the identity of the people giving the babies over. And so there's no way to guarantee the mother of that child has given her permission.

and you get grandparents bringing in children, you get men who father children who don't want them, you get all sorts of nefarious people. There's no money that's exchanging hands, but if you want to get rid of a child, this is a very good way to do it. That system has its issue as well. Then there is a new system introduced, and I think this is the worst of the three. It's awful. Yes. Trust

the Victorians to bring in even the concept of the deserving poor and Maddy I know you're going to tell us about it in a bit more detail I just can't help but feel we're on the brink of another awful bloody Victorian mark two era even in our own time that there's this delineation of poverty and deserving poor and and here we have it in the foundling.

Yeah, yeah, it's not great. So this begins in the early 19th century. So we can't entirely blame the Victorians, but certainly it is the defining feature of the founding by the proper. I'm still going to blame the Victorians. I mean, we'll blame them for everything. We're 18th century. I do. I genuinely blame the Victorians for everything. Yeah, yeah. No, it's actually true. I do think they are to blame for everything. We're sorry to all the Victorianists out there.

So this is a system of petitions. So if you are a mother, and this is all about, by the way, this is now about blaming the mother, judging the mother. Women are entirely responsible for their children in this scenario. There's no fathers being held to account in the same way that the women are.

So if you're a mother who needs to give your baby over to the foundling, you have to fill in some paperwork. And this is a printed form that everyone was given. And bear in mind, so many of these mothers are not literate or their literacy rates are not good enough to be able to fill in this form. So straight away, you need to find someone who can help you. And often that might be like the parish priest or rector or curate, something like that, or your employer, if they are generous enough, tolerant enough to

to help you with that. And often that would not be the case. And you have to fill in all this information. And it is so...

is intrusive. It asks about your marital status. It asks about the identity of the father, if known. It asks you to explain how you met him, how this baby came to be conceived. I mean, it's disgusting. It is disgusting. And if you were lucky to have a patron or someone supporting you, they could then attach a letter of recommendation to say, this woman is of good character. She deserves help. She's a poor, unfortunate, she can't help herself, but

we should give her some help. And sometimes you would get people writing to say, do not help this woman. She's dreadful. It's so grim. And in writing my second book that I'm doing at the moment, one of the women in that story deposits her child in 1817 into the foundling. And I went along to the archives. And when you call up these petitions, they're in huge big bundles. And there are the petitions of those who are successful.

and the petitions of those who weren't. My woman, who I was researching, gave her baby over. She was successful because she had the support of someone in the church, and her baby sadly died two weeks later. It's a really tragic story. But when I was sat in that archival room in the London Metropolitan Archives, and I really recommend people go and look at these records, I then started to read through the huge pile of the petitions from that same summer of

of the women who were unsuccessful. There is nothing to distinguish the women who got their babies in and the women who didn't. I cried so much that I had to leave the reading room at the archives. I couldn't see and I was actually afraid I was crying onto the 18th century, 19th century paper. Oh God, don't tell them that. I know. I had to remove myself and it made me so angry. I had to go and get a coffee and walk around the block and come back.

And it was so moving and it outraged me. It absolutely outraged me. And here were these lives, these complex human lives that were lived within the confines of the circumstances they were born to. And they had no hope of getting themselves out of that. And you could see the love of

Often the love between the parents as well, who simply couldn't care for the child. You know, it wasn't that all these women were tragically abandoned by terrible men. Often they were. But these are just lives that needed help and support, and often they didn't find it.

And the bizarre thing is that in the context of the time, for many people who worked in this area, this was best practice. So they certainly were in no doubt about their moral standing. They knew in the context of their time what they were doing was absolutely right.

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So we've seen now how the children are processed in those three different ways at various times in the history of the Foundling Hospital. But what exactly for the people involved, which is what you're getting at here, Maddy, what exactly might they expect at this particular moment in time? Her face was pale and drawn from sleepless nights as she stared down at her baby, a small, fragile thing with a tuft of dark hair peeking out.

The clerk had been kind to her, as he'd asked his questions and written things down on his pieces of paper. He'd taken great care to note everything her boy was wearing. She'd liked that, as if they were all important pieces of this fleetingly young identity. One ribbon, one cap, one threadbare bigging, one forehead cloth. Then he'd asked the name of her boy, and she'd given it him.

Lastly, he wrote down a number, once on the form, once on a slip of paper he pinned to her baby boy's clothes. A stern nurse came up now and took the boy from his mother's arms. He began to cry at once, she'd known he would. She noticed the nurse didn't comfort him. The clerk told her they would take good care of the child and assured her he'd be better off here.

Then he asked if she'd brought something to leave behind, in case she could ever come back to reclaim the child. She'd almost forgotten. Hurriedly, she put her hands to her neck and handed it over. The shilling on a string that had caused all her woes. A shilling bent in half as a sign of love, with initials and a star carved on the back of it. A promise of marriage, or so she'd believed. Look where that had got her.

Look at the tiny face that broken promise had led to. The nurse began to walk away towards the door. That was it. Her boy was gone. Swallowed, crying, into this grand, grim building. History is...

Just insane. It is the wildest subject in the entire world. This, everybody who's listening, is what Maddy is describing there at the end of that are the foundling tokens. And they are the most individually beguiling objects.

pieces that you'll find in any collection anywhere. They're so full of history and so full of stories. Maddy, tell us a little bit more about tokens and what they are and what they look like. They are beguiling and they're so different. They're so individual. So these are...

objects that mothers depositing their babies to the foundling would leave behind. And often they were broken in half and the baby would be left with one half and the mother would take the other half away. Or sometimes they'd be twin objects. And they were kept in the hospital records along with the baby. Because the thing was, the second your baby went into the hospital, it was given a number and then it was re-baptised with a new name. So it's

initial identity in the world was entirely scrubbed. And the idea was that if the mother's circumstances ever changed, and she could come back and claim that child, she would need to be able to prove her identity and to connect with the right infant. So the tokens were a way of doing that, a way of proving. And this kind of grew up from an earlier system where

the clothing of the child would be cut and a piece would be given to the mother and a piece kept in a ledger. But of course, cloth is fragile and delicate and can get easily lost. So this system of leaving something a bit more individual, a bit more interesting,

grew out of that. And there are, I mean, there are hundreds of them, but there's a glass case in the museum now where you can go and look at them. And I did that with our producer. And what you're going to hear now is me reacting in real time to the objects that we're looking at.

There are so many different tokens here, there's such a phenomenal variety of objects. Metal coins and tokens, there are little glass buttons and beads, there's a ceramic label for a bottle of ale at the top, we've got locks, we've got these handmade items, there's a bracelet, there's at the bottom here bits of jewellery, there's a garnet ring, there's

There's an embroidered little purse that I'm looking at, a pink little tiny bag with the initials MD sewn onto it in sequins. There's even this really strange item here that looks like little nuts or seeds strung together on a piece of string and to be honest, it's a little bit revolting. There's a tiny, tiny coin there that's barely bigger than the nail on my little finger. Interesting one down here, look at this. This is a tiny fish.

made of ivory and it's got this amazingly precise eye carved into it that sort of follows you as you go past it. There's even a tiny metal fist, a hand and a forearm which is really incredible and I'm fascinated to know more about that. There are things here that would have cost significant amounts of money but not everyone coming into this space could afford to leave something so fancy.

And amongst all these metal, ceramic, bejewelled objects, there's one here that really speaks to me. And it is a simple hazelnut. Nothing more, nothing less, just a nut.

On the one hand, this hints heavily at the mother who left this being incredibly poor. This is an object she might very well have picked up on the floor outside the hospital on her way to deliver her baby. This is something that had no real value, financial value at least, in the 18th century city. But also, there's another alternative explanation for this. We know that in folklore...

hazelnuts and hazel trees are associated with protection. So it could be that this impoverished mother, forced to part with her child, is actually trying to imbue that baby through this object with some kind of magical protection. She's leaving with it a valueless object but also that highest value of things, a mother's love, a mother's aspiration for her child.

It is the highlight of any trip to the Founding Museum, is the collection of tokens that you'll see in that glass cabinet. It's so worth your while spending a little bit of extra time in front of those tokens and just remembering the hands that had wrapped themselves around those tokens and remembering that there's a companion piece to the token you're looking at lost now in the world somewhere. And it just...

It's magical, actually. That's magic. That's real magic. And that's why I just love history so much. I love when you're within that much of a hair's breadth of people's heightened emotions. It's just the most incredible display. If for nothing else, and there's plenty more besides, but if for nothing else, that is the reason you would go to the Foundling Museum. Well, Maddy has led us through the application and the

the taking in of children into the Foundling Hospital in episode one. In episode two, we're going to concentrate on the children's experiences and the impact the Foundling Hospital had on them. But thank you for now for listening to this episode and for listening to After Dark. If you've enjoyed this episode and this

specific social history then please do check out betwixt the sheets with kate lister you'll find lots more there besides and as it's the festive time of year spread the word this christmas and tell friends family reindeer and everybody else in your lives about after dark because it helps us to find more listeners stay tuned for episode two

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