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Thomas Coram is forever identified with the foundling hospital he established in 1739. This, however, came near the end of his life: previous records seemed few and far between until Gillian Wagner began to look at the scarce but intriguing evidence for his earlier career. As a young man Coram went to Massachusetts, where he stayed for ten years building ships in Boston and Taunton, working to further the spread of Anglicanism. He returned to England disappointed and heavily in debt. Surviving this early setback, he slowly secured for himself a place within English society through his championing of further settlements to exploit America's natural resources, and his characteristic support for radical causes. A strong believer in women's rights and equal opportunities for girls, he believed that it was due to the unique support of a group of aristocratic women - twenty-one ladies of quality and distinction - that he was granted a royal charter for his foundling hospital. Within two years of the establishment of the hospital, Coram fell out with the governors and was ejected from the governing body. His last years were clouded by disagreements and poverty, but a pension, granted in 1749, finally signalled recognition of his achievements. He died in 1751 and was buried in the chapel of his hospital. GILLIAN WAGNER was the first woman to chair the Thomas Coram Foundation, successor to the foundling Hospital (now Coram Family), and Barnardo's - whose founder's biography she has also written. Her other books include Children of the Empire, the story of children sent to live and work in Canada and Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has had a long and noteworthy involvement with the voluntary sector (in particular, chairing the influential review into residential care, 'A Positive Choice'), and was created a Dame in 1994.
An examination of the eighteenth-century social and cultural struggle to develop new ideas for virtuous motherhood.
In 1739, the London Foundling Hospital opened its doors to take in the abandoned children of the city. It was the culmination of seventeen years of campaigning by Captain Thomas Coram, driven by his horror at seeing children die in the streets. He was supported in his endeavours by a royal charter and by William Hogarth and George Frideric Handel. The Hospital would continue as both home and school for over 215 years, raising thousands of children until they could be apprenticed out. London's Forgotten Children is a fascinating history of the first children's charity, charting the rise of this incredible institution and examining the attitude towards illegitimate children over the years. The story comes alive with the voices of children who grew up in the Hospital, and the concluding, fully updated, account of today's children's charity Coram is an ongoing testament to the vision of its founder.
Eighteenth-century London was teeming with humanity, and poverty was never far from politeness. Legend has it that, on his daily commute through this thronging metropolis, Captain Thomas Coram witnessed one of the city's most shocking sights-the widespread abandonment of infant corpses by the roadside. He could have just passed by. Instead, he devised a plan to create a charity that would care for these infants; one that was to have enormous consequences for children born into poverty in Britain over the next two hundred years. Orphans of Empire tells the story of what happened to the thousands of children who were raised at the London Foundling Hospital, Coram's brainchild, which opened in 1741 and grew to become the most famous charity in Georgian England. It provides vivid insights into the lives and fortunes of London's poorest children, from the earliest days of the Foundling Hospital to the mid-Victorian era, when Charles Dickens was moved by his observations of the charity's work to campaign on behalf of orphans. Through the lives of London's foundlings, this book provides readers with a street-level insight into the wider global history of a period of monumental change in British history as the nation grew into the world's leading superpower. Some foundling children were destined for Britain's 'outer Empire' overseas, but many more toiled in the 'inner Empire', labouring in the cotton mills and factories of northern England at the dawn of the new industrial age. Through extensive archival research, Helen Berry uncovers previously untold stories of what happened to former foundlings, including the suffering and small triumphs they experienced as child workers during the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes, using many different fragments of evidence, the voices of the children themselves emerge. Extracts from George King's autobiography, the only surviving first-hand account written by a Foundling Hospital child born in the eighteenth century, published here for the first time, provide touching insights into how he came to terms with his upbringing. Remarkably he played a part in Trafalgar, one of the most iconic battles in British Naval history. His personal courage and resilience in overcoming the disadvantages of his birth form a lasting testimony to the strength of the human spirit.