Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

Demographers and historians refer to the eighteenth century as the “century of illegitimacy,”1 pointing out that “in every city in England and the continent for which data are available, the upsurge of illegitimacy commenced around 1750 or before.”2 While they offer a variety of reasons to explain this increase, which remains “unprecedented in the known history of the British population,”3 they all agree that this phenomenon must have touched everyone who lived at that time and played a crucial role in the economic, social, and cultural life of the Enlightenment. But if so many families had to deal with the presence of illegitimate daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, and stepchildren, how did it influence the fictional stories that these families wanted, or pointedly did not want, to read? When contemporary writers portrayed bastard children and their parents—or when they carefully edited direct references to bastardy out of their narratives—whose perspective did they espouse, and why? And can we say that the fictional reimaginings of the social practices surrounding illegitimacy had any effect on these practices? For example, did the endless succession of plays and novels featuring lost and found children—the “foundlings”—impact the period’s view of the real- life foundlings, that is, the illegitimate children of serving women liable to be abandoned or even murdered by their mothers? Or, turning to another representational tradition, did the stories portraying sympathetically the “little ones o’both sides” (to adopt Laurence Sterne’s euphemistic phrasing) contribute to the gradual erosion of the official view of the bastard as a social and economic pariah? To begin to answer these questions, this study brings together research from several different disciplines, such as law, history, and cultural and literary studies. It pits the official legal views on illegitimacy against the actual everyday practices that frequently circumvented the law. It reconstructs the history of social institutions called upon to regulate illegitimacy, such as the London Foundling Hospital, and it examines a series of foundling narratives written, arguably, in response to the same concerns that underlay the emergence and functioning of such institutions. And throughout, it emphasizes the multiplicity of cultural meanings of bastardy, striving to redefine the “century of illegitimacy” as the “century of illegitimacies.