Foundling Textiles

Foundling Textiles is a project that combines an exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London with an associated publication. Together they will introduce the public to the mid-eighteenth century textiles preserved in the records of London's Foundling Hospital. Each of these textiles, at one and the same time beautiful and poignant, reflects the life of a single child. They form the largest collection of everyday textiles surviving from the eighteenth century. They have never been exhibited before.

The London Foundling Hospital, opened in 1741, was the most famous of a wave of charitable initiatives mounted by Georgian philanthropists. Public fascination with the history of the Hospital and its children has blossomed over the last decade, encouraged by the publication of Jamela Gavin's prize-winning novel Coram Boy in 2000, which has since been staged as a play at the National Theatre in an adaptation by Helena Edmundson. The Foundling Museum opened in 2004 to tell the story of the Hospital and its children.

The most personal and poignant records of the infants abandoned at the Hospital are the tokens kept, from 1741 to 1760, to identify each child. Most of these tokens are colourful textiles, often cut from the abandoned baby's clothes. These tokens offer a direct, visually arresting link to the individual children left at the Foundling Hospital. They are, in addition, Britain's, and probably the world's, largest collection of everyday eighteenth-century textiles, amounting to more than 5,000 individual items. Yet they remain interleaved in the Foundling Hospital's ledgers, housed not at the Museum, but deposited with the bulk of the Foundling Hospital records at the London Metropolitan Archives, rarely consulted and relatively inaccessible. They have never been exhibited and remain virtually unknown outside a small circle of specialists.

Examining the textiles pinned to the billets - tangible evidence of babies abandoned, many destined to die within a few days or weeks - is a poignant, emotional experience. But where a letter or note survives from a mother, a parish priest, or a friend (as it often does), we can also arrive at an intellectual understanding of the link between the textile and the child. Such letters help explain, for example, why it is a child from Wales who is accompanied by a piece of Welsh flannel, or a child from Rotherhithe workhouse in south-east London by a piece of the coarsest striped linen.

In addition, the Foundling textiles provide unrivalled material evidence for the history of dress and textiles in the eighteenth century. They enable us to see and sense how ordinary people in the eighteenth century dressed. The collection is so large that it includes named examples of most of the fabrics that we know from written sources to have been worn by the common people. It provides a unique opportunity to survey the whole range of fabrics worn by ordinary men and women during the era of the consumer and industrial revolutions, for both of which textiles were key. The Foundling textiles show, too, how infants were clothed at a time of crucial changes in the way babies were dressed, when swaddling was abandoned and looser clothing adopted. Indeed, in a number of cases, the token is actually still made up into a sleeve, a cap, or some other item of infant dress.

Foundling Textiles is rooted in the expertise Professor Styles developed researching his acclaimed recent book The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale University Press, 2007). He brings to the project not just his knowledge of the Foundling textiles as an aspect of the history of dress, but his understanding of the direct, personal link they provide to the lives of the Foundling children.