“Threads of Feeling” at The Foundling Museum
Just back from The Foundling Museum‘s heartbreaking exhibit “Threads of Feeling“. The reason for the museum’s existence is sad enough: to tell the story of the 27,000 children left at the Foundling Hospital, London’s first home for abandoned children, between 1739 and 1954. The hospital’s successor is the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, also known as just Coram, which today operates as a children’s charity.
The exhibition, which closes this Sunday, highlights a collection of objects, mostly textile scraps, left with the more than 4,000 babies abandoned at the hospital between 1741 and 1760. In many cases, the scraps were tokens of affection, but also served as a method of identification in the unfortunately unlikely case that someone returned to reclaim the child. The policy at the time was to ask no questions of the parents, many too poor to care for their babies, to avoid shame. The children were assigned a number and renamed, their past identities erased.
The children’s clothing and identifying marks were duly noted and any fabric scraps and notes left with them were pinned to the child’s registration documents.
The small selection of tokens shown was heartbreaking, but also fascinating from a historical and textile study viewpoint. This is an example of a cockade, a flat rosette of ribbon that helped identify a baby as a boy. Girls wore top knots, which were more loosely gathered bunches of ribbon.
In Victorian fashion, ribbons were frequently used as inexpensive embellishment. Ribbons were also popular as “fairings” — tokens of romance exchanged at fairs and holidays. From the exhibition text: “Ribbons served as powerful tokens of mothers’ love for the babies left … because they were universally recognized symbols of love in circumstances of separation and loss. The emotional message was re-enforced by tying knots in the ribbon, to symbolise the bond between mother and child, or by attaching other love tokens, such as coins or rings.”
Along with these expressions of “maternal love, hope, yearning and remorse” were handwritten notes. The exhibition text said that despite knowing that their babies would be given new names, many women noted their own choice of name. Some wrote letters and notes, “but others sewed names, initials, birth dates and birthplaces on fabric, or even wrote them on the fabric in ink. It was as if for these poor women, many of them barely literate or ill at ease with a pen, spelling out precious information on cloth rendered it personal, tangible and permanent in a way mere ink on paper could never do.”
During my visit, a mother with a child in a pram entered the exhibit area, and the toddler kept demanding “More sweeties!” and calling for “Mummy! Mummy!” which I found annoying at first, and then charming (I think kids with British accents are adorable), and then so very appropriate to the exhibition. The thought of all those kids waiting for “Mummy” to come get them, when only 1-2 percent were ever reclaimed, just made me want to cry.