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Reviewed by:
  • The Fallen Woman by Lynda Nead
  • Ellen L. Ramsay
Lynda Nead (curator), The Fallen Woman, (London: The Foundling Museum 2015)

The London Foundling Hospital, established in 1739, provided a home to over 20,000 children during its 215 years of operation. Now the site of the Foundling Museum at 40 Brunswick Square in London, England and opened in 2004, it is home to numerous exhibitions of art, music, poetry, and manuscripts dealing with historical and contemporary themes interrelated with the hospital’s history. The Fallen Woman, a recent mixed media exhibition at the museum (25 September 2015 – 3 January 2016), accompanied by an interesting catalogue, reveals a wealth of research now being pursued by scholars into the individual stories and social history of the women and children connected to the Foundling Hospital.

The Fallen Woman exhibition catalogue consists of three essays by Victoria Mills, Margaret Reynolds, and Steve Lewinson, examining the emergence of the “fallen” woman in the narratives of the hospital records. The hospital originated as a charitable institution with the philanthropy of Captain Thomas Coram, the artist William Hogarth, and the composer George Frideric Handel, to provide a home for children without “preference to any person.” Following a vast influx of children, the hospital shortly thereafter adjusted its admissions policy to a [End Page 327] randomized ballot system. However, by 1768 a petition system came into effect and, by the Victorian era, the “good character” of the woman came to be the main criterion for admission. As such, a series of narratives emerged in the application process centered on the “fallen” woman myth.

The principle historical records concerning the women, children, and staff at the hospital have been provided by the Foundling Hospital Archives and the London Metropolitan Archives. The curator of the exhibition, Lynda Nead, an art historian at Birkbeck College, is author of numerous volumes on the image of the woman in the nineteenth century including Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) and Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). The catalogue essayists also refer to Jessica Sheetz-Nguyen’s Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital: Sex, Gender, Charity and Class in Victorian Britain (London: Continuum, 2012). The authors present to us a description of the process of admission to the hospital beginning with the woman’s picking up of the petition form from the porter’s lodge at the hospital, the completing of the form in an age when literacy was at a premium (often involving the hiring of a writer), the submission of the completed form by 10 a.m. the following Saturday, the interview by the hospital committee, to the personal investigations of the committee into the woman’s past and present following the interview, including the solicitation of letters from employers, the father, medical records from doctors (including vaccination records), and workhouse documents.

The admission process was clearly very personal and sometimes traumatic for women according to the accounts here. The criteria to be filled was described on the back of the petition and specified that the character of the woman was to be probed. While the term “criminal conversation” had been repealed under the Married Women’s Property Act of 1857, the legal language describing adultery was retained in hospital circles well after the Act. According to Victoria Mills, many of the “seductions” reported would now be viewed as rapes and, predictably, many of the letters solicited from the fathers simply denied paternity. The women were also judged “respectable” or not by the porter in his log book according to his observation of their appearance when they first picked up the petition. A reference was found by Dr. Mills in the Metropolitan Archives indicating that the author Charles Dickens spoke on behalf of a Susan Mayne to the Foundling admissions staff. However her petition was refused because a matron at the lying-in hospital claimed she showed signs of venereal disease.

Margaret Reynolds suggests that the narrative of the “fallen” woman emerged as a punitive response to the feminist views of women such as Mary Wollstonecraft and...

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