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Helen Berry, Orphans of Empire: The Fate of London’s Foundlings

This is a highly readable, hybrid popularacademic study of the London Foundling Hospital and the long-term fate of the foundlings between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Berry looks beyond London and Britain to place philanthropy within its widest context and highlights the links between the charity, the country, and its empire. It is this focus on Britain’s two empires – its ‘first’, the American colonies and West Indies, and its ‘second’, Canada and India – that marks out this account of the London Foundling Hospital from others, as well as the fact that, rather than the mothers, Berry considers foundling education and apprenticeship. The book opens with the interlinked story of George King and the building of Trafalgar Square: George was one of the Foundling Hospital’s ‘orphans’ who had fought at the Battle of Trafalgar and he was invited to the opening of Trafalgar Square in 1844. Uniquely, he wrote an autobiography and Berry weaves his recollections as ‘a single, precious thread’ throughout the book, along with those of his best friend, Henry Rivington, while ‘other foundling voices join his in smaller, broken whispers’ (p. ix) since they left far fewer traces behind. The book begins by describing Britain’s empire and the ‘fiscal-military state’ at home. There were numerous charitable responses to poverty in the ‘inner empire’ of urban areas, and such impulses were increasingly extensive in London from the mid-eighteenth century. One was the Foundling Hospital, established by Thomas Coram, a ‘footsoldier of empire’ (p. 28), mariner, shipwright, and procurer of supplies to H.M. Navy. It was a fashionable cause, part, not only of the philanthropic fabric, but also of the cultural milieu as the first public art gallery – including gifts of Hogarth’s etchings and paintings – and archive of Handel’s musical scores. Governors and patrons also had links to empire and the slave trade. The most important governor, Jonas Hanway, supported the Marine Society, which provided clothing for adolescent boys to join the Navy (1756) and he used what he learned from the system of country nursing used by the Hospital to ensure it was extended to other children under the poor law (1762, 1767). Most infants admitted to the Hospital were not orphans but were a mixture of the infants of poor married couples and (mostly) unmarried mothers, as well as children without parents. They became children of the Hospital on being baptised or, indeed, re-baptised, upon entry. Despite the best of intentions of the Foundling Hospital the life chances of the children were poor: of the 15,000 or so admitted in the ‘General Reception’ period when all infants were received 7090 per cent died. The Hospital had an