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Had Lily taken over the wig emporium, built her own business, or made a roaring success of herself in America, there would at least be the lesson that adversity can lead to opportunity and progress. And such places sometimes attract the wrong sort – sadists, paedophiles and the like – to work there.
I’ll be looking up Stacey Halls’s novel The Foundling to see what inspiration she takes from it, and checking out the current exhibition at the Museum which follows a Foundling child’s journey from abandonment to fighting in the battle of Trafalgar. Rose Tremain’s latest novel is both a mystery set in 19th-century London and an indictment of the abuse of children. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Lily is not a joyful, bawdy, Dickensian romp, replete with cheeky cockney clichés and rosy-cheeked orphans.The rawness of the poverty and suffering people suffered in the Victorian era doesn't bare thinking about. She is surprised that Nurse Maude has not retired, and expresses this to the hospital official who is handling the records: ‘… Nurse Maude is a pillar of the Foundling Hospital, so we have kept her on’, he tells her.
Post-recovery, her memories of hospital are fragmented yet gruelling; she mentions how she became unable to eat and dangerously underweight, and how her co-ordination was so shot that she struggled to sign her name.From that moment, Nurse Maude singles her out for special punishment, and this goes on, in more and more perverted ways, until Lily leaves the hospital to go and work at Belle Prettywood’s Wig Emporium, where the sewing skills she had been taught by Nellie make her one of Belle’s most valued employees. Thinking about it, it seems like the author decided this book was going to just be a sad story with no other point. There is a sort of redemption, albeit tinged with the fact that certain actions cannot be forgotten, or their effects shrugged off, however apparently justifiable. Lily does get revenge but that’s what haunts her because she’s a good person which she demonstrates time and time again. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here).
The young children inevitably formed bonds with their foster families and became accustomed to rural or provincial life, which was very different to the squalor of the capital, making the transition back difficult. In London, in the winter of 1850, baby Lily Mortimer is found abandoned at the gates of a park by a young police constable, who takes her to the London Foundling Hospital. A further cruel feature of the system is the way the foundlings are regarded as being the ‘carriers’ of the sins of their mothers – not their fathers, note. Schooled in Biblical morality, Lily supposes that it won’t be long before she ends her days with a noose around her neck.But the very best thing about this meaty novel, which I liked so much that I gobbled it in two days, is the ending. however, at first I thought, with the most intense disappointment, that this was just going to be yet another facile, implausible Victorian melodrama.
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