The investigation of foundling characteristics and backgrounds highlighted the fact that many infants were abandoned, in response to poor economic conditions and family hardship. This suggests that their health and sustainability may have been poor even before they were left at the hospital. The Foundling Hospital attracted increasing criticism over time for supposedly raising the foundling children above their proper social standing. In its policies on external wet nursing, the hospital achieved a significant measure of success. In fact, the reaction of some nurses to the return of their foster children to the hospital suggests that very strong emotional bonds were sometimes forged with them. The existence of a national poor law system does, seem to have had a significant impact on the form and nature of infant abandonment in England.
This book examines the way in which abandonment to the London Foundling Hospital developed, and how it was used as a strategy by parents and parish officials. It also explores how it was mediated into health and survival outcomes for the infants involved. In considering pathways to health, ill-health and death for foundlings, the book engages with developments in childcare, ideas on childhood, motherhood and medicine, and a multitude of debates on charity, welfare, entitlement and patronage. The first half of the book is concerned primarily with the characteristics of the infants at abandonment, and how this affected their survival prospects. It gives significant insights into how abandonment worked as a poverty alleviation strategy in England, the condition of poor infants at birth and what their risk factors in terms of survivorship were. The second half of the book examines the critical nursing period for all foundlings placed with external nurses between 1741 and 1764. Since an infant's risk of death declines over time, this early experience captured much of their most vulnerable time of life. The hospital's records on nursing are enormously rich and detailed, and one of the benefits of this study is that it enables us to compare the foundlings' experiences of nursing, childcare and health with those of non-foundlings.