A token of my affection
Copyright, The Foundling Museum
Cross-posted from British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (BSECS) Reviews.
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We all have small odd objects in our life that carry meaning, sentimental tokens with little or no monetary value, but priceless records of memory: a holiday souvenir, an heirloom, old soft toy, letter or knick-knack. These we treasure for the stories which they tell us. But imagine if the token which connected you to your most important story was one that you never saw. This was the fate of every child that entered the Foundling Hospital between c.1741 and 1760, now commemorated by the Foundling Museum near Russell Square in London.
The Foundling's token collection is famous. Each child brought in was registered with an administrative billet listing their name, the date, and the number by which they would be known. Crucially, each was also left with a unique token, for which the parent kept the twin, in order that the child might be identified accurately should the parent be able to return. Each token was folded into a packet made of the paper billet, sealed, and filed by the date of the child's admittance. The child then wore a different type of token round its neck with the Foundling Museum cipher and its identifying number. That number created a simple, effective link from the child back to its token, and therefore to its parent. During the nineteenth century, these packets were opened and the hard tokens put on display to raise money and awareness for the hospital. The billets were unfolded and bound into record books. Those with soft tokens, most often paper slips or swatches of fabric, had these pinned to them. The Foundling staged a beautiful exhibition of the fabrics three years ago, Threads of Feeling.
But those records with hard tokens were separated from them, breaking the link from child to token. This is what the Foundling's current show, Faith, Hope & Charity, partly hopes to re-forge. Researchers Dr Gillian Clark and Janette Bright have made a database of the thousands of children who passed through the doors of the hospital, and their billet records, and tried to piece tokens and records back together. The exhibition opens with the story of this broken link, with a record ledger juxtaposed to an original nineteenth-century display case showing some of the most striking tokens. It then goes on to piece together some of the hidden stories of parents and children by matching records to tokens. Most evocative are those where the paper record still bears the impression of the token after years of being folded together. Labels give the number and new name given to the child on entering the hospital, alongside their original name if known. Most poignant are those labels which say simply 'unknown child'.
As with the Threads of Feeling show, what is most striking are the social histories which can be drawn from these simple but varied objects. The tokens on display range from coins, medals and pieces of fabric, to nutshells, jewellery, thimbles, trade cards, tickets to a natural philosophy lecture or to Vauxhall Gardens, an ivory spyglass, a trade card, a coral amulet, a game of battledore, gambling pieces, guards buttons, the metal tag for a bottle of spirit, and, most startling, a piece of a baby's 'caul': part of the placenta left covering its head after birth which was thought to bring luck. One section of the display discusses how parents personalised their tokens to make them more clearly identifiable. Coins were bent or engraved with images and messages, ribbons were re-embroidered. The cross-section of society which this range of tokens illuminates is fascinating.
Two groups of objects are used to tell particular histories of childbearing in the eighteenth century. In one, the guards' buttons along with medals from various naval engagements highlight the number of babies brought to the hospital whose fathers had gone to war, joining the army or navy, and leaving the mother destitute, unable to care for the child. This plight is highlighted by Joseph Wright of Derby's painting The Dead Soldier (borrowed from the Holburne Museum), which shows a young, buxom ‘camp follower’ clasping her child while crying into the hand of her dead soldier husband. In another group of objects, the baby’s caul mentioned above is put alongside amulets for good health, touch pieces, a midwife’s trade card, and a set of forceps to discuss contemporary medical concerns surrounding health, particularly the merits of male doctors versus female midwives. One foundling is recorded as arriving with damage to its leg caused by forceps. Reproductions of satires and illustrations on medical practice give these tokens context.
At the centre of the exhibition are the stories of five foundlings and their origins, which were rediscovered in the course of the research behind the exhibition, their tokens and records having been re-connected. These weave into the wider social stories displayed around them. Thus, by the war babies section is the story of one foundling admitted when its father departed for Jamaica, the carefully engraved mother of pearl token left with it suggesting that the mother did intend to return. The well-known surgeon William Hunter introduces another story, in which he arranged the admittance of twin sons to the hospital in order to avoid scandal attaching to their unmarried noble mother. Her story contrasts sharply with that of Margaret Larney, sentenced to death for clipping coins in 1757 and kept in Newgate prison until delivered of her son, who was sent to the Foundling, while Margaret was executed. Other stories tell of a blind foundling who lived her entire life at the hospital, or of little ‘Sally’, cared for with affection by the family of the priest responsible for overseeing the fostering system in the county to which she was sent, and who had been admitted with an embroidered blanket by her mother.
It is therefore particularly poignant to end the exhibition with examples of parents who returned to claim their children. This not only shows how simply and effectively the token system worked, allowing the right child to be identified, but also brings the matching tokens and documentation together for the first time. It is sad how many parents returned to find their child had died some time before. We are left wondering what impact the return of a parent had on those children who had thrived at the hospital. Evocatively, the museum refers to tokens that have lost their connection to a child as ‘orphaned tokens’, and the exhibition ends with a display of four of these, to which modern creative responses have been invited. The artist David Shrigley responds with a drawing, while authors Jackie Kay, Charlie Dark and Hallie Rubenhold have written pieces. A lovely way to conclude the exhibition by imagining stories for those tokens whose link to their child has been permanently broken.