Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital

This is a fascinating and exhaustive study of unmarried mothers who applied to the London Foundling Hospital in the Victorian period. Sheetz-Nguyen has mined applications for admission in order to draw a detailed picture of the 'calculus of respectability' employed by members of the Foundling Hospital's Board of Governors and Committee to assess petitioners' claims ... Sheetz-Nguyen combines comprehensive quantitative analysis of these issues with qualitative evidence drawn from the rich biographies of individual petitioners assembled from the petition packets. -- Samantha Williams, University of Cambridge, UK * Family & Community History (Vol. 16.2) * Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital offers a fascinating consideration of the interaction of desperate female petitioners and the elite men who decided their fates. The framework used to analyse these decisions, a 'calculus of respectability', is a useful tool for explaining the variety of factors that entered into the Foundling Hospital's decisions. We can learn a great deal from narratives derived from the archive of this institution and presented here. -- Andrew August, Penn State University * Journal of Victorian Culture * Jessica Sheetz-Nguyen's examination of perhaps the most well-known of these institutions is a welcome addition to a growing body of work on unwed mothers . . . Sheetz-Nguyen offers a worthwhile analysis of mothers' petitions to the Foundling Hospital which provides insights into society's somewhat ambivalent attitudes towards unwed maternity, and the reformability of youth, working-class courtship and sexual practices, and the employability and character of female domestic servants. -- Joanne Bailey, Oxford Brookes University * Social History *