Archival Seduction: The Discursive Challenges of Reading Sex Crimes in the London Foundling Hospital Mothers' Petitions, 1807–1827

The London Foundling Hospital's archives contain petitions that document the experiences of women who became pregnant outside of marriage and subsequently sought to give up their child to preserve their reputations. Similarities that I have uncovered in some of these narratives suggest that a serial rapist was at work in Regency-Era London. Yet to definitively pronounce on this criminal question is, I argue, impossible—not merely due to the material's cold-case status but also, and more importantly, due to the confluence of narratological and discursive issues pertaining to representations of women's sexuality in the early nineteenth century. This article identifies and discusses three key discursive dimensions that contribute to these petitions' opacity: the charitable/institutional regulations and structure, the medico-legal murkiness surrounding rape law, and the socio-cultural backdrop of "seduction." In doing so, I demonstrate how the study of these discursive dimensions, which prevent us from "solving" sex crimes from the past, allows us to unearth something of even more value: insight into the many ways in which discursive norms surrounding women's rights and sexuality—in both the nineteenth century and in the present day—work to obfuscate, rather than bring to light, gender injustice and oppression.