Not until World War II, when illegitimacy rates soared, would the government adopt a more compassionate view of unmarried mothers. Those changes would come too late for Lena, who would be forced to wait out her pregnancy at the Constance Road Institution, a workhouse established in the nineteenth century to house “imbeciles and lunatics” and the “aged and infirm.” Closer to her due date, she was transferred to Dulwich Hospital, built by the Guardians of the Poor of the Parish of St. Saviour, where, on January 1, 1932, she gave birth to a healthy girl.
Keeping the child had never been an option, not without her brother’s support.
Within a day or two of her daughter’s birth, Lena wrote a letter that would be the first of several. The handwritten note was dispatched to an address on Brunswick Square that was already familiar to me by the time it came into my hands, some eighty-five years after she’d written it. The contents of the letter were difficult to decipher, the ink faded with time, the penmanship sometimes illegible. I brought the photocopied replica closer to my face, squinting to make out the words.
Dear Madam,
I am writing to ask you if you would kindly help me if you are able. Through my misfortune, I have given birth to a daughter here, and I cannot find the father, and worst I have no parents. If I was able to have someone to look after the child, I should be able to go back to work. I should be very glad if you could come and see me, if you please can find it convenient [illegible] explain to you and tell you.
Yours faithfully,
Lena Weston
In reply, the secretary of the Foundling Hospital provided Lena with an application form and a copy of the Foundling Hospital’s “Rules for the Admission of Children”—the same rules that had been adopted more than a century before.
The form contained some perfunctory questions about the child, its sex, and the date of its birth, but the remainder of the questions focused on the circumstances that had led to Lena’s pregnancy. Who is the father? What is his full name? Did you become engaged to marry him? Who introduced you to him? Does the father know of your trouble? Has he promised to provide for the child?
In my research, I learned that the hospital’s primary purpose was to provide a home for illegitimate children who would otherwise fall through the cracks of the social order. It was understood, however, that the institution would serve a second and arguably more important purpose: that of restoring a fallen woman to her former standing. That she be prevented from becoming a prostitute, according to John Brownlow, secretary of the Foundling Hospital during the mid-1800s and a former foundling himself, was imperative. He was particularly concerned about the woman who had become the “unsuspecting victim of treachery,” and who, without the assistance of the Foundling Hospital, would become “delirious in her despair.”5 Brownlow felt compelled to help such a woman. “Preserving the mere vital functions of an infant,” he reasoned,
cannot be put in competition with saving from vice, misery, and infamy, a young woman, in the bloom of life, whose crime may have been a single and solitary act of indiscretion. Many extraordinary cases of repentance, followed by restoration to peace, comfort, and reputation, have come within the knowledge of the writer of this note. Some cases have occurred, within his own observation, of wives happily placed, the mothers of thriving families, who, but for the saving aid of this Institution, might have become the most noxious and abandoned prostitutes. Very rare are the instances, none has come within notice, of a woman relieved by the Foundling Hospital, and not thereby preserved from a course of prostitution.6
Helping a woman regain her dignity and virtue was a noble and essential purpose, and the rules of the institution reflected the gravity of the task. To have her child admitted to the Foundling Hospital, a mother had to prove to the satisfaction of the governors who administered the process that all requirements had been met.
Each rule had been designed to determine whether a woman was of sufficient moral character that her reputation could be repaired, and that, if granted the great favor of being allowed to relinquish her child, she would return to her station in society. The rules on this score were unforgiving:
No child can be admitted unless the Committee is satisfied, after due enquiry, of the previous good character and present necessity of the Mother, and that the Father of the child has deserted it and the Mother; and also, that the reception of the child, will, in all probability, be the means of replacing the Mother in the course of virtue, and the way of an honest livelihood.7
Nor were ladies of great wealth spared the rigors of the process. Infants delivered to the hospital in fine lace bonnets or intricately embroidered gowns, with expensive toys clutched between their tiny fingers, would still have been vetted to the full extent of the rules.
Once a child had been admitted, its mother could rest easy, knowing that the very existence of the child would be a closely guarded secret. The hospital’s clerk entered the name of the mother and the sex and age of the child in a central register, the only record of the mother’s true identity. The register, along with any other identifying tokens or documents, was placed in a billet that was to be “kept with great Secrecy and Care,” and “never to be opened but by Order of the [Hospital’s] General Committee.”8 The child would go by a new name, and in correspondence or in response to inquiries, he or she would be identified only by a letter and the date of admission. At first children were given the names of distinguished public figures to honor them, a practice that began in 1741, when the hospital’s first two charges were named after its founder, Thomas Coram, and his wife, Eunice. The naming system was abandoned when grown children began laying claims upon their namesakes, and the earls and dukes who had lent their names were forced to defend themselves against spurious claims of descent.
On my first sort through the documents back in that small room across from the Foundling Museum, I’d noticed that Lena hadn’t named the father on her application form, instead listing him anonymously as a “commercial traveller.” When Val came back to check on us, I’d asked her curiously if he might have been a traveling salesman. My own frame of reference called up a particularly American notion of the trade—a humdrum man in a cheap suit knocking on doors, selling encyclopedias or vacuum cleaners. Maybe I could track down the identity of my grandfather by researching companies that had employed salesmen in the area. But Val gently disabused me of these notions, along with my hopes of finding out more. It was common for applicants to the Foundling Hospital to claim that the men who’d impregnated them were travelers passing through town, to hide their true identities.
There was another clue in Lena’s statement of her case:
My brother is my nearest relation. . . . I have written to him to ask if he could take the child and myself, but writes to say that he could not do with the child but would give me some assistance. . . . I am making this application to you asking for your help, if you would kindly take the child off my hands now that I can get work, and trust that some day I shall be in circumstances to have the child again. The tragic part—I do not know the father or much about him as I met him casually as a stranger stranger he never told me either his name or address, unfortunately only now realize my foolishness! Trusting that you can understand and help me through, this most awful fate.