Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital by Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen, and: Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture by Galia Benziman (review)

These books provide a fresh perspective on a topic which both pulls at our heartstrings and tells us about the past: neglected and abandoned children and the parents, especially the mothers, who left them behind. Their sources—the records of the london Foundling Hospital and Victorian depictions of children in poems and novels—are well-known but not yet stale, and both authors promise new and exciting approaches. Despite some criticisms, I would nonetheless recommend both books for the ways in which their authors challenge standard ideas about child neglect and abandonment.

Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen’s book is not about children. The actual foundlings of the London Foundling Hospital (LFH) are unseen and unheard in this book, which instead tells the story of the single mothers who applied for their infants’ admission. Earlier work on the LFH has focused on the admitted infants, particularly their treatment and chances of survival, as in Alysa Levene’s recent book, The Childhood of the Poor (2012), or the history of the institution itself. The LFH aspired to be respectable, to be “the ornament of the metropolis,” and, as the demand for care for illegitimate children exceeded the supply, the directors could select whose babies they chose to shelter and whose they rejected. Their criterion was “respectability”: whether or not the mothers had been respectable before their “fall” and therefore had a good chance, if relieved of their offspring, of again being so (57–58).

Application for admission involved a petition which consisted of three parts: the application itself, an examination of the mother recorded in a transcript, and personal references. One important point here, which perhaps deserves greater attention, is that success was measured by the admission of the child, its separation from its mother, and her relief of responsibility: events we might consider tragic. If unwed mothers wept, it was because their petitions failed, not because they had to surrender their babies. Both successful and failing petitions were retained in the archives. This is crucial for Sheetz-Nguyen. Her analysis of the details of the cases reveals the prevailing ideas about merit and morality that motivated the LFH officers.

These petitions have been used before to illuminate the lives of the mothers, notably by Françoise Barret-Ducrocq in Love in the Time of Victoria (1989). However, according to Sheetz-Nguyen, the earlier analysis was neither systematic nor sensitive to the mothers’ limited but possibly still detectible aims and objectives. As a result, Barret-Ducrocq cast the petitioners as either prostitutes or victims. In contrast, Sheetz-Nguyen seeks to uncover women’s agency. Her methodology promises to provide “new ways of understanding the mothers’ choices” by taking into account “statistical samples of discrete pieces of information found in the petitions in order to create a biographical overview of these women” (5). Sheetz-Nguyen promises a quantitative and qualitative analysis of this information viewed through four “analytical frames”: time, space, gender, and agency (6).

Chapter 1 describes contemporary attitudes toward unwed motherhood and details the changes provided in the New Poor Law with its infamous “bastardy clauses.” The account of these changes and the debate that accompanied them constitutes useful reading for Poor Law and gender historians alike. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the petitioning process. Chapter 3 looks at the geography of respectability, while 4 delves deeper into the backgrounds of the mothers in terms of age, occupation, and the nature and duration of the relationship with the fathers. Both of these later chapters summarize various quantitative characteristics of the petitions and petitioners according to their ultimate success or failure. For example, chapter 3 looks at...