New textile exhibition at the Foundling Museum

MEDIA RELEASE COURTESY OF: The Foundling Museum

The Foundling Museum, London, celebrates the opening of a new and highly emotive exhibition entitled Threads of Feeling. The exhibition will showcase fabrics never shown before to illustrate the moment of parting as mothers left their babies at the original Foundling Hospital, which continues today as the children’s charity Coram.

In the cases of more than 4,000 babies left between 1741 and 1760, a small object or token, usually a piece of fabric, was kept as an identifying record. The fabric was either provided by the mother or cut from the child’s clothing by the hospital's nurses. Attached to registration forms and bound up into ledgers, theses pieces of fabric form the largest collection of everyday textiles surviving in Britain from the 18th Century.

A selection of the textiles forms the focus of the Threads of Feeling exhibition, along with examples of the kinds of garments made from them, and the stories they tell us about individual babies, their mothers and their lives.

John Styles research professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to curate the exhibition. John comments: “The process of giving over a baby to the hospital was anonymous. It was a form of adoption, whereby the hospital became the infant’s parent and its previous identity was effaced. The mother’s name was not recorded, but many left personal notes or letters exhorting the hospital to care for their child. Occasionally children were reclaimed. The pieces of fabric in the ledgers were kept, with the expectation that they could be used to identify the child if it was returned to its mother.

The textiles are both beautiful and poignant, embedded in a rich social history. Each swatch reflects the life of a single infant child. But the textiles also tell us about the clothes their mothers wore, because baby clothes were usually made up from worn-out adult clothing. The fabrics reveal how working women struggled to be fashionable in the 18th Century.”

Renuka Jeyarajah-Dent, Coram Director of Operations comments:

“The exhibition so vividly illustrates how the separation of a mother from her child is never an easy act and the depth of feelings involved are the same. Coram remains a charity, which works with children parted from their parents, including those in state care, to enable the parents and children involved to deal with their emotions. Even today, an object can be a reminder and comfort when someone is parted from a parent.” The exhibition will include representations, curated by Renuka, from children, young people and families Coram works with today.

THREADS OF FEELING

Fabric swatches from the 18th Century tell stories of mothers and babies parting

14 October 2010 – 6 March 2011