In return, she was asked to do only one thing—forget that her daughter had ever existed.
5
Bastards
To understand Lena’s choice, I’d have to go back to the eighteenth century, to images that seem barbaric to us now—dead or dying babies tossed into open sewers or thrown atop piles of refuse on London’s streets. Medieval as it sounds, the disgrace of an unwanted pregnancy was still so ruinous at the time that a woman from any walk of life might find herself turning to infanticide. Where better to hide the evidence of her crime than among butchers’ bones strewn along narrow alleys, where a child’s discarded corpse would be buried under the excrement dumped from chamber pots emptied from the windows above?
Not all children died at the hands of their desperate mothers, of course. Many were simply left to fend for themselves. A thousand children or more might be abandoned on the streets of London in a given year, and those fortunate enough to survive past infancy were often relegated to lives of begging, theft, and prostitution. The wickedness of London’s streets was so commonplace that it was reflected in the art of the time, memorialized most famously by William Hogarth. A leading eighteenth-century artist who would eventually find a sideline saving children cast off by society, Hogarth captivated London in the early 1730s with his Rake’s Progress series of paintings. The story of a man who forsakes his pregnant fiancée and squanders his fortune on wild parties and orgies would have resonated at the time. Of course, punishment awaited: the final painting depicts the rake’s demise at Bedlam, London’s infamous mental asylum.
London’s ruling class had a long history of providing for children whose fathers had died honorably or were too long at sea, serving their country. But the growing number of illegitimate children abandoned along the city’s streets was another matter altogether. Members of high society didn’t see fit to help children born outside of marriage, an act that would have been considered immoral, against the teachings of Christ. Eighteenth-century philanthropist and author Jonas Hanway summed up the prevailing view in describing the failure of earlier attempts to save forsaken children during the reign of Queen Anne: to help a child born out of wedlock “might seem to encourage persons in vice, by making too easy provision for their illegitimate children.”10
Not all members of society shared this view. Thomas Coram, whose own tragic childhood would inform his life’s work, viewed these discarded children not as the wages of sin but as a worthy cause. Born in 1668, Coram started life unluckily, losing his mother when he was four, a few days after she gave birth to a younger brother who also perished. At the age of eleven, the poor, motherless Coram was sent to sea by his father, later becoming an apprentice for a shipwright. Somehow, with no pedigree or resources, the competent and tenacious boy managed to turn that apprenticeship into a successful career as a shipbuilder. From there he made his way in society, sailing for Boston in 1694 to stand up a shipbuilding business. He traveled the world, became a trustee of the brand-new colony of Georgia, and developed a plan (implemented by the Earl of Halifax, among others) for the settlement of Nova Scotia. Yet no matter how changed his own circumstances, he could never turn a blind eye to the tiny corpses or starving children with outstretched hands on London’s streets, as so many Londoners did. Instead he made a pact with himself—he would find a way to care for these forgotten children.
Coram’s quest would not be an easy one. The practical difficulties of carrying out any philanthropic efforts in this area were compounded by his countrymen’s moral objections.
It is difficult to imagine an entire nation turning its back on defenseless infants. But as historian Ruth McClure noted in her meticulously detailed account of the Foundling Hospital, eighteenth-century foundlings had been effectively dehumanized: “The most difficult obstacle to overcome, as Coram soon found out, was prejudice because, for the most part, the attitude of the average Englishman towards foundlings was not recognized as a prejudice. Everyone took for granted the equation: foundling equals bastard; . . . everyone also took for granted the corollary: bastard equals disgrace. That was the accepted order of things in God’s universe and all decent English society; few questioned it.”11
There was an exception; the very highest members of society did not always share in loathing the illegitimate child. Among their ranks, bastard births were remarkably common. Perhaps that is why women of great status and wealth were among the first constituency to rally by Coram’s side—“Ladies of Quality and Distinction,” as he called them.
The first woman to support Coram’s efforts was Charlotte, the Duchess of Somerset, whose husband, Charles Seymour, the 6th Duke of Somerset, was one of the richest men in England. Her rank allowed her to support the cause without running the risk of censure, paving the way for the others that soon joined her—daughters and wives of barons, marquesses, earls, and dukes. Twenty-one of them would sign the “Ladies Petition” calling for the establishment of an institution to care for deserted children. The document was presented to King George II in 1735, and although the plea did not immediately persuade the king, it was thought to be the key to Coram’s ultimate success, as it provided respectability to an otherwise taboo subject. The ladies also had the ear of the king’s bride; many of them served as ladies of the bedchamber to Queen Caroline.
Even so, the pleas of women would not be enough to persuade the king. Coram would need to recruit men to his cause—powerful men who owned property, controlled the nation’s assets, held seats in Parliament, and they would not be easily won over. Their influence and prosperity were dependent on primogeniture, the system whereby the eldest male heir inherits his father’s estate. An illegitimate child could alter the future, change fortunes, transfer wealth and power. A system that allowed such a child to be cared for, and perhaps one day to challenge the established lines of succession, was not in their best interest. Leaving that child to die on the streets of London was, for these men, the price of assuring the social order’s smooth functioning.
Their intransigence would stall Coram’s scheme for seventeen years. But Coram was playing a long game. And when a game-changing opportunity finally arose, he seized it.
When Coram first took on the cause of London’s abandoned children, the city was mired in financial uncertainty brought on by the failure of a venerable financial institution. After promising vast riches, the celebrated South Sea Company had collapsed, ruining its stockholders and sending economic shock waves throughout Great Britain. The time was not ripe for charity. But in the ensuing years the economy recovered, and a growing confidence in the future allowed the elite to live a little more lavishly. Construction boomed, requiring stonemasons, brickmakers, carpenters, and roofers.
This rise in prosperity was set against the backdrop of Britain’s desire to build its empire by expanding its influence on the European continent and abroad. Conflict was brewing in North America, and England was already engaged in a series of ongoing territorial wars—the Nine Years’ War against France, then the wars of the Spanish Succession and the Austrian Succession. With war and economic growth came a serious and pressing need for a resource that had become all too scarce: able-bodied men and women—men to fight, and women to wait on a growing elite in need of servants. Thomas Coram was a clever man, and he saw an opportunity within these developments to advance his cause, boldly cloaking his pet project in a brand-new argument. Caring for foundlings, he now maintained, was no mere charitable act but a public good that could address the government’s need by creating “useful members of the commonwealth . . . in order to supply the government plentifully with useful hands on many occasions, and for the better producing good and faithful servants from amongst the poor and miserable cast-off children or foundlings.”12