ABSTRACT
The Foundling Hospital’s legacy takes various forms. To day the Hospital’s descendant, the Thomas Coram Foundation, is split into two closely linked bodies: a children’s welfare orga nization, Coram Family (whose work includes tracing the histo ries o f former foundlings); and the Foundling Museum, which houses the Hospital’s extraordinary collection o f eighteenthcentury art.2 This double legacy means that a vast range o f indi vidual and institutional histories depends on the Hospital’s rec ords, which are amassed in the London Metropolitan Archives. These documents include the reports, records, and minutes o f the Hospital’s daily routine, together with the Governors’ pol icy discussions, neatly ordered and beautifully inscribed. They contain the petitions in which mothers, applying to have their children accepted, told the story o f their predicament to the Board o f Governors. They encompass some o f those mothers’ letters asking about their children’s progress-some scrawled, barely literate and almost illegible, on dirty scraps of papers; others penned (possibly by amanuenses) in neat copperplate hand. They also comprise correspondence from former pupils,
apprentices’ masters, and others, as well as more public docu ments, such as published sermons preached in the Hospital, re ports o f Charity Commissions, and the Hospital’s own pub lished annual reports.
