"Objects of Charity": Petitions to the London Foundling Hospital, 1768-72

Abstract

England was peculiar among the leading European countries of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in not having a major hospital devoted to the care of abandoned babies and young children. By 1700, many other countries had such a facility, usually established in their principal cities: institutions of this sort were to be found in Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, and Venice. Although London had Christ's Hospital, founded in the reign of Edward VI, an institution that in the first half-century of its existence admitted some foundling children, it soon transformed itself into a refuge and school for the legitimate offspring of freemen of the city of London. By the late seventeenth century, the Hospital had a notice posted near its gates, stating These are to certify that no child or children who are dropped in Christ's Hospital can receive any benefit from thence.' The establishment of a true foundling hospital was impeded by hostility to bastard-bearers, and by Tudor poor laws that vested responsibility for the nurture of abandoned babies and children in the parishes in which they were found.2