Poor Women and Elite Men

Abstract

Elizabeth M., a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant, sought help from the London Foundling Hospital in 1891. She had met a respectably employed man, Daniel B., a foreman in the office of a dairy company, and the two began courting. They decided to marry and engaged in sexual intercourse. She became pregnant but then found Daniel reluctant to continue the relationship. He disappeared and she later learned that he had fled for America. Elizabeth sought refuge at Miss Pye's Home for Unwed Mothers and then asked the London Foundling Hospital to take her child. Her petition was successful and, according to Jessica Sheetz-Nguyen, this ‘preserved her character for the rest of her life’ (p. 117). Accounts such as this, drawn from the archives of the Foundling Hospital, form the basis for an examination of the interaction between unwed mothers and the men who managed the institution that was described by Henry Brougham as ‘the ornament of the metropolis’ (p. 50).