Fallen Women and Foundlings:

Rethinking Victorian Sexuality

by Lynda Nead
During the last year and a half I have found myself revisiting and reconsider-
ing some of the historical material and theoretical ideas that I first encoun-
tered in the 1980s when I was a research student in a History of Art

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

Department and working on a PhD called ‘Representation and Regulation:
Images of Female Sexuality in Victorian Art’. The return to this material has
brought about what might be described as a ‘then and now’ experience in
which I have had cause to re-evaluate in the light of subsequent work some of
the models that I worked with then; allowing a new archive to shape the
questions and frameworks of the research. Like Frank (Mort) and Judith
(Walkowitz) in these pages, I don’t wish to indulge in a kind of nostalgic
journey back into the 1980s, but I would like to think again about the history
of Victorian sexuality, the impact of Foucault and his relevance in 2015.
The title of my thesis, ‘Representation and Regulation’, gives a pretty
strong clue to its intellectual formation. The first volume of Michel
Foucault’s History of Sexuality had very recently been published in English
translation (translated by Robert Hurley) and Foucault’s other studies such as
Madness and Civilization; The Birth of the Clinic; The Order of Things; and
Discipline and Punish, which had been published at various points during the
previous fifteen to twenty years, were also having a tangible impact on the
shape of arts and humanities subjects.1 Foucault’s subjects – the invention of
modern madness; the forms of modern punishment; the shaping of modern
medical knowledge – redefined, for me, what it meant to be interdisciplinary,
and indeed, what it meant to be disciplinary. Foucault’s writing suggested new
objects of historical study and new ways of thinking about them.
The study of Victorian culture and society was also in the middle of a
revisionist project. During the 1960s and 1970s, in the context of a self-
conscious liberalization of sexual practices and definitions, the Victorian
period was recruited as the age of sexual hypocrisy, with popular books
such as Ronald Pearsall’s Public Purity, Private Shame and Michael
Pearson’s The Age of Consent reiterating the prurient model in which bour-
geois respectability concealed a nineteenth-century underworld of prostitu-
tion and pornography. Where Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians had
used a stripped-down Freudian model of sexual repression manifesting itself
in covert and illicit sexual behaviours, the more popular writers didn’t even
bother with the psychology of the Victorians but just propagated the famil-
iar Bloomsbury myths of sexual inhibition and release.2

Birkbeck, University of London l.nead@bbk.ac.uk

History Workshop Journal Issue 82 Advance Access Publication 22 August 2016 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbw040
ß The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

Fig. 1. Completed page of a Foundling Hospital form petitioning for a child’s admission, 1851.
 Fallen Women and Foundlings 179

It was feminist historians such as Martha Vicinus, Leonore Davidoff,

Catherine Hall and Judith Walkowitz (and there were so many others but
here and now, and without offence, I merely sketch out my own experience
of the intellectual context at that time) who began to work differently with
the archives and who drew on socialist histories to map class and gender in
the nineteenth century on to each other. With this incredible body of pub-
lications from the 1970s to draw on, as a PhD student I felt that I was
becoming involved with one of the most vibrant and innovative fields of
British history.3

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

Within this context Foucault seemed to offer something really game-
changing – and I still think he does, albeit with certain caveats. Put
simply, Foucault’s introduction to The History of Sexuality set out a new
paradigm for understanding and creating research on the Victorian period.
He showed (I would say argued, but it was never exactly argued) that in the
nineteenth century there was a proliferation of discourses on sexuality rather
than a denial or repression (what he referred to as ‘the repressive hypoth-
esis’) and that in this period sexuality emerged as a major social issue and
permeated political debate and policy. Developing aspects of his earlier
work, Foucault analysed Victorian sexuality in terms of an economy of
discourses, with the emergence of key areas such as medicine, psychiatry
and criminal justice, producing and disseminating discourses on the sexual.
These sites radiated definitions of acceptable and unacceptable forms of
sexuality; they intensified people’s awareness of the sexual and created a
further incentive to speak about it. Memorably, he defined sexuality as:

. . . the name that can be given to a historical construct; not just a furtive
reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the
stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to
discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of con-
trols and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few
major strategies of knowledge and power.4

This was heady, intoxicating stuff. In a few intellectual moves, Foucault had
dislodged the conventional view of Victorian morality; rather than seeing
the Victorian age as a period of silence and suppression, he described sexu-
ality in the nineteenth century in terms of a constant process of definition
and regulation. It was provocative and gestural; it invited engagement with
and critique of its models of power and the spaces of resistance. It ignored
feminism but demanded a feminist response; the important thing was that
Foucault’s own model raised additional questions and required further
refinement.5
More recently, my own work has moved away from the nineteenth cen-
tury and from Foucault’s theories of power and knowledge. Until, that is, I
was asked to curate an exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, on
the subject of the nineteenth-century ‘Fallen Woman’, which brought me
180 History Workshop Journal

into contact with an extraordinary archive that I had not seen before. This
demanded a reconsideration of questions concerning women’s experiences
of prevailing norms of sexual behaviour in the early and middle decades of
the nineteenth century and the ways in which they managed these ideas and
images and negotiated the institutions that generated them.6 Work on the
exhibition raised questions such as: what is the relationship between the
archive and the conceptual framework and what demands does the archive
make on the history of sexuality? What is the nature of resistance beyond the
web of power evoked by Foucault? How does the history of sexuality work

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

with and relate to the history of emotions and feeling? What role, if any,
does the historical imagination of the researcher play in understanding nine-
teenth-century sexualities? These questions differed from those I had framed
in the 1980s, inflected by shifts in historical methodologies that had created
a space for concepts such as feeling and imagination, which had been
excluded in the earlier Foucauldian work.
The Foundling Hospital opened in 1741 as a home for abandoned babies;
at that time it did not give ‘Preference to any Person’ and when it was full it
simply put a notice on the gates. By 1742 the numbers had increased to the
point where a ballot system was introduced and from 1768 the system
became increasingly formalized, with mothers required to fill out a form
or petition.7 In the nineteenth century the focus of the Hospital shifted
significantly when only the babies of unmarried mothers were eligible for
consideration and the decisions of the Governors became based on a de-
tailed investigation of the cases of the individual mothers.
It was a judgement of the woman rather than the child, in order to assess
whether they were of sufficiently good character to be able to return to a
respectable life if relieved of the upkeep of their babies. In most respects,
then, the Foundling Hospital sits comfortably within Foucault’s model of
the history of sexuality, specifically in relation to its dissemination of a norm
of female sexuality and of forms of deviancy; the differentiation of licit and
illicit sexual behaviour and the classification of the deserving and the un-
deserving poor. The Foundling Hospital was an effective and relatively
benign institution of power; it was far better than the workhouse and al-
though mortality rates among the children were still high, they generally
stood a better chance of survival than in most other institutional environ-
ments in the period.
Although a lot of very good work has been done on the lives of the
Foundling children (most notably, ‘Threads of Feeling’, John Brewer’s exhib-
ition of the tokens left with the children by their mothers), very little is known
about the women who applied to have their children accepted into the
Hospital.8 The aim of the exhibition was to bring those women’s stories to
light, and the metaphor of giving them their voices back was used repeatedly
while we worked on it. The exhibition included a specially-commissioned
sound installation by Steve Lewinson, which used the words provided by
the women in the Foundling Hospital petitions (application forms) to
 Fallen Women and Foundlings 181

create a haunting aural accompaniment to the images in the galleries and to

‘[bring] the women’s voices to life’.9
The archive of the Hospital in the nineteenth century is held at the
London Metropolitan Archive and is so full and rich that it gives a vivid
picture of the process of application and of some of the women who applied.
The exhibition opened with a wall of their names, taken from some of the
completed petitions: Emma Tucker; Emma Moore; Fanny Buckingham;
Sarah Gale; Elizabeth Morton. . . These were real women whose lives had
been turned into narrative and myth in the stories set out in the Hospital

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

application forms and in the Victorian paintings and prints on the walls of
the galleries. Some of the first names appeared frequently: Elizabeth, Emma,
Fanny. Others were more unusual; some sounded archaic, outmoded,
whereas others were utterly contemporary. But each name represented a
life; a woman who had been confronted with a personal crisis, which had
been preserved in the archives of the Hospital.
The Hospital was well known in the London area and it is to be expected
(and it is interesting how much I drew, during the research on the archive,
on a growing familiarity with and sense of the place and the people) that
unmarried women who became pregnant would have known about it or
would have been told about it by friends or female relatives.
So what would happen if an unmarried woman became pregnant, was
unable to support her baby and wanted to apply to have it admitted to the
Hospital? She would begin by collecting a petition from the Porter’s Lodge,
at the entrance of the Hospital. The Porter would make brief notes of those
who took the forms; recording only the most cursory details of dress or
accent. She would then complete the pre-printed form. The Foundling
Hospital was one of the first institutions to adopt pre-printed forms and
quickly developed an efficient bureaucratic procedure for the processing and
assessment of applicants. If the woman could not read or write, she could
ask a friend or relative to complete the form, giving information about
name, age, and occupation; the birth of the child and the whereabouts of
the father (Fig. 1). They had also to describe the circumstances of their
sexual relationship (often referred to as ‘criminal conversation’ in the
Hospital notes). What is described most frequently in the petitions is rape
and assault (usually couched in the melodramatic language of seduction);
accounts of women being drugged, raped, and later abandoned by the
father. Other stories relate to consenting and committed sexual relation-
ships, but tell of desertion when the father discovered the pregnancy.
When the form was completed, the women returned it to the Hospital,
along with the names and addresses of referees who would vouch for them.
Every woman who submitted a form was required to attend an interview in
front of an all-male committee of Governors. Amongst the miscellaneous
papers in the Foundling Hospital archive, there is a logbook with a list of
the questions that were put to the women in their interviews. These included:
182 History Workshop Journal

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

Fig. 2. Receipt for a child admitted, Emma Bickmore (20207), 1843.

Fig. 3. Admission notes stacked on a spike, 1879.

 Fallen Women and Foundlings 183

 Where did you reside when you were seduced and what led to your
seduction?
 Was the criminal intercourse repeated?
 Is your child healthy, is it a child of colour or has it any particular
marks?
Notes were often made during the interview, following which the veracity of
the evidence was checked by the Hospital Enquirer (a post held in turn
during the middle decades of the nineteenth century by James Twiddy and
by Mr Dobbs), who investigated the mother’s story, checked addresses, and

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

followed up references, medical history etc. Once this evidence had been
gathered, a decision was made either to accept or to reject the application.
(There was an uncomfortable and uncanny moment during the preparation
of the exhibition when we realized that in choosing the archive objects to
include in the exhibition we were repeating this process of selection and
rejection.)10 If the mother’s application was successful and the baby was
accepted, the mother would be given a note for admission, setting out the
date and time that the baby would be received into the Hospital. The child
would be entered into the admission book and the mother would be given a
printed receipt (Fig. 2). The receipt given to the mother when she deposited
her child was a vital piece of evidence should she later be accused of infanti-
cide and if she ever returned to the Hospital to reclaim her child. It is im-
portant to emphasize the power and intensity of this archive and how
embodied the experience of working with it. Amongst the most extraordin-
ary objects in the archive was a spike for keeping papers, piled with admis-
sion notes taken from the mothers when they deposited their babies (Fig. 3).
Now yellowing with age and curling at the corners, the unstable pile of
papers in its lumpen materiality conveyed more than could any words, the
actuality of the Foundling mothers’ lives and those of their babies. The
question remains, however, what does the researcher do with that visceral
experience of the archive and how does it become part of the historical
reading of the material?
There is no doubt how moving the stories are; visitors to the exhibition
and even those who had read about it in the press or online but had not yet
seen it felt compelled to say how moved they were. Foucault’s confessional
drive and the will to speak seems relevant both to the procedures of the
nineteenth-century Foundling Hospital and to the twenty-first century vis-
itors to the exhibition. But just what are these narratives, these stories of
sexual experience and its consequences? Increasingly, I have come to feel
that things do not settle where you expect them to and that little is what it
initially seems. Foucault tells us that the history of sexuality is not a history
of repression and silence but of the impulse to speak the truth of sex and yet
it is the silences that remain with me – the things that could not be said, that
could not possibly have been said. How could a woman ever have written
that she loved and desired a man so much that she was willing to risk
184 History Workshop Journal

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

Fig. 4. Letter from John Brownlow, Secretary to the Governors of the Foundling Hospital, to
Catherine Brown (20682), 3 June 1856.

everything for sex? This is an archive of silences and of secrets that are
spoken, in part, through an authorized philanthropic language of female
sexual passivity.
I have tried to imagine these women sitting with the form and with one or
two friends and discussing how to fill it in; knowing more or less what the
Foundling Hospital was looking for and how their stories needed to be told.
These were real women in a desperate fix, but they might also have had their
wits around them sufficiently to think tactically – to try and use their power
in an otherwise powerless and nearly invisible situation. Can Foucault ac-
count for these women and their micro-techniques and strategies, which, as
Michel de Certeau writes, have: ‘remained unprivileged by history yet con-
tinue to flourish in the interstices of institutional technologies’.11 Take, for
instance, the woman who particularly asked not to have to attend the inter-
view. John Brownlow, the Secretary of the Foundling Hospital, replied that
if she did not come to the Hospital the following Saturday at 9am ‘nothing
could be done for her’ (Fig. 4). Why did this woman feel compelled to
request an exemption? Undoubtedly, the interview must have been appall-
ing; one does not need a highly attuned or developed historical imagination
to comprehend how acutely uncomfortable it must have been for these
young women to come before the all-male panel and answer their intimate,
personal and possibly prurient questions. Perhaps women shared their ex-
periences of it with each other. Did this woman feel unable to articulate her
position and explain her situation? Or was she lying and afraid that she
would be exposed? In 1868 the Enquirer reported the successful case of
Emily Bridges, whose baby had been born in the workhouse, and who:
 Fallen Women and Foundlings 185

‘. . .was so bewildered when under examination on Saturday last at the

Foundling Hospital that she could not recall to her mind some of the
facts of her case’.12 Is this an entirely understandable response to the pres-
sures of the interview or a case where the Hospital is the victim of its own
mythic notion of the fallen woman, and is hoodwinked by a good perform-
ance? It is surely possible to return to these women, in their critical situation,
an agency that does not necessarily undermine the poignancy of the
Foundling Hospital archive.
Then there was the case of Anne Gidding, whose application was rejected

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

in 1831. In spite of writing that she hoped that the Governors would take her
circumstances: ‘[in]to your feeling consideration’, it appears that she offered
the Enquirer (then Mr Dobbs) a bribe. He reported that Gidding had told
him that if he was: ‘. . .not very particular in his enquiries she would make
me a present’.13 The Hospital was absolutely emphatic about bribes and the
instructions printed on the cover page of the form stated clearly that no
money should be offered to any Hospital staff, or the petition would be
rejected. Not only did Gidding offer a present, but also the family that she
was staying with offered a sovereign and further payments if the baby was
accepted. What made them think they might be able to get away with it; that
it would work? Did it ever work; did stories circulate about success through
bribery?
Or was there something about the manner and comportment of the
Enquirers that made petitioners feel that they were open to surreptitious
approaches? There are some cases, such as that of Charlotte Parker, where it
appears that Mr Twiddy interviewed the woman on his own, thereafter
compiling his report.14 One of the items in the archive that troubles me
most concerns the case of Mary Thompson, whose application was rejected
in 1852. It appears that Thompson was first interviewed by the Board and
then later by Twiddy on his own. Thompson was a twenty-three year-old
servant, working for a bookseller; the father was a travelling agent who
worked for the same employer and lived at the same house. Thompson
wrote that when the family were out this man: ‘. . .violently assaulted me
and effected his purpose to which I was insensible having fainted’.15 When
she threatened to tell her mistress the man went to Australia. A letter
included with her papers informs the Hospital that her baby has died; her
petition had been rejected a few days before. There is also a letter from
Thompson’s employer accusing Mr Twiddy of: ‘. . .language fit for a brothel’
and of ‘indecent questions put in an improper manner’. Twiddy angrily
denied the charge – is this why the petition was rejected? Was the accusation
false or did Twiddy ever exploit his position or act and speak inappropri-
ately to the petitioners?
There is clearly a responsibility in working with an archive of this kind
and it is with a degree of hesitation that I raise these questions about the
truthfulness of the testimonies, or the integrity of the officers of the
Hospital. People want to be moved by authentic stories, but I want to
186 History Workshop Journal

understand how women might have positioned themselves in relation to the

institution and their awful need to have their babies taken in. I am not sure
that the Foucault of the 1980s would have enabled this approach; or perhaps
it was the way I worked with his writing then: rigidly, obediently, un-
imaginatively (?). I cannot conceive the present truly interdisciplinary field
of the history of sexuality without Foucault’s work but I think it belonged to
a very particular historical conjuncture – a moment of Thatcherism (and her
evocation of Victorian Values), of AIDS and homophobia, when a different
understanding of Victorian sexuality was timely and necessary. In the last

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

months that I worked on this material I felt the pressure of a different set of
imperatives. Reading the narratives of Victorian unmarried mothers, pre-
senting their cases, trying to persuade white male figures of authority and
longing for assistance, our own historical moment with its terrifying stories
of flight and migration was the filter through which I examined the archive.
Fallen or wanton? Deserving or undeserving? Economic migrant or refugee?
Who is allowed in and who is cast adrift?

Lynda Nead is Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck. She has

published widely on the history of British visual culture, with particular
focus on the nineteenth century, gender, sexuality and the city. She has
recently completed a book called The Tiger in the Smoke: British Visual
Culture c.1945–60, which will be published by Yale University Press in 2017.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

I gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of the Thomas Coram Foundation and the
Foundling Museum.
1 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: an Introduction, transl. Robert Hurley,
London, 1976; Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, transl.
Richard Howard, New York, 1965; The Birth of the Clinic: an Archaeology of Medical
Perception, transl. Alan Sheridan, London, 1973; The Order of Things: an Archaeology of
Human Sciences, London, 1970; Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, transl. Alan
Sheridan, London, 1977.
2 Ronald Pearsall, Public Purity, Private Shame: Victorian Sexual Hypocrisy Exposed,
London, 1976; Michael Pearson, The Age of Consent: Victorian Prostitution and its
Enemies, Newton Abbot, 1972; Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: a Study of Sexuality
and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England, London, 1966. One of the first to draw
on Foucault’s writings to rework the prevailing narrative of Victorian sexuality was Jeffrey
Weeks, with Sex, Politics and Society: the Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, London and
New York, 1981.
3 There were many important articles published in this period, but amongst the key books
published by these writers were Martha Vicinus, Suffer And Be Still: Women in the Victorian
Age, Bloomington, 1973; Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season,
London, 1973; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the
English Middle Class, 1780–1850, London, 1987; Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian
Society, Cambridge, 1980.
4 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Harmondsworth, 198, pp. 105–6.
5 See, for example, Lucy Bland, ‘The Domain of the Sexual: a Response’, Screen
Education 39, summer 1981, pp. 56–67. My own study was also produced within this set of
debates: Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain, Oxford, 1988.
6 ‘The Fallen Woman’, the Foundling Museum, London, 25 Sept. 2015 – 3 Jan. 2016. See
http://foundlingmuseum.org.uk/events/fallen-woman.
 Fallen Women and Foundlings 187

7 On the history of the nineteenth-century Foundling Hospital see Jessica A. Sheetz-

Nguyen, Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital, London and
New York, 2012, and Victoria Mills, ‘The Fallen Woman and the Foundling Hospital’, exhib-
ition pamphlet for ‘The Fallen Woman’, 2015, unpaginated.
8 ‘Threads of Feeling’ was at the Foundling Museum, London, 14 Oct. 2010 – 6 March
2011. See the exhibition website www.threadsoffeeling.com.
9 Stephanie Chapman, ‘Fallen Voices: a Sound Installation by Steve Lewinson’, exhibition
pamphlet for ‘The Fallen Woman’, 2015, unpaginated.
10 This happened in a planning meeting with Victoria Mills, who was the research assist-
ant for the exhibition and whose work in the London Metropolitan Archives was outstanding
and invaluable.
11 Michel de Certeau, ‘Micro-Techniques and Panoptic Discourse’, in Heterologies:

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Toronto Library on November 14, 2016

Discourse on the Other, transl. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis and London, 2010, p. 189.
12 Report by the Enquirer, relating to the application of Emily Bridges, 1868: A/FH/A/
08/001/002/077, London Metropolitan Archives.
13 Anne Gidding rejected, 1831: A/FH/08/1/3/38/1, London Metropolitan Archives.
Thanks to Victoria Mills for email correspondence on this case and on the case of Mary
Thompson, 19 Oct. 2015.
14 Charlotte Parker rejected, 1851: A/FH/A/08/001/003/058, London Metropolitan
Archives.
15 Mary Thompson rejected, 1852: A/FH/A/08/001/003/059, London Metropolitan
Archives.