Folly (22 page)

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Afterword

The characters in this book come entirely from my imagination. But Thomas Coram and his Foundling Hospital were very real, and responsible for saving thousands of lives during more than two hundred years. The good work is continued today by an organization called the Coram Family, which assists inner-city children in London.

Thomas Coram's own mother died when he was four years old. It seems likely that he first sailed to sea by the time he was eleven. He grew up to be a sea merchant and spent many years in America, trading in lumber. Upon his return to England later in life, he was horrified to discover that dead or dying babies were often abandoned in the gutters or dung heaps of London by parents unable to care for them. The only alternative for the very poor was

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the workhouse, a grim place where families were separated, underfed, and worked like slaves.

Thomas Coram vowed to provide a home that would welcome and educate children born out of wedlock, raising them to be responsible citizens. His dogged efforts for seventeen years resulted finally, in 1739, in King George II's signing a charter to establish the Foundling Hospital.

It was immediately clear, when the doors were opened, that there were far more infants in need than there were places for them. Desperate women crowded the streets, begging that their babies be taken in. Police were hired to patrol the neighborhood so that discouraged mothers would not simply drop rejected babies in the gutter.

Several plans for reception were tried over the next few decades, from undiscriminating universal acceptance to strict guidelines as to the age and health of the child. My character, Mary Finn--and my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Ann Ranson--came to the Foundling Hospital in the late 1800s, when the women were personally interviewed and required to declare that their pregnancy was their first--and last--misstep. The facts of these interviews were carefully recorded and checked. An effort was made to contact each father, to prove that he could not, or would not, provide for his family. Elizabeth Ann, like Mary, was lucky to find a generous employer who allowed the baby to be born under her roof. We'll never know the reason why she made the heartbreaking decision, when her son was nine months old, to say goodbye.

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Upon arrival at the hospital, the foundlings were baptized with new names, bestowed with a set of clothes, and sent at once to foster mothers in the country, who usually had their own new babies and plenty of milk to nurse an extra. At the age of five or six, the children were returned to the institution to be educated and trained for future use to society--the boys most often as soldiers or sailors and the girls as domestic servants.

I knew none of this when simple curiosity compelled me to learn more about my grandfather's origins--beyond the "orphan" label he'd carried in family lore. He was far from an orphan. Both his parents had been very much alive. He had more of a history than he ever knew--but isn't that true for all of us?

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marthe jocelyn

is the author of several award-winning novels and

has also written and illustrated picture books. Her

novels for Wendy Lamb Books include
How It

Happened in Peach Hill
and
Would You
.

She lives in Stratford, Ontario.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Marthe Jocelyn

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books,

an imprint of Random House Children's Books,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jocelyn, Marthe.

Folly / Marthe Jocelyn. -- 1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: In a parallel narrative set in late nineteenth-century England, teenaged country girl Mary Finn relates the unhappy conclusion to her experiences as a young servant in an aristocratic London household while, years later, young James Nelligan describes how he comes to leave his beloved foster family to live and be educated at London's famous Foundling Hospital.

eISBN: 978-0-375-89451-0

[1. Foundlings--Fiction.

2. Household employees--Fiction. 3. Foundling Hospital (London, England)--

Fiction. 4. London (England)--History--19th century--Fiction. 5. Great

Britain--History--Victoria, 1837-1901--Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.J579Fo 2010

[Fic]--dc22

2009023116

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