Knowing now that my grandmother spent her childhood in an orphanage during the Victorian era, my mind was immediately filled with images of the institution in which Oliver Twist had the misfortune to find himself in Charles Dickens's novel of the same name. A cold, bleak, grim place where the main diet was gruel, strictly rationed. My research found that before an orphan or "pauper child" arrived at an actual orphanage or "workhouse" they were sent to a privately run "baby farm." This was a requirement set out in Jonas Hanway's Act of 1767; all pauper children under the age of six from London parishes were to be sent to the countryside at least three miles from London or Westminster. Poor relief was administered by English parishes until 1834 when the Poor Law Amendment Act was enacted and parishes were combined into "poor unions." Hanway's Act survived and the new unions continued to send their children to privately run baby farms.
Dickens's Oliver Twist was born in a workhouse to a mother who had been taken there after she was found lying in the street, heavily pregnant. She had evidently walked some distance and no-one knew her, where she was from or to where she was going. His mother having died almost immediately after giving birth, Oliver was 'farmed' until, at the age of nine, he was sent to a workhouse to be schooled and taught a trade. After having the temerity however to ask the formidable Mr Bumble for a second bowl of gruel, he was immediately put up for sale - "a bill was pasted on the outside of the gate offering a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the hands of the parish. In other words, five pounds and Oliver Twist were offered to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade, business or calling." (Chapter II, Oliver Twist, first published 1839)
Once children entered a workhouse, they were given schooling for at least three hours a day in reading, writing, arithmetic, religion, history and geography for boys, needlework, knitting and domestic employment for girls. Such were the areas of instruction at St.Marylebone's Workhouse in the 1840s, a workhouse school where it appears orphans were lucky in the schooling they received as some in authority had questioned whether such children even needed to be taught to read and write. The Poor Law Amendment Act included the principle of "less eligibility" which, it was argued, allowed workhouse children to receive an education of lower quality than that given to children of modest means who lived in the community.
Jonas Hanway, when he formulated the concept of babies being nursed before they entered an orphanage or workhouse, was a governor of the Foundling Hospital, an orphanage at St.Pancras which received babies born to mothers who were unmarried and unable to provide for them and the one which admitted the infant "Edith Irwin". Edith, perhaps feeling the stigma of being brought up in an orphanage, promoted in Australia the story that she had lived with "an aunt" when she was a child. This "aunt" however, may simply have been the woman to whom she was sent to live before entering the Foundling Hospital, where she was living at the time of the 1891 census, aged nine, with 99 other girls aged from eight to 14.
As can be seen from Oliver's experience at Mr Bumble's workhouse school, discipline was harsh at such places and children were treated as if they were chattels and fodder for the workforce. A strict routine was enforced in whichever institution children without parents lived; the Foundling Hospital being no exception. It provided security, but the children were largely isolated and were often left unprepared for the world outside. But, all things considered, my grandmother was fortunate to have entered this place of residence as an infant. The Foundling Hospital, which still exists to this day as a museum, was a more benevolent institution than the grim and spare parish workhouses in which many children lived and worked until they were deemed old enough to leave and earn a meagre living with the basic skills taught to them in accordance with their lowly station in life. It was in fact "the first, vitally important step towards society's recognition of its responsibility to care for all children"* and its social aims survive and exist today in the form of Coram, the UK's first-ever children's charity.
Sources: www.workhouses.org.uk
London Metropolitan Archives (www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/lma)
*Exhibition note from The Foundling Hospital Museum display
www.coram.org.uk
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