How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore Page B

homeland. He was appalled by the unemployment, poverty and slum conditions he found in early eighteenth-century London. But most shocking of all, as he walked to London and back each day, was the sight of abandoned babies “sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying,” dumped on rubbish heaps by the side of the road.
    With no substantial income or significant connections, it took Coram seventeen years to raise sufficient support and funds to build a refuge for orphaned and unwanted babies. But after winning royal backing in 1739 and parliamentary approval the following year, Coram’s charity received its first charges on March 25, 1741. By midnight thirty babies had been accepted while others were turned away with an appeal to their mothers not to abandon their infants that night. A clerk recording the event wrote,“the Expressions of Grief of the Women whose Children could not be admitted were Scarcely more observable than those of some of the Women who parted with their Children, so that a more moving Scene can’t well be imagined.”
    From the beginning the charity’s governors installed a rigorous system of logging and documenting their charges. While careful to preserve the anonymity of the babies they admitted, and thus erase the stain of their probable illegitimacy, they took meticulous steps to ensure the orphans could be tracked throughout their lives within the charity. On reception, therefore, any distinguishing marks that might later identify a child were carefully noted on billet forms, and mothers were encouraged to leave information about the baby’s birth, parentage and other history along with a small memento. Initially the governors hoped that mothers would later reclaim their children on production of relevant identification. In practice few children were ever reunited with their parents.
    Carefully stored under lock and key, the billet forms and tokens that accumulated over the ensuing years tell a heart-rending story of desperate parents in desperate times. Some mothers left letters or poems describing the appalling circumstances that had forced them to give up their infants. One mother was under sentence of death at Newgate; another had been raped by two sailors. While most mothers were unmarried, and too poor, too young or too ashamed to support an illegitimate child, a substantial number were married women who had simply fallen on hard times. “This Little Innocent is the Darling Offspring of a Unhappy but truly Virtuous Woman by the fondest Husband,” wrote one mother.
    The tokens left with their tiny babies by these bereft mothers included coins, buttons, buckles, thimbles and padlocks. Those who had nothing of value left nutshells, bottle tops, scraps of paper or whatever else came to hand. Some mothers left one item of a pair—one earring, one cufflink, one shoe buckle—or tore a playing card in half in the hope of one day joining the two halves when they were reunited with their loved ones. If no token was left, the clerks sometimes snipped a scrap of fabric from the baby’s clothes and pinned it to the form.
    Upon reception each child was allotted a number, stamped on a lead tag which was tied around the baby’s neck, and this was used to track the child throughout its lifetime in the charity. At the same time, immediatelyupon admission, each child was renamed. The very first babies were named after the charity’s benefactors—including Thomas Coram—but when some patrons raised concerns that the little Bedfords and Montagues might grow up to claim familial rights, other names were smartly introduced. Subsequent babies were baptized Julius Caesar, Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth Tudor after dead heroes, and when these ran out, children were named after places, flowers or virtues they might aspire to, such as Patience, Prudence and Faith. But as these too were used up, babies were named simply Jane or John as befitted their lowly station in life. With a new name, new clothes