Two interesting items:
The author's article in New York Archives
A letter regarding foundlings in The Riverdale Press
In the nineteenth century, foundlings--children abandoned by their
desperately poor, typically unmarried mothers, usually shortly after
birth--were commonplace in European society. There were asylums in every
major city to house abandoned babies, and writers made them the heroes
of their fiction, most notably Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. In
American cities before the Civil War the situation was different, with
foundlings relegated to the poorhouse instead of institutions designed
specifically for their care. By the eve of the Civil War, New York City
in particular had an epidemic of foundlings on its hands due to the
rapid and often interlinked phenomena of urban development, population
growth, immigration, and mass poverty. Only then did the city's leaders
begin to worry about the welfare and future of its abandoned children.
In Abandoned, Julie Miller offers a fascinating, frustrating, and
often heartbreaking history of a once devastating, now forgotten social
problem that wracked America's biggest metropolis, New York City. Filled
with anecdotes and personal stories, Miller traces the shift in
attitudes toward foundlings from ignorance, apathy, and sometimes pity
for the children and their mothers to that of recognition of the problem
as a sign of urban moral decline and in need of systematic intervention.
Assistance came from public officials and religious reformers who
constructed four institutions: the Nursery and Child's Hospital's
foundling asylum, the New York Infant Asylum, the New York Foundling
Asylum, and the public Infant Hospital, located on Randall's Island in
the East River.
Ultimately, the foundling asylums were unable to significantly improve
children's lives, and by the early twentieth century, three out of the
four foundling asylums had closed, as adoption took the place of
abandonment and foster care took the place of institutions. Today the
word foundling has been largely forgotten. Fortunately, Abandoned
rescues its history from obscurity.
