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“Children of Accident and Mystery” Foundlings in History and Literature On a December evening in 1838, a group of well-to-do New Yorkers sat down to dinner at the home of Philip Hone, a former mayor of the city. As the group tucked into their game and oysters, they were interrupted by an unexpected ring of the doorbell. When Hone’s servant answered the bell, he found no one there—until he looked down at the doorsill and saw a baby boy, about a week old, packed in a basket. The servant carried the baby in his basket into the dining room for Hone and his guests to see. Hone was captivated by the baby, whose appearance he meticulously recorded in his diary: “It had on a clean worked muslin frock, lace cap, its underclothes new and perfectly clean, a locket on the neck which opened with a spring and contained a lock of dark hair; the whole covered nicely with a piece of new flannel, and a label pinned on the breast on which was written, in a female hand, Alfred G. Douglas. It was one of the sweetest babies I ever saw.” Hone and his guests abandoned their dinner and launched into a discussion of what to do. Hone was tempted to keep his charming guest, but his guests advised against it, warning that if he took the foundling in, he “would have twenty more such outlets to my benevolence.” Furthermore , Hone reflected later that evening in his diary, “if the little urchin should turn out bad, he would prove a troublesome inmate; and if intelligent and good, by the time he became an object of my affection the rightful owners might come and take him away.” The anonymous author of the note pinned to Alfred’s wrapping identi fied herself as the mother of the baby and a “poor friendless widow.” Hone, knowing nothing more of his mother’s marital or sexual history, presumed that, like most foundlings, Alfred was illegitimate. “Poor little innocent,” Hone sympathized, “—abandoned by its natural protector, 1 13 and thrown at its entrance into life upon the sympathy of a selfish world, to be exposed, if it should live, to the sneers and taunts of uncharitable illegitimacy!” In the end, Hone took his guests’ advice and decided not to keep the foundling. He repacked Alfred in his basket and sent him to the almshouse with a servant.1 When confronted with a foundling, Hone and his guests knew just what to think, to fear, and to do. Their familiarity was partly the result of experience. Infant abandonment, while not yet present on the scale familiar to those in European cities such as London and Paris, was relatively commonplace in early nineteenth-century New York City. In the year when Alfred Godfrey Douglas landed on Philip Hone’s doorstep, the almshouse collected a total of eighty foundlings. Three of these, including Alfred, were retrieved on Hone’s street alone.2 But New Yorkers of this period did not need to encounter foundlings directly in order to decide what they signified. As descendants of European immigrants and inhabitants of a port city where they were the recipients of a continuous flow of transatlantic information, New Yorkers such as Hone and his guests belonged to a culture in which infant abandonment was entrenched . They believed it was tragic, even deviant, but they also understood it as an ineradicable part of life. To them, the presence of foundlings seemed at once terrible—and normal.3 “Helpless Indigent Beings”: European Foundlings and Their New York Counterparts New York’s experience with foundlings can be understood as a New World manifestation of a problem long familiar in the Old World. Infant abandonment was widely practiced in the ancient Mediterranean, for instance. In Rome, fathers were legally entitled to abandon (and also to sell or kill) any babies born in their households whom they did not choose to keep.4 Institutions devoted exclusively to the care of foundlings appeared first in Italy, with possibly the very first appearing in Milan in 787. Foundling asylums spread through Italy, and then through the rest of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.5 By the eighteenth century, infant abandonment had become a mass phenomenon in European cities; as many as one out of every three or four children was abandoned in French, Italian, and Spanish cities at that time.6 In 1785, 14 | “Children of Accident and...

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