Hannah Dennett, University of Warwick
This blog reflects on Hannah Dennett’s work to produce the ‘Tiny Traces’ exhibition, which was given a special commendation in the Social History Society’s 2023 Public History Prize.
After a long campaign by its founder Thomas Coram, London’s Foundling Hospital opened its doors on 25 March 1741 to receive the first intake of thirty infants into its care. It offered an alternative for mothers who might otherwise have abandoned their babies on the doorsteps of churches or left them to die in the streets, unable or unwilling to care for them. T he Foundling Museum is situated on the site of the old Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury, and tells its story to today’s visitors.
The lives of children of colour have until now been absent from the historical narrative of the Hospital. My collaborative PhD project with the University of Warwick and the Foundling Museum, aims to address this absence by uncover the lives of foundlings of colour within the Hospital’s archives.
When I began my research, it was not certain that I would be able to identify any children of colour because the Foundling Hospital had no official policy to record ethnicity. I therefore searched the archival records for incidental references to the skin colour or places of origin of children and their parents. Billet forms that were completed for each child included a section ‘Marks on the Body’ where additional identifying features were recorded. Here, I came across comments which noted the colour of some children’s skin. For example, Foundling no. 7766, a male infant admitted on 18 March 1758 was noted to be ‘a Black child’. The petitions presented by mothers to the governors occasionally included a parent’s place of origin. Henrietta Dislie’s petition in 1780 stated that she was from Antigua, and the father of her child was ‘a European’. Other petitions included notes which referred to the colour of a father’s skin. Susannah Wright’s petition in 1804 recorded that the father of her child, George Clark was a ‘man of colour’.
For cases where these incidental references to skin colour and places of origin appeared, I used the unique identification number given to each child to search other records in the archive. These include the nursery books which detailed where and with whom infants were sent to be wet nursed, letters from inspectors supervising the care of children at nurse, and the General Committee Minutes of the Hospital’s day-to-day business. Through these records I began to piece together the fragments of the lives of foundlings of colour, successfully identifying twenty-two children of the African and Asian diasporas who were admitted into the institution between 1741 and c. 1820.
Sadly, eighteen of these children’s stories ended in their premature deaths, which reflected the devastatingly high child mortality rates in the Founding Hospital during the period. Four children survived to be apprenticed, but once a foundling was apprenticed their presence in the archives tended to end, and tracing them beyond their time in the institution is almost impossible. However, foundling no. 18,757 Fanny Kenyon proved to be the exception, though her life highlighted the difficulties she faced as a poor young woman of colour in eighteenth-century London. In 1822 at the age of eighteen, Fanny appeared at the Old Bailey accused of stealing silk purses from her master. She was sentenced to three months in prison, and on her release entered the Hackney Refuge for the Destitute. She appeared in the Committee Minutes of the Refuge on several occasions over the next few months due to complaints about her behaviour, before disappearing from the records.
Record of Fanny Kenyon’s prosecution at the Old Bailey on 22 October 1822
Both her age and the length of her sentence were recorded incorrectly.
After uncovering the lives of foundlings of colour, I spent six months developing an exhibition with the staff at the Foundling Museum, based on my findings. I am so grateful to the Foundling Museum team for making this such an enjoyable and informative experience, as I was new to exhibition curation. We felt the life course of the children leant itself perfectly to the flow of the exhibition space, and the natural division of the sections within it. I chose to include examples of the lives of children which I felt represented the span of their experiences, and interwove their individual stories to create the overall story of African and Asian children at the eighteenth-century Foundling Hospital.
One of the challenges we faced was that most of the material relevant to the exhibition was documentary in nature, and that is not always easily accessible or engaging for visitors. So we decided to create a film that would sit alongside some of the original documents. The films incorporated images of objects and art from the period and added a different medium to the exhibition whilst enabling us to explain the wider context of the British empire and eighteenth-century London.
The voices of the children and their parents are notably absent from the records pertaining to their experiences, but despite these absences we wanted to find a way to give the children and their mothers a physical presence within the exhibition. We approached contemporary artists whose work engages with themes of empire, migration and identity, who selected pieces from their collections which they felt spoke to the stories included in the exhibition. The result was the inclusion of six stunning pieces of art. They offered points of connection to the human realities and emotions of the stories, not easily grasped from the documents, creating a rich, questioning dialogue between the past and the present.
This section highlighted the stories of mothers of children of colour.
Alexis Peskin’s Passage (Iemanja’s tears), 2017 was hung amidst the mother’s petitions.
Having spent months preparing for the exhibition, it was thrilling to be part of the installation team and see the results of the project come into being. Tiny Traces: African and Asian Children at London’s Foundling Hospital was held at the Foundling Museum from September 2022 until February 2023, during which time over 12,000 people visited the museum. It has been a privilege to uncover the lives of African and Asian foundlings and to bring their stories to a public audience. Once hidden, the experiences of children such as Fanny Kenyon can now take their rightful place within the stories told by the Foundling Museum, creating a more inclusive and accurate history of the Foundling Hospital.
About the Author: Hannah Dennett is in the final stages of her AHRC Midlands4Cities-funded PhD at the University of Warwick. Her research project, Forgotten Foundlings: Black Lives and the Eighteenth-Century Foundling Hospital is in collaboration with the Foundling Museum, London, and is uncovering the lives of children of colour taken into the Foundling Hospital in the long eighteenth century.
The exhibition ‘Tiny Traces: African & Asian Children at London’s Foundling Museum’ ran from September 2022 to February 2023. You can find out more here.