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.

Location, location: Scenes from Ten Things I Hate About the Duke

In a previous post, I showed you the Green Man Inn as it was. It’s still there, not quite the same, but easy to recognize.

Litchfield House aka deGriffith House, is the building on the left with the trees on the balcony.

Also still in existence is the house I turned into deGriffith House. Currently known as Litchfield House, No. 15 St. James’s Square, it stands in a corner of the square next to the London Library. You can see some interiors here.

You can read more about the house here at Patrick Baty’s blog.

St. James’s Square in 1812, image from Ackermann’s Repository.

St. James’s Square looked very different in the time of my story.

“In the centre is a large circular sheet of water, six or seven feet deep, from the middle of which rises a fine equestrian statue of William III. Erected here within these few years.” Thomas Allen, History & Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southwark ... Vol 4 (1829).

Apparently, the pool was still there in the 1839 edition.

Another, much later writer has this to say about the pool: “The basin of water was not even then removed, and is still remembered by many persons now living, the stagnant slimy pool having only been finally drained within the last fifty years, after one of our periodical panics of cholera, when the existing garden was laid out and planted with trees.” Arthur Irwin Dasent, The History of St. James's Square and the Foundation of the West End of London: With a Glimpse of Whitehall in the Reign of Charles the Second. (1895)

Images L-R:

Furnival's Inn, Holborn was demolished in the 1890s.

Lord Grosvenor's Gallery, Park Lane - Shepherd, Metropolitan Improvements (1828)—Grosvenor House was my model for Ashmont House. It was demolished sometime about 1926-27. A hotel now stands on the spot.

The Hanover Square Rooms, where the fancy fair takes place in my story, was demolished in 1900.

The Adelphi (the image dates to when it was the Sans Pareil) theater, which has been renovated and rebuilt and enlarged over the years, remains in active use.

Charles Cotton’s Fishing House, photo by Neil Gibbs 2 August 2006. Attribution Neil Gibbs

And this is the Fishing House, which I moved from Derbyshire to Surrey for story purposes. You can see other images here at Derbyshire Life.

Hardwick Hall, the Model for Athcourt

Because readers seem to be very interested in the posts about locales and vehicles mentioned in Lord of Scoundrels*, I'm continuing the visual guide.

Athcourt, where Lord Dain resided, is on the fringes of Dartmoor.  It’s based, however, on Hardwick Hall, which is in Derbyshire.  But there are moors there, too, and Hardwick Hall certainly is atmospheric.  I chose it because it looked like the sort of place Dain would have grown up in and because I had a picture of it in cross-section—so helpful in seeing the movie in one’s head.  Since a great deal of action takes place in this house, the cross-section was invaluable.

You can see a black and white version of the cross section here.

The National Trust publication about Hardwick Hall includes a cross section in color, as well as many interior views, including the Long Gallery, down which Dominick runs au naturel. Below is a Victorian pseudo-Elizabethan view of the gallery, but it hasn't changed much.

*Yes, still celebrating the book’s 20th anniversary.
 

 

Images: North View of Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire and
Interior View of the Hall at Hardwick, by John Buckler (1813), courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Gallery image from The Mansions of England in the Olden Time, Vol 2, 1870 - See more at: