Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital

Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781441141125
• eBook ISBN: 9781441131683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This volume seeks to address the questions of poverty, charity, and public welfare, taking the nineteenth-century London Foundling Hospital as its focus. It delineates the social rules that constructed the gendered world of the Victorian age, and uses 'respectability' as a factor for analysis: the women who successfully petitioned the Foundling Hospital for admission of their infants were not East End prostitutes, but rather unmarried women, often domestic servants, determined to maintain social respectability. The administrators of the Foundling Hospital reviewed over two hundred petitions annually; deliberated on about one hundred cases; and accepted not more than 25 per cent of all cases. Using primary material from the Foundling Hospital's extensive archives, this study moves methodically from the broad social and geographical context of London and the Foundling Hospital itself, to the micro-historical case data of individual mothers and infants.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• List of Archival Collections Consulted
• Introduction
• 1 ‘There Can Be No Reason for Giving to Vice Privileges Which We Deny Misfortune’: Legal Constraints for Victorian Mothers
• 2 Ornament of the Metropolis: Victorian Representation and Reality
• 3 Circumventing Social Geography: The Unwed Mother’s Search for Respectability
• 4 ‘When First Acquainted with Father I Was. . . ’: Foundling Hospital Mothers and Fathers
• 5 ‘Is My Own Name Really Required, for on that Everything Depends’
• 6 ‘If You Will Kindly Take Her from Me, You Will Save My Character’: Framing Respectability
• 7 ‘Dear Mr Brownlow, Will You Please Tell Me. . . ’
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index