Foundling Stories - Stacey Halls and Rose Tremain by Judith Allnatt

In 1747, in a fine room at the splendid buildings of London’s Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright holds her one-day-old baby girl. Alongside other mothers, Bess draws a ball from a bag in a lottery held to decide who will win a place for their child as a pupil. This game of chance is played out under the eyes of invited benefactors, wealthy ladies and gents, who witness the show of human drama. Thus starts ‘The Foundling’ by Stacey Halls. 

In 1850, a baby, wrapped in sacking is abandoned at the gates of a wintry park in London where she is scented by wolves from the Essex marshes. She is found by a policeman, who hears the wolves’ howling and takes her to the Foundling Hospital. Thus begins ‘Lily’ by Rose Tremain. 

A separated family is a powerful engine to drive a story and perhaps the most poignant separation of all is that of a mother and baby. Stories of ‘foundlings’, babies found abandoned by parents or handed over in desperation to foundling hospitals, start with this heart-breaking premise and immediately fire the reader with a strong desire to see parent and child reunited. For me, this desire would probably be enough on its own to keep me reading but the two books above offer so much more in their examining of the relationships of adults caught up in the drama.

Receiving day at the Foundling Hospital. Wellcome Images

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/fgqknntr

In ‘The Foundling’ poverty and the shame of illegitimacy force Bess to give up her baby, Clara. Like other brokenhearted mothers, as well as leaving the baby’s name and details at the hospital she leaves a token to identify her – half of a heart made of whalebone given to her by the baby’s father. All kinds of things were used as such tokens: slips of paper, embroidered ribbons, rings and pierced coins. Then if the mother were able to drag herself out of poverty and also save enough to pay a fee to the hospital for the child’s upkeep (a difficult feat), even when the hospital had given the child a new name they could be sure of reclaiming the right child by describing the token they left with them. 

Token on Marchmont Street, Author: Matt BrownNo changes made https://www.flickr.com/photos/londonmatt/53413014277/

                                  

The story takes a leap and the stakes are raised when Bess, after six years of scrimping, returns to claim her child only to find that a stranger has claimed her the very day after Bess had placed Clara in the hospital’s care. Avoiding spoilers - the exploration of what it is to be a mother deepens as the two women are brought up against each other. The genius of the book for me is the way in which Stacey Halls balances the representation of the needs of the two women so that despite the reader’s natural urge to see mother and daughter reunited there is also feeling for the damaged woman who has claimed Clara. This creates powerful dramatic tension and pulls the reader’s emotions in different directions, resulting in a gripping read that one can’t put down.

The Foundling Restored To Its Mother 1858 painting by Emma Brownlow
  1858. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

In 'Lily', subtitled ‘A Tale of Revenge’, Rose Tremain writes of poverty, cruelty and crime in Victorian London. The infant Lily is first placed in a loving foster family but is then wrenched away and returned to hardship as a pauper at the hospital. Now, as an adult, Lily has committed a murder and lives in fear of discovery. Tremain holds back the nature of the murder and the identity of the victim, masterfully managing the dramatic tension and creating a mystery that kept me turning the pages into the night.
However, the truly fascinating thing for me was the relationship between Lily and the policeman who rescued her as a baby. She feels he may hold the key to her salvation but she dare not confess to him for fear of the rope.

Tremain writes with all her usual subtlety and feeling, imbuing everyday objects with the emotional charge they hold for her characters so that they become powerful symbols of love and loss: a scarf that Lily knits for her only friend at the hospital, a deep, black well at the farm where Lily was happily fostered that comes to symbolise her worst fear of discovery and execution.

One of Tremain’s great strengths is that she looks unflinchingly at human darkness whilst still maintaining a feeling of authorial empathy and understanding. This novel moved me to tears – it is heartrending, compassionate and brilliant.

To find out more about the fascinating history of the Foundling Hospital and see examples of the tokens left by parents, do visit https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk

Is the historical novel the ultimate novel? - Emma Darwin

As soon as you start researching a historical novel, you discover that the past really is a foreign country, and they really do do things differently there. That's part of the fear and part of the fun: you're the pioneer in this strange land, hacking back the jungle and getting the measure of the natives, before you go back to collect your readers, and lead them through it in their turn.

And yet they also say that the first person you meet when you travel abroad is yourself. We read and write historical fiction to experience our own time and our own selves from another angle and sometimes a more revealing one: to find out the constants in human nature, as well as the variables. When Rose Tremain wanted to write about Eighties Britain, she wrote Restoration, about the court of Charles II. When I wanted to conjure up the last, pre-digital generation of photojournalists, for The Mathematics of Love, I shared their story with the first stirrings of photography 150 years earlier. And it's because of this dual nature of historical fiction - the way that, like history-writing, it embodies Now, as well as Then - that I want to suggest that the ultimate kind of novel is the historical novel.

As philosopher and novelist Richard Kearney puts it, in all storytelling the storyteller works with bits and pieces of experience from their world: things the listeners know, and things they know about from others past and present. The storyteller spins the bits and pieces into a tale which makes sense of them and shows the world in a new and clearer light.

Non-fiction-storytelling confines itself to giving the reader a logical experience of the probable: the best description possible of how things actually are or were. Fiction-storytelling offers an imaginative, affective experience of how things might be, or may have been. Our minds' neural pathways can't tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real one, and so fiction also tells its tales "as if" they really happened, to give us the experience of other lives and worlds. You could say that fiction offers us the memories we don't have ourselves. And in her essay about her novel Alias Grace, which is based on a true story, Margaret Atwood says this:

Fiction is where individual memory and experience and collective memory and experience come together, in greater or lesser proportions. The closer the fiction is to us readers, the more we recognise and claim it as individual rather than collective. [Canadian novelist] Margaret Laurence used to say that her English readers thought [her novel] The Stone Angel was about old age, the Americans thought it was about some old woman they knew, and the Canadians thought it was about their grandmothers.

I think Atwood has put her finger on two important things. First, her "memory and experience" is clearly the same as Kearney's "bits and pieces": fiction is where particular stories can be shaped and related to general ones. Second, she's saying that being distanced from the world of the story helps us to see the general (old age) underlying the particular (grandmother's) life. She's talking about geographical distance, but of course temporal distance comes to the same thing.

Some literary critics hate historical fiction, because it doesn't deal "authentically" with the experience of Now, but by definition can't be authentic to Then, either. No writer now setting a novel in the mid-eighteenth century is seriously trying to convince the reader that it's a long-lost manuscript by Henry Fielding, whatever games she or he plays with us along the way.

And some historians hate historical fiction because History, as a discipline, depends utterly on being honest about the distinctions between a provable fact, a trustworthy record, a reasonable assumption, and pure speculation. But to tell a story "as if" it all happened, novelists must waltz to and fro between probable and possible, across the historians' all-important boundaries, without the reader ever feeling the bump.

But to me what these historians and critics hate are some of the greatest strengths of the historical novel: the kind of strength which comes from growing up on disputed ground. When you write about history in any way you have to work under the tension built into a story which is about "not only Then, but also Now". And when you write a novel you have to work under the tension built into "not only Is, but also Might Have Been". So, if Atwood is right about what fiction is, then historical fiction has to hold together all four poles. It has to stretch backwards as well as sideways, reach across time as well as space, evoking particular experience to bring us collective memories beyond our individual reach. A historical novel, in other words, is doing explicitly what other kinds of novel only do implicitly. The ultimate novel, you could say, is the historical novel.