·Chapter 7·

Cruelty and Kindness

Some of the hardest historical material to read in the Foundling Hospital archive because of its disturbing content are those records which make only too evident the living and working conditions of children when they first went out into the world from the Foundling Hospital. The children, many of whom were no more than ten or eleven years old, were at the mercy of their masters and mistresses. With few friends and no family on whom they could call, theirs was a precarious existence indeed. In an era when children often received physical punishment, community scrutiny rather than social services were the main means of policing orderly and kind relations between minors and their parents or guardians, as well as employers. In some respects foundlings had a ‘safety net’ that mirrored the one that in theory protected other pauper apprentices sent out under the traditional parish system. The network of Foundling Hospital inspectors, which branched out to those provincial institutions established during the General Reception, was supposed to provide a safeguard to ensure that foundlings would not be treated cruelly, exploited, or abused. Following changes to the law during the eighteenth century, it was magistrates who normally received complaints by apprentices that they were being ill-treated by their masters, and who were empowered to break the terms of an indenture on the grounds of cruelty and neglect. Abuse was sometimes exposed by the diligence of Foundling Hospital inspectors, reports of neighbours, and in some instances the direct intervention of constables and magistrates and the public scandal of press publicity. In some cases of abuse, the system worked: in many others, it did not.

Even today, the challenges facing children who speak out about abuse of all kinds—whether physical, sexual, or psychological (or a combination of all three)—are only too clear in Western societies coming to terms with institution-wide ‘hidden’ histories, and where children’s voices have been altogether trivialized or ignored. So it is intriguing to find that where Foundling Hospital inspectors carried out their duties with diligence (and this was by no means universal) and where magistrates listened sympathetically to foundling apprentices who complained about their treatment, children and adolescents were not only sometimes heard and believed; they could be removed from abusive situations. The test for this was not whether a modicum of physical correction, hard work, and privation was experienced by the foundling apprentice, for these were hard times for poor working children. Instead, certain criteria were used to decide whether masters and mistresses had behaved cruelly. These included whether living conditions were sufficient to keep the apprentice ‘decently’—meaning adequately clothed and fed—according to the terms of the apprenticeship indenture. This stated that in addition to learning a trade the apprentice should be given ‘Meat, Drink, Apparel, Washing and Lodging, and all other Necessaries according to the Custom of the City of London’. Physical punishment was common, but communities judged whether corrections meted out to child apprentices were harsh according to the communal standards of the day, and what was deemed normal according to specific circumstances, such as the social rank of the household and the gender of the child. The parallel was with other household members living under the rule of a patriarchal male head, including wives and other servants, not just apprentices. Corporal punishment, it was thought, should be used in moderation and only in extreme circumstances, and then without the one issuing a beating losing their ‘reason’ or gaining pleasure from it.¹ It should leave no lasting physical signs (such as bruises or scars) and there should be no other causes of suspicion, such as ragged, ‘indecent’, and inadequate clothing, signs of unusual dirtiness, or malnutrition. The household should not be known for drunkenness or disorder, and should not be associated with people of ‘bad character’. Very rarely, the imputation of sexual abuse came to light, and perhaps surprisingly such cases were acknowledged in the eighteenth century with a frankness that is remarkable in the light of modern attempts to airbrush such stories from public view.

Community policing and the testimony of neighbours could lead to a tip-off for a Foundling Hospital inspector that all was not right, or even a direct report to the Foundling Hospital Governors. It is noticeable that the majority but not all of such reports were sent from within a twenty-mile radius of the London Foundling Hospital, suggesting that cases of abuse further afield were hard to detect. One such case was of Joan Cabot, apprenticed to Mrs Sidney Jackson in the parish of Christ Church Spitalfields, a ‘Black and White Milliner’. In 1770, the General Committee was informed that her neighbour, Mrs Pollard, another woman in trade ‘at the [sign of the] Pewter Pot Whites Row’ had complained ‘that this Woman Starves and Ill treats the Girl’.² In another case from the same year, a Mr Weals of no. 8 Goldsmith Street, Gough Square, notified the General Committee that he would attend to report that ‘Jane Duck . . . apprenticed to William Adams of Execution Dock, Wapping, Surgeon and Apothecary, who is sailed in Business and his Wife uses the Girl in a Most barbarous manner; he likewise has a Boy of this Hospital which is not with him’.³ The justices of the peace for the county of Middlesex took a sworn statement from Andrew Gray, a staymaker, who lodged at the house of Alexandra Young in Golden Lane, testifying to an incident that had occurred the previous week in which he had overheard Mrs Young order her apprentice, Honor Lucas, to go into the cellar to fetch some sand, which she did ‘with great Reluctance’. He heard Mrs Young tell her husband ‘to Observe the Sulkey behaviour of his apprentice’, after which Mr Young ‘put himself into a passion and struck her once upon the face with his open hand’, upon which ‘she came forward against him and she told this Deponant that he struck her several times’. Next morning, Honor refused to come to breakfast and showed her resistance to further abuse by crying out so that her neighbours would be alerted. The neighbour also observed that, in spite of the beatings, ‘the said Apprentice has not been debarr’d from Bread Butter or Chees and Small beer’.⁴ The Youngs were beating, not starving, Honor Lucas into submission.

The perpetrator of violence could be anyone in the household: the master, his wife, or other servants or employees against male or female children. On 8 November 1787, foundling apprentice William Gray came to the Hospital to complain ‘that his Master suffered his Journeymen to beat him in an unmerciful manner, that he desired they would and that he frequently beat him severely himself, tho’ not so bad as his men did’. William displayed the marks of their violence: just the night before he had been knocked down by the journeymen and cut his head, and the only clothes he was allowed were those he was standing in when he appeared before the General Committee.⁵ Christian Wilson, a girl apprenticed at just under ten years old to a shoemaker’s household to be ‘employed in Mantuamaking and household business’, came forward at the age of eighteen to complain ‘that her Mistress had beat & ill treated her, for straying 2 hours upon an errand she had sent her to gather some Rents at another house which she Lett into lodgings & bringing but 6 pence &c’. The girl wanted to show that her alleged crimes were trivial: she had been beaten on another occasion ‘for taking some butter without leave to mix with some turnips’. She took refuge at the Foundling Hospital where she hid from her employers, ‘being afraid of being beat again when she went home’, and on this occasion the steward ‘sent a Letter . . . requiring her Master and Mistress to appear at the Committee . . . to answer the complaints’.⁶

Christian Wilson’s case illustrates the precarious experience of many of the poorest people in London, and how few options there were, especially for young women. Girls in service sometimes had employers who were barely surviving themselves, in spite of the Foundling Hospital’s efforts at only placing children in established households. In the face of sickness, disability, bankruptcy, or death of an employer, female servants could slip from scraping a living as domestic skivvies or washerwomen into prostitution and crime. Apart from the Hospital Governors, their only source of support would be if they could prove that they had lived and worked as a servant for a year or more in a parish, thereby gaining settlement and entitlement to doles of money as ‘outdoor relief’ or, in extreme circumstances of last resort, admission to a workhouse. In these notorious institutions, men were segregated from women and children, and barrack-like communal dormitories provided ripe breeding ground for the spread of contagious disease. Even the very young and very old were not allowed to be ‘idle’, and were set to work at monotonous tasks such as picking oakum (unravelling coarse rope by hand to collect fibres that were then mixed with tar to make ships watertight) or breaking stones. Some historians have questioned whether conditions in Georgian workhouses were as universally harsh as the notorious Victorian workhouses of Dickensian ignominy, but there is much evidence that the poor themselves regarded these institutions as shameful places of last resort.⁷

One former foundling who narrowly escaped the workhouse because of the intervention of the Foundling Hospital Governors was Catherine Horton. Catherine served out over a year of her apprenticeship to James Flatt of Clapton, a coachman. In 1775, she left Flatt’s employment ‘on account of ill usage’, and the Parish of Hackney turned her over to another master, a box maker in Cripplegate, until 1778. Though there must be some caution about linking more than one person with the same name, a Catherine Horton aged twenty-one in 1778 (which would fit her admission date to the Foundling Hospital, in July 1757) was ordered to be removed from the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, which may have been when her itinerant life began, scraping a living by moving between public houses.⁸ The Foundling Hospital only learned of her fate in May 1788 when they received a report that she ‘has expended the wages she earned before’, at which point she was given 8 shillings in relief by the charity that had raised her. Catherine’s experiences demonstrate how difficult it was to negotiate between uncertain entitlement under the parish system and charitable institutions for London’s poor, and how easy it was to slip into utter destitution.⁹

Like many pauper children, those who had been raised in the Foundling Hospital were expected to pursue a life of drudgery without complaint, and could be treated with casual brutality and rough justice. Some letters to the Foundling Hospital suggest that foundling children felt a lifelong safety net that originated from the sense of being under the patronage of the powerful Governors of the institution in which they had been raised. When foundling apprentice Francis Desse was thrown into Bridewell Prison by his vengeful master for saying that he wished to terminate his indenture, he obtained the skills of a fluent letter writer to petition the Governors for his release: ‘[Francis] thinks it a Duty he owes to the Governors of that Hospital to mention to your Worships that He is not confined among the abandoned Class of Persons but in one of the solitary Cells’. It was important for Francis that he, unlike some of the London poor, was not utterly abandoned, but had the patronage of the Governors upon which he hoped he could call in a time of crisis. He wanted to show the Governors that he would do them credit and would be able to maintain a degree of respectability in solitary confinement ‘away from the Association of Thieves &c. &c’.¹⁰

Any pauper who could prove they qualified for settlement in a parish could claim assistance—usually in the form of doles of money by writing to the local Poor Law officials. Since the early days of the Foundling Hospital, anxious ratepayers had received guarantees that foundlings would not qualify for settlement in neighbouring parishes simply by virtue of having been raised there: similar guarantees were issued from branch hospitals across the country. Once they were out in the world, those foundlings who had not qualified for parish settlement could be found petitioning the only source of help they knew: the Hospital Governors. These letters constitute some of the few traces of foundling voices from the eighteenth century, offering insights into the lives of female foundlings in particular which are otherwise lost to the historical record:

Most Worthy Gentlemen,

I hope you will Pardon the boldness of a poor Unfortunate Woman formerly an Orphan in the House who has Sufferd Numerous Hardships and is greatly Distress’d hopes the Gentlemen will take her Case into Consideration that she may be enabled to go to Place as she has a Place in view but for the want of Necessary Apparel [spelling corrected] Cannot do it, she has Suffer’d greatly oweing to Sickness, she Humbly prays that the Worthy Gentlemen will pardon the Petition of their Distress’d Orphan H Harriet Searle [Seal] No. 12, 233.

A note at the foot of Harriet’s letter indicated that she was ‘Apprenticed 3 May 1769 to John Gourley of Round Court Strand to be employ’d as a Mantua-maker’, although there was no means of telling whether she had served out her time.¹¹ Harriet’s married name was Munden, and she wrote again, indicating that her fortunes had not improved, although she got married: she had ‘not a Friend to apply to and am now quite Distress’d my Husband is gone abroad being Press’d having been at Sea before’. This rare fragment of a letter written by a female foundling in the 1790s gives some insight into the hardships caused among the labouring poor at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, when impressment was the main way of procuring sailors for the Royal Navy. Harriet reported that she was ‘distitute of Cloaths to go to get a service or any way to provide for myself hope you will be so kind as Stand my Friend this time and never hope to Trouble you again without which I am quite a lost Creature’. A note at the foot of Harriet’s letter verified that she was going to live in lodgings at Soho Square, and that the committee raised half a guinea for her relief.¹²

The Hospital Governors were petitioned for assistance if a foundling apprentice was unable to work owing to sickness or disability. When it was their charges who wrote to them, typically the Governors responded with a collection for a particular former foundling in distress in response to requests for urgent help. The girl Magdalen Hall was provided with relief amounting to 9s 6d, and was given 5s from this immediately, the remainder left with the steward for safekeeping and noted carefully. In her case, the relationship with her master had not broken down, but his employment as a schoolmaster left him with a precarious living that jeopardized his ability to provide for her.¹³

The patience of the Governors was tested when masters or mistresses returned to the Foundling Hospital to complain if their apprentice fell ill or proved unsuitable for work. The wife of Charles Cole, a silk dyer at the Old Exchange, attended the General Committee to let them know that their apprentice, Laetitia Keene, who had been with them since April 1787, ‘has been taken ill & is said . . . to be in a declining way’. Country air was advised, but Mrs Cole thought a preferable (and perhaps cheaper) solution would be for Laetitia to return to the Hospital to be nursed, offering to pay for her maintenance while she was there.¹⁴ Less than a year after being apprenticed to a peruke (wig) maker and hairdresser in Holborn, eleven-year-old David Garrick’s master brought him in, and the Governors had him examined by the Hospital’s apothecary and surgeon, who treated him for disease. Perhaps there was a sense of continuing obligation on the part of the Governors owing to the fact that this was less than a year since the boy had been apprenticed, although the lack of dates on all documents makes it difficult to tell whether this was generally the case.¹⁵

We cannot know for certain what proportion of foundlings suffered abuse, nor how many apprentices did not serve out their term, and for what reasons. Only fifty-five apprentices are recorded as having died in the apprenticeship register, although this was most likely a substantial under-recording. These are skewed towards those in London and Middlesex parishes, with just over two-thirds of these entries reporting local deaths less than 10 miles away from the Foundling Hospital. Those children suffering disease and dying in hospitals such as St George’s, or private residences near the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury, were reported more regularly: only a small number further afield were noted, perhaps because of the unusual circumstances of their deaths. Nine male foundlings reportedly ‘drown’d’ after having been apprenticed to sea service from coastal port towns, but two apprentices met their end during the term of their indenture from as far away as Jamaica and Guinea. Another apprentice died tragically having been ‘Run over by a broad wheel Wagon and killed on the spot’.¹⁶

In 1747, a law was passed enabling any allegedly abused apprentices to complain to two magistrates if the premium paid to their masters for their training was less than £5. If their complaint was upheld, then they were released from their indentures, although the master could keep the premium paid with them, which was a gift to unscrupulous masters seeking to be rid of an apprentice on spurious grounds. From 1757, indentures were replaced by a stamped deed, often a printed document restating mutual obligations (although these were still commonly referred to as indentures). Though many foundling apprentices were despatched with a £5 premium (below the threshold that would have allowed them to use this form of redress if they were abused in some way by their masters), further legislation after 1760 increased the eligibility of all apprentices bound for less than £10 to complain to magistrates of ill treatment, with the introduction of a £2 penalty for masters against whom a complaint was upheld.¹⁷

As a result of these changes in legislation, many more stories emerge of foundling apprentices making complaints against their employers. Some of these cases were heard by the famous reformer and justice of the peace for the county of Middlesex, Sir John Fielding, the blind half-brother of the novelist Henry Fielding (whose novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling had been such a success). Sir John’s interest in ameliorating the conditions of the London poor was witnessed in the part he played in helping to found an asylum for orphaned girls in Lambeth. He also demonstrated considerable sympathy to the cases of abuse reported by foundling apprentices. One such case was that of foundling apprentice Sarah Cadwick who gave detailed evidence in front of Fielding and his fellow justice of the peace, Sir Sampson Wright, that her master Roger White, a ‘White Smith’, had ‘assaulted and cruelly beat’ her, having ‘neglected to find and provide for her sufficient Meat Drink and other Necessaries and hath otherwise ill treated her’. Sarah’s experience as a young girl apprenticed at the age of ten to White’s household in York to undertake domestic service was not untypical in its chaotic character, although unusually detailed in its thorough examination by the two magistrates. Sarah’s master, Roger White, had ‘always been a lodger’, the court noted, and had been a ‘common Soldier/Light Horseman’, and he himself had failed to complete his own apprenticeship as a whitesmith when he absconded to become a soldier. As it turned out, the Foundling Hospital’s safeguards failed in this case. White procured a false character witness from a sea captain so that Sarah’s services could be obtained for his wife, ‘who wanted a Girl to do her drudgery for her’. Mrs White turned out to be of ‘Light character’ (her sexual reputation maligned) for having been ‘frequently visited by other Men who have been of service to her husband’ in his absence. Roger White was himself described as ‘profligate’, fleeing to London to escape his creditors and tailed by his family and the rest of his household including Sarah. They were given a series of temporary lodgings, from a cellar near Seven Dials, to Tower Hill, and finally Drury Lane, as White moved to find work. In order to escape the cruelty of her first master, who forced her to go begging on the streets to help him clear his debts, Sarah deserted the White household and obtained a discharge from two magistrates from her apprenticeship before she qualified for settlement, since she had not spent more than forty days in any one parish. Since then, the precariousness of her situation was evident: ‘she hath never lived as an hired yearly Servant one whole year together. Or been bound an Apprentice. Or done any other than Act or Thing whereby to gain a legal Settlement in any Parish or Place.’ Instead, she moved between various public houses, working as a servant for between two and nine months in a variety of positions, from a wine merchant’s house in Islington to a bricklayer’s and another establishment ‘where Clothes were taken in to wash’. Sarah’s lot was the embodiment of the ‘economy of makeshift’ that characterized the lives of poor women. She moved so frequently that when cross-examined about the chronology of each position she answered that ‘she cannot recollect’. A copy of the lengthy evidence presented at the hearing, and the ruling, dated 1 October 1777, was filed at the Foundling Hospital, to provide documentary evidence for the Governors of Sarah’s liberty from obligation to any other master or mistress should the opportunity for reapprenticeship arise.¹⁸

Another dimension to the scrutiny given to the treatment of foundling children as apprentices lay in the particular circumstances of the later eighteenth century, which witnessed the rise of the popular press. The idea of public opinion was forged through the circulation of newsprint in London and across the British Isles. By the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a growing sense among the rich and powerful that their lives were under scrutiny via the fourth estate, and though a very small proportion of the population had the vote (just under 5 per cent by 1800), a much wider reading public, both men and women of the middling and lower sorts, gained access to news and information on matters of high politics and general interest. Anonymous political commentators under the guise of, e.g., ‘Observator’, ‘Junius’, used a cloak of anonymity to expose corruption and criticize those in authority, particularly politicians and the king’s advisors.

For as long as the Foundling Hospital had existed as a charity, the Governors were used to coming under widespread scrutiny and attack in the public prints. Their enterprise had been supported from the public purse during the period of general admission. Many critics were looking to make political capital of any cases which seemed to prove they were right to claim that foundlings would never make decent, hardworking citizens. Moreover, the conduct of the Governors themselves was called to account, with suspicion of embezzlement and neglect of duty. The editor of The World, a title specializing in miscellaneous national and international news culled from diverse sources, published one such letter from the anonymous commentator ‘Observator’ regarding the case heard at Guildhall involving ten-year-old James Squires, apprenticed to an apothecary in Cheapside. James’ cruel punishment for minor and allegedly unfounded misdemeanours was described in sensational and graphic terms to shock the World’s readers into demanding ‘some of the Governors of the Hospital [to] . . . interfere on the part of this distressed Foundling, and save him from inevitable ruin’. Squire had been sent to Bridewell Prison, ‘stripped naked from the waist upwards and . . . whipped till his back was bloody’, then had to endure a month’s hard labour ‘for some trifling offence’. The author of this account appealed to the idea of the helpless foundling imbued in public imagination following the success of Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones and the plethora of literary spin-offs. So, the eye-catching large print title of the feature about James Squire was ‘The Distressed Foundling. A True Story’. James was featured as a ‘helpless orphan’, ‘left destitute of friends, or even a place to lay down in’, ‘forced to wander about the streets day and night, living upon what he could beg of the public’ and reimprisoned as a vagrant, where he languished awaiting transportation before being ‘accidentally discovered’.¹⁹ An anonymous member of the public sent the secretary of the Hospital a copy of the paper to ensure that inquiries would be made, appealing to the ‘humanity’ of the Governors in this case. Upon inquiry, the Governors secured written confirmation from the Lord Mayor that James Squire had in fact been guilty of ‘divers Misdemeanours’ including stealing from his master, an apothecary named James Upton of Cheapside. In an illuminating example of a tradesman and ordinary citizen taking seriously the power of the press to impugn reputations, within a week of the sensational story being made public he wrote his own account of the apprentice’s crimes to the editor of The World. They had, claimed Upton, ‘unjustly charged’ him of cruelty (‘the grossest defect of common Humanity and Charity, the two best principles of Human Nature’). The press had made ‘a false, malignant, and infamous statement, plainly intended to stab the character of an individual, hitherto unimpeachable’, and this under the ‘flimsy pretext of Philanthropy’.²⁰

Some of the most scandalous cases of abuse to be exposed by Foundling Hospital inspectors, which made it into the press if they resulted in criminal action against masters, related to girls despatched to work in factories. Richard Blackburn, ‘a very Considerable Silk Manufacturer’ in Stockport, Cheshire, needed ‘a greater number of hands of all ages than can be procured in the neighbourhood’ and sought to employ ‘as many as would enable him to proceed in a more Extensive way’. He faced opposition from local magistrates, who sought guarantees that pauper children employed in large numbers would not become chargeable to the parish. Having secured the necessary assurances, Blackburn took on eleven foundling girls between the ages of ten and fourteen, reapprenticed to him on the same day (23 November 1773) following the death of their previous master Thomas Tatlock, who like Blackburn was described as a ‘Silk Throwster’.²¹ This kind of employment could have catastrophic consequences for the children’s welfare, as revealed by factory visits by Foundling Hospital inspectors. The apprenticeship register records that seven of the girls originally apprenticed to Tatlock died, an under-recording of the actual number of fatalities. The London Governors paid particular attention to the living conditions of the surviving girls who were sent to work for Richard Blackburn, and even received a letter from the girls directly which accounted for their favourable treatment by him, including the appointment of a friendly governess, and their lasting affection for the children whom they left behind in London:

To foundling Hospedel   Stockport July 13th 1780

This Comms Whith all our Dutes to you all hoping thease Lines whill find you all in good halth as it Leaves us all at Present bless god for it our Governess is the bearer of this Letter . . . being the best frend whe have found since we Left you. [We] have a verey good Please [place] on Every account whe have had new Cloathing Everey [year] and that which is verey genteel better than most Peepel of our Rank.

The unnamed young woman who wrote this letter, who would have perhaps been in her early twenties, added ‘Loves to the Children’ who were at the Hospital. The letter was not signed, but someone else wrote at the foot of the page that ‘most of the Girls has served their time and stays with their Master’, further testimony that the young women wanted to stay in Blackburn’s employment for wages once their period of apprenticeship had ended.²²

One of the most notorious cases of abuse and neglect was by Martin Browne, a clothier from Holbeck Lodge, Leeds, who requested fifty girls from Ackworth in 1764 to work in his factory.²³ Browne’s grandiose plan had been to construct a new building, ‘The Industrious Foundling Hall’, 117 feet long by 26 feet wide, and employ fifty girls of seven years old to work making ‘Cloath like the French Cloath for the East India or Turkey Trade’, fine woollen textile manufacturing which he planned would rival the French monopoly on imported cloth. The industrialist attempted to bypass the Ackworth branch of the Foundling Hospital, where Dr Lee was asking too many questions about the project. He also attempted to extract the maximum payment from the London Governors since he had heard that the government was considering subsidizing foundling apprentices. In the event, parliament granted a further £2,000 for apprenticeship fees, and Browne demanded that he be paid backdated fees for taking so many.²⁴ The Governors capitulated and agreed to pay ‘nursing money’ for a year since the children he had taken were younger than the normal age for foundling apprentices. However, news was soon received by Jonas Hanway in London that twenty-four of Browne’s apprentices had died of ‘Putrid Fever’; another twenty children were in a ‘perilous condition’; and upward of thirty more needed to regain their health from overwork and starvation. A visit by one of the Ackworth inspectors revealed a ‘Putrid Stench from the Little House’ [latrine], just one indicator of neglect and poor living conditions.²⁵ The children ‘slept on corded beds with thin mattresses laid over them’ which he observed ‘must be very unfit to refresh those weary limbs that have kept the whole day to hard Labour’. Browne’s grand scheme had been exposed as a scandal. In order to bail out his business, he had taken on contract work, engaging the small children in worsted spinning, a heavy and hard labour requiring them to be on their feet all day, which caused pain in their legs, hips, thighs, and knees. Browne was summoned by the Ackworth committee to account for himself, but was less than contrite: he shamelessly claimed that the children liked the beds he had supplied ‘better than the boards’ and he did not see anything wrong with their food or clothing. The case was brought before a magistrates court in Leeds, attended by the mayor and Alderman, but the authorities did not discharge the children from their indentures, finding Browne had no case to answer and perhaps mindful that the children could become chargeable to ratepayers in Holbeck. The London Governors did not prosecute Browne, perhaps in an attempt to minimize further adverse publicity, but they instead raised a charity subscription for the surviving girls, and new places were found for them.²⁶

Not all cases of abuse related to foundling girls, and not all were confined to ‘batch’ apprenticeships. One particularly touching case was recalled by the Hospital secretary of foundling Samuel Storey, who attended the General Committee ‘to make complaint of the treatment towards him by his Master’. He was questioned by the Governors and ‘said he had insufficient to eat and to drink’, but had a decent bed and was not overworked, although ‘when he neglected to Work his master slapped him’ and, Samuel added, ‘I Have forgot all my prayers’.²⁷

The segregation of boys and girls and male and female employees at the Hospital may have afforded pauper girls better protection from sexual exploitation than those of a similar age who more or less fended for themselves beyond the Hospital walls. The potential for sexual abuse was not confined to adult men preying upon young girls, but if there were cases of foundling boys suffering in this way, then their experiences were never recorded. The secretary Morris Lievesley recalled that when the foundling girl Catherine Beecher, employed as a Hospital servant, was sent ‘for some Herbs in the Garden’ she was raped ‘by William Lodge the Undergardener’, having been ‘taken into the Tool House and by him she had a Child’. Lievesley mused that this was ‘The only instance of this kind of Mischief believed to have occurred within the Walls of the Hospital’. The shared single-sex children’s dormitories and culture of surveillance at the Hospital might just have meant that this was true, but we should certainly treat his claim with scepticism.²⁸

The sexual abuse of young girls outside of the Hospital was not uncommon, and several instances of this were noted by the secretary, perhaps because of the exceptionally young age of the girls concerned. ‘A Girl thirteen and a half years of age applied in March 1843 for the admission of her Child aged 3 Months’, recalled Morris Lievesley, which he calculated must have meant that she had been pregnant ‘at the tender age of twelve and a half years’.²⁹ Such cases only came to light if they led to pregnancy, meaning pre-pubescent girls’ abuse was less detectable. Lievesley also reported the case of a fifteen-year-old girl who claimed her father was the seducer and father of her child, which she brought to the Foundling Hospital. She and her sister had been the objects of their father’s ‘revolting passion’, having separated from their mother, in a case which was treated sympathetically at the Hospital. The secretary reported with approval that the sisters had ‘by their own industry and under providence not only been able to maintain themselves respectably in business but to contribute to the support of their kind mother’.³⁰

Cases of sexual abuse by masters did come to light according to children’s testimonies and were reported to the Governors. Sarah Drew, one of the girls apprenticed to Job Wyatt, the wood screw manufacturer at Tatenhall in Staffordshire, reported that Wyatt ‘had attempted to debauch her at Eleven Years of Age and completed it afterwards and continued the same ill Usage till Xmas last & beat her if she refus’d to submit to his Will’. Sarah had been told that Wyatt ‘had also debauch’d several other Apprentices amongst whom were Mary Johnson Mary Rise and Ann Beauchamp who often talk’d of it to her’. The Governors saw to it that the girls were removed from Wyatt and their indentures discharged under the authority of local magistrates, and new places were found for them.³¹ The lack of further legal action or punishment for abusive employers like Wyatt is shocking to the modern eye. The temptation may be to blame the laissez-faire attitudes of eighteenth-century governing elites and to claim that nothing so brutal could happen today. But the lack of legal redress for the poor, especially abused children and women, is something that persists to this day, particularly in the light of growing awareness of modern-day slavery and institutionalized abuse in Britain.³²

In late-eighteenth-century society, there may actually have been a greater willingness on the part of neighbours to intervene in cases of abuse than in later periods, since during the Victorian era the home came to be seen as something private and sealed off from public scrutiny, particularly among the middle classes.³³ One former foundling and servant girl, Mary Largent, attended the General Committee to complain of ‘uncommon severity’ and beating by her mistress’s second husband, John Warrington Rogers, whom her mistress ‘did not blame for his severity but would rather abet and encourage him’, using ‘unjustifiable weapons’ for ‘trifling offences’, including two walking sticks ‘of considerable thickness’ which he broke in the process of administering the beatings.³⁴ Mary’s case was strengthened by the fact that she listed a number of neighbours including a ‘Dr Cornish’ who would verify the truth of her claim, and some disturbing details that suggested Rogers was ‘wanton’ in his administering of corporal punishment.³⁵ It was understood in the eighteenth century that some people gained sexual pleasure from flagellation, and the details that Mary passed on suggest that she, her neighbours, and the authorities would have understood the implication.³⁶ Rogers’s actions were perverse and deliberate: he forced her head between his knees while he was administering beatings and kept her at home until bruises had healed so ‘that they were not so visible’, watching her to make sure she did not complain to the neighbours. Mary’s spirit was not broken, even in the face of such tyranny. She bravely made her escape one day by climbing over the iron railings surrounding her master’s house and fleeing south over Westminster Bridge, where she eventually secured the help of a kindly carriage driver and some ‘reputable people’ who had known her former master. The matron and apothecary of the Foundling Hospital examined her within the week and found under her clothing that ‘the greatest part of her Body Arms and Head still . . . of a livid colour, tho’ 6 days had lapsed’ since her last beating.

Other documents reveal that Mary’s widowed mistress had married John Warrington Rogers, a wealthy solicitor, who lived at the smart address of 22 Manchester Buildings, Westminster. A man of property and considerable status, Rogers’s mortification that the Governors had received a report of Mary’s mistreatment at his hands and intended to pursue not just the cancellation of her indenture but a prosecution against him is indicated in a lengthy and grovelling letter he wrote to the Governors, addressing their ‘Glorious Institution’, which is preserved in the Foundling Hospital archive. Mary’s examination in November 1786 had led to Rogers’s summons before the General Committee to account for himself, but he failed to turn up. He justified himself by saying ‘a personal Information I received at the Hospital, [informed me] That writing wo’d be less trouble to you and have the desired Effect—Else I sho’d with great pleasure have waited on you to have the further Honour of stating the facts of their Case as they arose’. The lawyer realized, too late, that he had made a mistake in snubbing the aristocratic Governors of the Foundling Hospital, his more powerful social superiors. He protested that he had merely been following ‘the Diction of my Duty [sic]’ in correcting Mary and now he was being ‘blamed, prosecuted and exposed for a fault which I might under the same alarming Circumstances have inflicted upon a Child of my own’. Rogers seems to have been on a personal crusade to stamp out what he saw as the ‘fatal Consequences’ of sin, ‘by this means this City wo’d be less crouded with distressed Objects, misery wo’d become a greater Stranger—And your great and unspeakable Bounty less abused’. He was now himself labouring under ‘unmerited severity’ by the Governors for his actions, having taken on ‘this Girl’ as an ‘incumbrance’ to him ‘at the useless and uncommon age of 12 years when she co’d be of no service to any one’, and provided her with board and lodgings for five years (‘such an expence for such a length of time, I trust you will conceive merited a Return’). Warming to his subject, Rogers began to rant in fragmented sentences (‘it was at a time she wanted the care and Attention of a father, to Guide and protect her thru Life—and which called aloud for some severity’). The lawyer had been exposed as a cowardly sadist: he concluded by begging for the Governors’ mercy, urging them to drop their prosecution of him:

The Anxiety I have repeatedly felt on this Occasion is great . . . Under these Circumstances—Considering the great expences I have been at for 5 Years with so young a Girl—relieve me from the Prosecution without any expence and the same will impress a due sense of Acknowlegement [from] Your most Obedient Most humble Servant.³⁷

In the long run, this episode did not hinder the man’s legal career. His wife appeared before the General Committee on 4 April 1787 to plead (successfully) for the prosecution to be dropped, and Rogers succeeded in keeping the scandal away from the press. He practised as a solicitor until his death in 1836, having been a member of the Select Vestry of St Margaret’s Westminster, a Churchwarden who succeeded in lowering the rates so that less money would be available to the ‘undeserving’, and solicitor to the ‘Guardians of the Poor’.³⁸

In extreme cases, foundling children lost their lives as a result not just of overwork, mistreatment, and poor living conditions, but because of the sadistic behaviour of their masters or mistresses. Foundling Mary Jones was sent to the parish of St Dunstan in the West to be engaged in household work aged eleven in May 1765.³⁹ Her master was James Brownrigg of Fetter Lane, and Mary narrowly escaped the clutches of his wife Elizabeth and son John, who displayed behaviour that might today be called psychopathic. She received a beating that nearly cost her an eye, and fled back to the Foundling Hospital for refuge, where the Governors, shocked at her injuries, obtained a discharge of her indentures. Two years later, the Brownrigg mother and son were indicted at the Old Bailey for ‘wickedly, maliciously, and feloniously’ beating another servant girl in their household, Mary Clifford, to death. For over a year, on ‘divers other days and times’, with ‘divers large whips, canes, sticks, and staves’, over her ‘naked head, shoulders, back, and other parts of her naked body, in a cruel and in human manner, giving to her divers large wounds, swellings, and bruises; and with divers large hempen cords, and iron chains’, Mary Clifford was beaten and imprisoned against her will in a cellar, before she eventually died of her injuries. The press gave a lurid report of Mrs Brownrigg’s crimes and execution at Tyburn.⁴⁰

Not all foundling apprentices escaped brutal and sadistic masters or mistresses; perhaps those sent to work in London found it easier to run back to the institution that had raised them than those who had been dispatched from a branch hospital to an area where there was less direct scrutiny by inspectors. Jemima Dixon was murdered by her master, William Butterworth, a Manchester weaver, whose brutality towards her was only revealed when there was an attempt to prosecute him for her death. He was found guilty but reprieved by a judge, a pardon that could not be overturned even by the intervention of the Hospital Governors.⁴¹ In an age where networks of patronage and wealth were exercised to protect the interests of employers, where bribery and corruption were an accepted part of the political landscape, and where the legal system was unambiguously patriarchal in character, it was not uncommon for the death of a low-status woman like Jemima to go unpunished.⁴²

Like other pauper apprentices, children who had been raised in the London Foundling Hospital and its branch institutions, once apprenticed, could use the bureaucratic mechanisms of inspections and local officials representing the Governors’ interests to speak out about issues such as neglect, cruelty, and various forms of abuse which they suffered. Even by the standards of the late- eighteenth century, the details of such cases were considered harrowing, and in the extreme could result in the death of one or more children. There are numerous cases where the Foundling Hospital Governors were attentive to what children told them about abusive masters and mistresses, and could act swiftly to intervene, using powerful networks of patronage and social influence to advocate for the children deemed to be in their lifelong care. So when foundling apprentice Sarah Middlesex appeared at a committee to inform the Governors of her ‘cruel treatment’ at the hands of Mrs Coles, the wife of Sarah’s second master who was a cabinet maker of Aldersgate Street, the committee, ‘having reason to suppose her complaint to be well founded’, placed her back with her original employer. Perhaps the most visible evidence to the Governors was that Sarah, no longer a girl but a sixteen-year-old young woman, was inadequately clothed when she appeared before them. This was to a degree that they found shocking, since they threatened her master Coles with ‘a prosecution’ which ‘will be commenc’d against him by this Corporation’, adding that ‘this Committee expect[s] Mr Coles [sic] answer on or before Wednesday next’.⁴³

Where magistrates failed to intervene or no satisfactory outcome resulted from statutory intervention to help a distressed apprentice, former children from the Foundling Hospital could find it to their advantage to have powerful Governors on their side who could threaten errant employers with prosecution, or be a source of appeal if they found themselves on the wrong side of the law, allegedly through no fault of their own. Foundling George Smith wrote a lengthy and impassioned letter, apparently in his own hand, from prison, where he had been thrown for absconding from his apprenticeship to George Bernfleet, an engraver of St Martins. George’s letter was unusually fluent and well written, signed ‘with the greatest respect, your grateful Obedient and Humble Servant’). His boldness was in complaining to his patrons that the magistrate who had committed him to prison ‘has greatly prejudiced my Character’, considering his treatment had been so abysmal. Bernfleet had not clothed the young man properly, which as George cannily expressed it ‘were a disgrace to my master and myself’. His bedding had been inadequate, so he had arranged to share a bed in another lodging ‘with a friend who was a foundling’, and hid from view in his master’s shop for the shame of wearing ragged clothes. As George phrased it eloquently in his own words:

[Had] I been negligent of my masters business or had his circumstance rendered him Incapable of providing in a better manner I should have patiently submitted to all those Inconveniences but as I was convinced of the contrary, I humbly Conceive Gentleman I was not blameable in quitting his service.

Though the general correspondence and memoranda make no further reference to this case, the apprenticeship register indicates that George succeeded in securing his release from prison and was reapprenticed (suggesting the Governors ‘repaired’ the damage to his character, a vital matter for tradesmen if they wanted to secure good credit) to John Lockington, a copperplate engraver of St James, in November 1791. It is tempting to think that George’s expression of sensibility and fluently respectful deference towards the Governors were instrumental in securing not only his release, but also his reapprenticeship to the ‘liberal master’ he had hoped for, in a much more affluent parish.⁴⁴

There were different dimensions to the treatment of foundlings who found themselves the victims of injustice. How they were treated could be influenced by the disparity between the lower social status of farmers, manufacturers, or tradesmen who typically employed foundlings, and the high social rank of the Foundling Hospital Governors, on whose behalf the Hospital’s officers acted. The Governors could issue thinly veiled threats to their social inferiors, or even legal action, and such displays of authority were not lightly bestowed or received. Foundlings in difficulty sometimes had access to powerful patronage through the institution that had raised them. However, the Governors were only too aware of the reputational damage that could potentially be done by foundlings exposed in notorious court cases reported in the press. For some, foundlings would always be ‘bastards’ who were simply acting out the low morals and criminal behaviour that many commentators believed would be the inevitable outcome of this expensive and grandiose experiment in social engineering.

The treasurer of the Foundling Hospital, George Whatley, showed that he was prepared to intercede on behalf of one vulnerable young woman, a foundling named Mabel Roper. Mabel had been apprenticed to a farmer from Skipton in Yorkshire named John Simpson, whose household she had left having served out her full seven years’ apprenticeship, thereby demonstrating she was hardworking and of good character. She went on to work for another year after her apprenticeship was ended and was therefore entitled to wages. But by that time she had moved to London, and her former employer was still in possession of her clothing and a box containing all her possessions. The steward, who drafted the letter on behalf of the treasurer (with many crossings-out, hinting at the sensitive wording that was needed in this case), instructed Mabel’s former master ‘be pleased at the same time to enclose (in her Box) . . . 5 guineas due to her at Michaelmas last for One Year’s wages and a Receipt signed by herself shall be sent to you’. With the paternalistic force of the Foundling Hospital behind her, Mabel’s employer was also issued with instructions about providing her with a reference:

[The Treasurer hopes] you will not hesitate to give her a proper recommendation to help her to another Service in London wherefore he [the Treasurer] desires that you will transmit him in writing such a Character as you think she deserves, specifiying her qualifications, the length of time she was with you, signed with your name and be pleased to enclose it in the Box with her other Things.

Another remarkable feature of Mabel’s story is that further inquiry was made into the circumstances of her leaving her clothing, belongings, and wages behind, and that the Foundling Hospital officers continued to be her advocate even when the full story was known. Her good conduct in fulfilling her apprenticeship had been established, but it transpired that she had left her employer’s house after having been lured away to Doncaster by a young man who had seduced her. She walked all the way there via Leeds, which took her three days, and she waited in vain for a further week for the young man to appear. In a desperate state, Mabel sold what remaining clothes she had in order to pay her way to London, where she found shelter in a workhouse and contacted the Foundling Hospital steward. In a final twist to Mabel’s tale, the steward, John Merryweather, was presented with a moral dilemma about what to tell the treasurer to say to Mabel’s former employer about why she had absconded. This part of her story casts an intriguing light upon what former foundlings chose to say about their origins and their upbringing:

Unless the Treasurer deems it necessary they may be left to their own conjectures [about the reason for Mabel’s disappearance] nor does it appear requisite they should be acquainted this is a Foundling, she never having told them she was so, her Master and Mistress hav[in]g always looked upon her as being apprenticed by the Parish to the Man she served her time with, not that she concealed that circumstance from shame or any other motive but as they imagined it to be so, it was of no consequence to undeceive them.⁴⁵

At first this case is mystifying, since it is difficult to imagine how Mabel’s master and mistress could not have known that she was a foundling. The apprenticeship register provides a plausible answer: her first master was not John Simpson, but a man named John Young, a farmer from Ripon in north Yorkshire, to whom she was sent to work in November 1769. Reapprenticeship was an opportunity for Mabel to reinvent her past as a parish apprentice, poor but not stigmatized as presumed to be a bastard child. We should perhaps be less surprised at the degree of initiative shown by young Mabel in pretending she was a parish apprentice, than by the Foundling Hospital’s willingness to collude with her story. Ultimately, it was in the interests of the Governors and of Mabel herself to secure her belongings, wages, and the possibility of an honest living so that she could be self-sufficient. Pragmatism ruled over prudery at the Foundling Hospital in dealing with the consequences of seduction and failed elopement, although as time passed and attitudes hardened, their tolerance increasingly became a source of criticism in the Victorian world of evangelical social and sexual mores.

The Governors of the Foundling Hospital often provided lifelines to their former charges and a valuable safety net that was not available to poor people who had no connection with the charity. Though their efforts were directed towards making the children self-sufficient, and shifting the balance of responsibility for their welfare onto the parish system by securing settlements via employment, they continued to take an interest and provide practical help if they fell upon hard times in adulthood. Sometimes this took the form of small doles of money to help petitioners later in life if tragedy befell them. Stephen Grateful, to the best knowledge of the Governors, had been apprenticed to an apothecary at Holmfirth in Yorkshire in October 1767. Stephen turned up later in London, however, ‘in great distress’ having left his employment to go to sea and ‘suffered Shipwreck’. His ambition was to get help so that he could get employment ‘at Haymaking’.

The Governors sometimes resorted to public fundraising if the case was particularly poignant, and beyond their means to provide lifelong support. In a pamphlet entitled The Case of Mercy Draper, the Governors publicized the fate of a blind girl who had, unusually, been allowed to pursue a musical career, with solo parts at the Hospital Chapel; ‘the Number of Persons who resorted to the Chapel of the Hospital to hear her sing’ raised a ‘considerable Benefit to the Charity’, since her voice was ‘uncommonly harmonious’. In 1775, aged nineteen, Mercy was engaged to sing oratorios at Drury Lane under the patronage of Mr Stanley, a respectable citizen whose repertoire of sacred music made Mercy’s career acceptable to the Governors. In 1777, she was taken into Mr Stanley’s household ‘where she was treated with great Tenderness and Affection’, meeting ‘universal applause’ for her performances until 1782. It was hoped that her talent would bring her ‘Competency for Life’ and the means to earn her own living; however, the unfortunate young woman was struck down with ‘a Disorder of the Brain, which has terminated in INCURABLE INSANITY’. Whereas individuals of means could be confined to a private madhouse and treated to the expensive tyranny of doctors (not least George III, the king himself), there was no public hospital for the likes of Mercy Draper (‘open for the Reception of Patients afflicted with this most dreadful of all human Evils’). For a time she was confined to Bedlam, and then to a private facility, ‘William Perfect’s mad house’ in Kent, but her benefactors died and an appeal was made to the public to raise money for her treatment. What made this ‘poor forlorn young Woman’ a member of the ‘deserving poor’ was that she had earned her keep for the Hospital that had raised her by singing (‘being in her Turn a Benefactress to that Institution, which had extended its Bounty towards her’). The rhetoric of sentiment that accompanied this appeal emphasized that, having been saved from a young age ‘from all the Horrors of want, Misery and Vice’, and making a promising career for herself, her fortunes had now changed. Owing to her illness, Mercy was now ‘more helpless than an Infant, more destitute than a forsaken Orphan’ and played upon the public air of uncertainty about the tragic consequences of insanity for individuals, and the nation, at a time when George III’s mental and physical health were uncertain (‘Madness! Incurable Madness! Whither can it fly for Refuge?’). The Foundling Hospital recognized that some children with mental disabilities were vulnerable to abuse and could be exploited in the world outside the Hospital walls. Ann Twigg, a girl said to be ‘deficient in understanding’ and ‘defective in capacity’, was returned before her apprenticeship ended on the grounds ‘that it may be hurtful to the Girl to be from under the immediate protection of this Charity’. Bartholomew Walbroke was said to be so unruly (‘an idiot, mischievous and ungovernable’) that he was sent directly to Bedlam rather than being returned to the Hospital.⁴⁶

The Governors continued to exert clemency towards foundling girls in adulthood if they became pregnant out of wedlock, showing compassion at a time when attitudes were hardening towards illegitimacy. In 1788, former foundling Sarah Saunders, apprenticed to a hosier by the name of William Surgery in Leicester Fields, ‘returned Thanks to the Committee for their kindness’ in having admitted her child to the Hospital, ‘upon the representation of her Master’. Assuming that there was nothing unduly sinister behind William’s actions—that he was not the father of her child (which was often the case in households where one of the men had consensual sex or raped a young female servant), eighteen-year-old Sarah had few options. She was grateful that the Hospital provided for her illegitimate baby, and no doubt that her master showed compassion in liaising with the Governors on her behalf, bypassing the normal admission procedure. It was noted ‘the Girl called in and admonish’d to be careful of her Character’. This was the most that someone in her situation could hope for.⁴⁷

In adulthood, former foundlings made their own networks of allegiance, finding surrogate brothers and sisters, mentors, and parental figures. The process of finding an alternative family for themselves started while they were still at the Foundling Hospital, and continued when they went out into the world. The ties of mutual help and affection that they made could help them to get by and even prosper, though for many the limits of their expectations were very narrow. Many foundlings married and had families of their own, while others kept in touch with their ‘schoolfriends’ (as George King liked to refer to the boys he had known while he was growing up, fellow foundlings like himself ). Small acts of friendship, kindness, and neighbourliness could be crucial to a poor person’s survival and were documented in the incidental comments made in the Foundling Hospital correspondence. When Hannah Draper’s master, an ironmonger of Holborn, went bankrupt, she moved from place to place until finally she fell ill and was confined to St Thomas’s Hospital for a year. When she was discharged, she was no longer fit to work in domestic service, but avoided the workhouse because of her skill at needlework and ‘the benevolence of her Friend at the House where she lodg’d’.⁴⁸ Another foundling, Charlotte Downing, the well-behaved servant whose ‘excellent Character’ earned her a gratuity for good behaviour throughout her apprenticeship, was taken ill shortly after going to work in a household in Fish Hill Street near the Monument (on the same street, coincidentally, as George King lived while an apprentice). She ended up in St Bartholomew’s Hospital for a time. Charlotte was helped to find a place once she was well again by kindly Mrs Lyney, her former master’s sister, ‘in consideration of her good Conduct’. The same woman petitioned the Hospital Governors on Mary’s behalf so that she could receive her rightful gratuity. Mrs Lyney described herself in another letter as Charlotte’s ‘Friend’, a term that had considerable significance and a specific meaning at this time, as someone who could be an advocate for another person as though they were a blood relative.⁴⁹ Calling in her network of favours from respectable women known to the Hospital, Mrs Lyney also dropped in the letter that Charlotte was known to Mrs Coleman, ‘a School Mistress at the Foundling [Hospital]’.

For some, but by no means all, foundlings, the haven of their early childhood was with their wet nurses and families. A few children managed to maintain contact with these motherly figures throughout their lives. The Foundling Hospital inspector in Chertsey reported that Adam Bell had turned up in Surrey having escaped from his master, a pocket book maker in London. He had ‘come down to his Nurse to inform her that his Master has used him exceedingly ill & that he could not stay any longer with him’. The youth, who was fourteen years old at the time, was returned to London for examination by the Governors, bearing the inspector’s letter.⁵⁰ When Honor Barnes’s master, described as a ‘Gentleman’ of Southwark, died suddenly, she had the good fortune to be looked after by Ann Waterman, described as a woman who ‘goes out ironing’ for a living ‘and has taken care of Honor Barnes’. The girl had been turned over by her master’s widow, who soon remarried, to an ‘undertaker and appraiser’ and his wife. This unscrupulous woman, a seller of ‘Oysters, Milk and Fruit’, pawned Honor’s things and kept the proceeds for herself. Ann was instrumental in helping Honor recover a petticoat and cloth apron, a far from trivial matter to the girl, since with these humble items of clothing she could earn a living and keep herself decently.⁵¹

The few mothers who sought to reclaim their infants from the Hospital were often unsuccessful because so many babies and young children died before they could be reclaimed. There is some evidence in the archive of the other side of the story, however: some foundlings who did survive wanted to know about their identity later in life. One such foundling was Rebecca Potter, received into the Hospital on 16 March 1760, and apprenticed on 14 June 1769 to William Hayes of Moor’s Yard, Old Fish Street in the Parish of St Nichols, a tailor. She was employed in Hayes’s household as a servant, and attended the sub-committee of the Foundling Hospital in person many years later, on 16 December 1786, at the age of twenty-six. In front of the assembled dignitaries, she requested ‘their indulgence to acquaint her what name she was received with’. A note written at the head of the slip of paper that documented this extraordinary evidence of a foundling wanting to know more about her birth identity was that the ‘Billets [were] ex[amin]d’, but they yielded little information, and no further clue was given as to whether Rebecca ever learned more about the name her mother had given her, nor anything further about her true identity.⁵²

Another foundling who wanted to know more about his identity was Thomas Radford. Thomas was bound apprentice to John Glover, a cutler, by the Governors of Ackworth Hospital on 21 March 1771, ‘with whome he served honestly and faithfully the term limited’. The local schoolmaster, John Richardson, commissioned by Thomas for his superior letter-writing ability, wrote on behalf of Thomas in fine copperplate hand from Sheffield in May 1791. Thomas wished to thank ‘the Patrons of his Youth’ and said ‘that he would be exceeding glad of a line in return’, adding he would like to be told ‘should any thing concerning his Relations or Parents ever have transpired or came [to] light, or may hereafter be known’.⁵³ Likewise, Elizabeth Larker, received 29 April 1769 at the age of two, was apprenticed in July 1777 to Ann Chambers of Poplar, a widow, as a household servant, and reassigned to Ann Hatley of Brook Street, Stepney. It was recorded at the Foundling Hospital that ‘The above Eliz. Larker attends to request the Committee to Inform her of her parents if possible’.⁵⁴

The Governors may have been surprised to find their former charges cared so deeply about the identity of their true parents. That the former foundlings had any opinions at all on the subject, and the gumption to ask them questions about how they had been treated as infants, was not always well received. Given the patrician attitudes of the times, the Governors would have been surprised if anyone of lowly rank had questioned them, or exhibited sentiments usually reserved for those of higher rank and finer feelings. In one small memorandum written for the General Committee, there is the trace of kindness on the part of a master towards his foundling apprentice that offsets the many cases of brutality that are also documented in the Foundling Hospital archives:

If the Committee should think proper to order Indentures for Apprenticing James Melling to Mr Newham whose Petition lies before them, He desired the Steward to inform the committee that he requests his own Name of Newham may be inserted in the Indentures instead of Melling if compatible with the rules of the House, as he intends to look upon him as a relation & call him so, and have him [left] something handsome when he dies if he finds he shall deserve it hav[in]g no Relations of his own to bequeath his Property to.⁵⁵

It was not unusual for someone to take on the name of a benefactor, guardian, or godparent in the era before adoption became a legally recognized process, which did not happen in English law until 1926. Francis Newham, James’s master, was a Whitechapel grocer, who had purchased a shop on Whitechapel Road in the 1750s and had taken ten-year-old James as his apprentice in September 1789. Newham was prosperous: he converted an alleyway into ‘Newham Rents’, four cottages to the rear of his shop. It may have been his intention to have secured an heir via the Foundling Hospital or this could have been a serendipitous plan that developed during James’s apprenticeship. A footnote in a small, crabbed hand, records that the General Committee considered this unorthodox request, and noted dismissively that ‘The Comm[itt]ee cannot change their Registers, Mr Newham may call the Boy by what Name he pleases’.

In the event, Francis Newham’s plan to make a foundling his heir came to nothing, perhaps because the Governors’ response was so dispiriting, or maybe the condition that the boy should behave well and merit his benevolence (‘if he finds he shall deserve it’) did not materialize. James was reapprenticed in 1794 to a woollen draper in St James, and again in 1796 to a warehouseman in St Mary Le Bow. His former master, Francis Newham, died in 1807 and divided the ownership of his business and property empire among relatives.⁵⁶

Of the thousands of stories of foundling children who went out into the wider world beyond the Hospital walls, only a few have left traces in the archives, and those that have are often better documented because they were exceptional, whether because the children were the victims of cruelty and brutality, or had encounters with the law as the victims or perpetrators of crime. We have seen how some of them chose to reinvent their stories later in life so that the shame of being associated with bastardy was erased from their past, something which makes it harder still to trace them. For those who did not break the law, or girls whose names changed upon marriage, there are still fewer paper trails.

There were horrific examples of violence and abuse meted out to foundling children, who were among the most vulnerable members of Georgian society once they left the confines of the Hospital grounds. Their lives were often no more nor less impoverished and susceptible to illness and misfortune than others destined for the bottom of the social order. Yet in relation to their own quests for identity and resilience in the face of so many obstacles, the traces are there of resourcefulness, defiance, and gritted determination to survive. And, as we shall soon see, a small number of foundling children managed to escape the fate that had been planned for them by their social betters since before they were born.