On a recent trip to England, Your
Humble Narrator managed a visit to the Foundling Museum, recommended
to him several years ago by veteran travelers Theda Perdue and
Michael Green. The museum stands on the site of London's first home
for orphaned and fostered children, which philanthropist Thomas Coram
founded in 1739, and which over the next two centuries housed over
25,000 boys and girls. Its exhibits include a history of the
Foundling Hospital, with displays of inmates' clothing and beds and
photos of foundlings who “graduated” in the twentieth century.
One case contained a unique selection of artifacts: “tokens” left
by children's parents to identify them if they wanted to redeem their
offspring. These consisted of commemorative medals, passes to locales
like Vauxhall Gardens, coins (sometimes clipped or punched),
padlocks, penknife handles, and scraps of cloth. All silently
testified to the ragged circumstances that had obliged
mothers and fathers to abandon their children.
Other galleries tend toward opulence,
rather than pathos. A sitting room, decorated in rococo
style, pays tribute to the institution's wealthier patrons. A display room celebrates the life and work of composer George
Handel, who helped finance the Foundling Hospital. A selection of paintings and prints by William Hogarth (another patron), including
the original version of “March of the Guards to Finchley,” adorns another hall. Taken as a whole, the
museum offers a cross-sectional view of London society in the
eighteenth century: the refinement available to the wealthy, the
satirical worldliness of a professional middle-class artist like
Hogarth, and the wretchedness of the impoverished majority, for whom
even a spartan life in a charity hospital seemed an improvement.
