The Foundling Museum

Reporting from London:

Maybe this should start with a trigger warning, as the topic is abandoned infants, it starts in the early 1700s, and the picture isn’t pretty. Let me tell you that I wept. So, if you’re still with me, here goes.

Charles Dickens introduced me to Coram’s Foundling Hospital in Little Dorrit. In a time when there was, essentially, nothing in the way of birth control, a great many impoverished women ended up abandoning their babies on the streets of London. By the thousands. Thomas Coram, who’d made his fortune in the shipping trade in America, was horrified at what he saw. No doubt he wasn’t the only one, but he felt he had to do something about it. And so he campaigned for years, and eventually, with the help of a number of prominent people, and, finally, the King’s permission, in 1739 founded a hospital or home for these children.

The idea was, the babies would be left at the hospital with some sort of token identifying them, so that the parent could reclaim the child when/if able to support him or her. In reality, very few children were reclaimed. They were, however, cared for, and given some sort of training that would allow them to become apprenticed or go into domestic work when they were old enough. At the time, 14 was old enough.

No, it wasn’t an ideal situation. Conditions being what they were in the 18th and 19th centuries, many children did not survive. But the Foundling Hospital saved the lives of thousands of children, and in many cases allowed them to have a better adulthood than they might have otherwise expected. For the full story, you might want to look at the Wikipedia article here.

I visited the Foundling Museum on a beautiful, sunny day. Nearby, children played football (U.S. soccer) in a park, reminding us that life, while not perfect now, is better than it was.

The museum comprises three floors. The ground floor focuses on the collections of artifacts related to the children, from the earliest days of the organization to the 20th century, when the hospital was relocated to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. You can listen to audio accounts from some of these former residents.

The next floor contains reconstructions of some of the original rooms of the hospital, and includes many of its works of art. That collection is a story in itself. With art donated by the artists, it became the first public art gallery in the U.K., and a fashionable charity.

The topmost floor contains the Gerald Coke Handel Collection. There I sat for a while in one of the armchairs with built-in speakers and listened to Handel’s music to quiet my soul.

The Great Equestrienne Louisa Woolford

Print depicting Mr Ducrow and Miss Woolford in their circus duet as the ‘Tyrolean Sheppard [sic] and Swiss Milkmaid’ as performed at Astley's Theatre (print published 26 July 1831). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

“In ‘The Tyrolean Shepherd and Swiss Milkmaid,’ for example, [Ducrow] was joined by his wife, Louisa Woolford; while standing on the backs of their circling horses, the two performed the pursuit and wooing of a ‘fair peasant,’ complete with a lovers’ quarrel and reconciliation scene, followed by an exquisite pas de deux.” —Britannica

An article about equestriennes that I shared some months ago on Facebook reminded me of one of my favorite early 19th century London locales, Astley’s Amphitheatre, and its equestrienne star, Louisa Woolford. Since she wasn’t a Belle Epoque figure—she was born about 1815, in the Regency era—she didn’t get much attention in the Paris Review piece on equestriennes. Or elsewhere.

Miss Woolford makes a brief appearance in Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, in the piece, “Astley’s.” Not enough about her, but a fine and funny verbal picture of the place, worth reading, I think.

She was the most famous circus performer of the time—but information about her is scarce. Here’s what I’ve pieced together, with the aid of a descendant.

Louisa was the seventh of nine children, one of two born in Ireland (the others were born in England). Her father was a horse breeder and trainer who worked with the famous equestrian circus performer Andrew Ducrow, of Astley’s fame, and she began performing at Astley’s at an early age.

According to a quote from an Andrew Ducrow obituary in a London Dead Blog post: “ ... Miss Woolford ... before she became Mrs Ducrow was for a long time the chief attraction of his theatre, and drew crowds by the accustomed gracefulness of her action, and the skilful management of her steed. The deceased has two children* by her. Miss Woolford was very early a debutante at Astley’s, and many theatrical people of about thirty years standing will remember her at the Amphitheatre under Astley’s management as a little girl with a long crop, and of intelligent and pretty manners. She had two brothers also at the same time with her on the stage, who have since died in America; she bears an amiable and good character; her age is about twenty seven, and she had been married to Mr Ducrow about four years.”

The trouble is, she tends to take second place to her famous husband. She put him in first place as well, with an extravagant epitaph on his magnificently over-the-top mausoleum in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery. I took a detailed look when I visited London a few years ago. On one side of the tomb is the epitaph Louisa wrote, which you can read in full in my blog post at Two Nerdy History Girls.

His funeral, as described in The Gentleman’s Magazine, was in keeping with the grand tomb.

We learn from the Gentleman’s Magazine obituary that Louisa is pregnant (with their third child): “The situation of Mrs. Ducrow renders it probable that her accouchement will take place in June. It is understood to be her intention not to resume her professional exertions.” This pregnancy produced the son who earned his own blog post on the London Dead blog.

Had she resumed her professional exertions, it’s possible that her fame would have equaled her first husband’s. But she married again, about two years after Ducrow’s demise, a gentleman named John Hay. He died in 1873, and she lived on comfortably it seems, having two live-in servants as of the census of 1891. She died at Paddington, London, on 25 January 1900, leaving her daughter something over £ 700.

For the information about her life after Ducrow and for most of the images here I am indebted to Eden Pelletier, a descendant, who got in touch with me after reading my 2NHG blog post about Andrew Ducrow’s mausoleum.

We have not yet found Louisa’s burial place, and we continue to search for further information. For now, she seems to be one of those women who, after the early years of fame, “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs,” as George Eliot said of Dorothea in Middlemarch.

*Peter Andrew and Louisa.