'Threads of Feeling'. The Foundling Museum, London. Until 6 March 2011

I always envied my brothers the place of their secondary education, a school housed in a magnificent building with expansive grounds in the Buckinghamshire countryside.  I didn't realise at the time this amazing place had been originally built as a relocation for the London Foundling Hospital.  Now a recommendation on the British Quilt and Textile History List forum has led me to a wonderful textile exhibition related to the Foundling Hospital.

The original Foundling Hospital was London's first home for abandoned children, the philanthropic vision of an unlikely coalition - the philanthropist Thomas Coram, artist William Hogarth, and musician George Frideric Handel.  The original London building was demolished in 1928, but in an adjacent restored and refurbished building you can now visit the Foundling Museum.

When mothers left their babies at the Hospital, many of them left small objects or tokens with the child as an identifying record.  These were painstakingly attached to registration forms and bound into ledgers, unwittingly creating what is now the largest collection of everyday textiles surviving in Britain from the 18th Century.

'Sprigged Cotten'.  Cotton printed with sprigs and dots.
Foundling number 13287.  A boy aged about 21 days,
admitted 30 June 1759.  Named Hannah Carter by the
Foundling Hospital.  Died 18 February 1760. ©Coram

An expensive flowered dress silk of
about 1750, with a matching piece of
fly braid.  Foundling number 2584.
A  girl admitted 27 October 1756.
Named Sarah Barber by the Foundling
Hospital. Died 17 March 1761
©Coram

Professor John Styles of Hertfordshire University (author of The Dress of the People) curated this exhibition, and stresses the significance to research of these 5,000 scraps of fabric.  Historians generally search in vain for evidence of what ordinary working people wore, so these scraps provide the only surviving solid evidence.  As well as being a heart-rending piece of social history, this exhibition is an unprecedented opportunity for textile lovers to learn about the clothes their mothers wore, because baby clothes were usually made up from worn-out adult clothing.  

Should the mother ever find herself in a position to reclaim her child, a matching piece of fabric would be all the evidence she could produce. Sadly, as you can read in an extensive and fascinating Guardian article, out of the 16,282 infants admitted between 1741 and 1760, only 152 were ever called for.  More information on the Foundling Museum website.  More articles at The Independent, Visit London, AHRC, London Printworks Trust (whose staff worked from a fabric scrap to reproduce 30 metres of hand printed cotton for the exhibition),  Spoonfed and Austen  Only.

There is also a published catalogue to accompany the exhibition.

As always if any readers would like to send me their reviews I will be happy to include them.