How to Create the Perfect Wife (12 page)

No details of Ann’s mother were recorded beyond the fact that she gave birth in Clerkenwell. Sandwiched between the thriving financial center
of the city’s square mile and the fashionable quarter of the West End, Clerkenwell was home to some of London’s poorest and most desperate people. Its maze of dead-end alleys and dark courtyards, where ramshackle tenement buildings blocked out the sun, housed thousands of families in attics and cellars devoid of sanitation or ventilation. Nearly half the population, including children from the age of six, were dependent on the area’s renowned clock- and watchmaking trade. It was here, to the constant thrum of hammering and grinding echoing in the narrow streets, that Ann’s heart first began to beat. Whether her mother was a maidservant seduced by her master or an heiress involved in an illicit liaison, the likelihood is that she was illegitimate; certainly that would remain the assumption throughout her life.

Illegitimacy rose throughout the eighteenth century in Britain as in Europe; the Georgian era has been dubbed “the century of illegitimacy.” But far from proving an upsurge in lax moral behavior, the rise was probably due chiefly to planned marriages being abandoned through unforeseen disasters. Traditionally it was common practice, especially in the countryside, for couples to enjoy intimate relations that were only legalized in church if and when the woman fell pregnant. But high living costs and wartime conscription, along with the Marriage Act of 1753 making weddings more complicated to arrange, deterred or prevented many well-intentioned couples from proceeding up the aisle.

All these factors reached a climax in spring 1757—around the time of Ann’s birth—when a peak in bread prices, an increase in adult mortality and the continuation of the Seven Years War combined to produce a sharp spike in illegitimate births. Deserted or bereaved by her seducer or her lover, therefore, Ann’s mother may have thrown herself on the mercy of the parish and given birth in the Clerkenwell workhouse. There she may have died in childbirth or given up her newborn baby reluctantly to parish officials or even taken the baby herself to the Foundling Hospital in the hope that she was thereby assuring her a better future.

The enigma mattered little to the staff of the Foundling Hospital who had long since surrendered curiosity for pragmatism. With six other infants to register that day, the clerk promptly stamped the baby’s number, 4579, on a lead tag and tied this around her neck with a piece of silk.
Bathed clean by the nurse and dressed in a regulation white smock, she was handed to a wet nurse and whisked away to the nursing ward. Meanwhile the clerk completed the billet form and entered the new arrival’s details in the General Register along with her new name: Ann Kingston. Plucked at random from a list of approved names, this was how she would be known during her life within the charity. Only three of the seven babies admitted that day lived beyond infancy; Ann was one of the lucky ones.

Unknown to Thomas Day, therefore, his chosen child bride had been born just a few miles from his own birthplace. She had been deposited at the gates of the Foundling Hospital in the same year that he walked through the gates of Charterhouse School a few minutes’walk away.

Her stay in the hospital was short. On the same day that she arrived, Ann was handed over with a parcel of baby clothes, including three shirts, three caps and a gray woolen coat, to a new wet nurse, called Mary Penfold, who had traveled in from the countryside earlier that day. A receipt details the clothes provided along with the nurse’s weekly wage of 2s and 6d. Unable to write, Mary Penfold signed for the goods received—both baby and clothing—with a cross. And along with four other foundlings and their respective nurses, Ann set out on a slow twenty-seven-mile journey by horse-drawn cart to her new home in pastoral Surrey.

Although the charity’s legion of wet nurses was paid basically to suckle their charges, essentially they were foster mothers to the babies committed to their care. Cartoons and novels frequently depict eighteenth-century wet nurses as ignorant, drunken and neglectful. Yet most of the women who nursed the Foundling Hospital orphans were loving surrogate mothers to the children they brought up until the age of five, six or older. Like Mary Penfold, most were the wives of poor farm laborers and country artisans with several children of their own who viewed the monthly 10s fee as a lifeline in times of widespread hardship. Although this generous wage was plainly the main motivation for some, many became so emotionally attached to their foster children that they appealed to keep them permanently or simply refused to give them up. Occasionally such requests were granted and foundlings were apprenticed to their foster families; usually they were refused.

Whether Mary Penfold had been spurred to volunteer from altruism or poverty, from the moment she accepted Ann and her bundle of clothing she became the central figure in her young life, effectively becoming the mother she had never known. The fact that Ann was breast-fed—in accordance with the charity’s enlightened policy—inevitably deepened that bond. Until the mid-1700s, newborn babies were often fed, or “dry-nursed,” with bread, cake or biscuit mixed with cow’s milk, butter and sugar—known as “pap”—supplemented by brandy, rum or wine. But the Foundling Hospital’s physician, William Cadogan, had convinced the charity’s governors—and later popularized the idea—that breast was best. Benefiting from this progressive nursing regime, breathing the fresh country air and nurtured by Mary Penfold, Ann thrived. Like the country maiden of Thomas Day’s fantasies—like the Sophie created by Rousseau for his Émile—Ann grew up among peasant folk according to simple country ways. But it was no rural idyll.

Living in the hamlet of Wotton, three miles outside the market town of Dorking, Mary Penfold already had her hands full when she took in her foundling. Her family comprised James, sixteen, Mary, fifteen, Betty, six, John, two and Thomas, who was just four months old. His nose abruptly pushed out, baby Thomas must have been promptly weaned or had to share his mother’s milk with the little stranger. Rising at dawn and going to bed at dusk, the Penfold children would have spent much of their day helping in the fields and around the house. There was no cosseting and few cuddles for children in the laboring classes. But when the chores were done, there was freedom to play on the village green or scramble over the chalk hills, to whirl around the maypole in spring and tumble in the haystacks at harvest. For Ann, trading the noxious squalor of overcrowded Clerkenwell for the pure Surrey air, it was a clear change for the better.

On her first birthday, her foster mother’s care was acknowledged with a ten shilling bonus—equivalent to an unskilled laborer’s weekly wage—the reward given to all wet nurses if the baby survived twelve months. This was no mean achievement. Of all babies sent to wet nurses during the General Reception, more than half never returned. Ann’s survival, in the face of such odds, was due in no small measure to the diligence of the charity’s local inspector, Hugh Kerr. A busy surgeon based in Dorking,
and a volunteer like all the inspectors, Kerr took responsibility for seventy-six orphan babies in the surrounding villages from June 1756 to June 1757 alone; of these only fifteen died.

Yet just over two years after Ann’s arrival in Wotton, in August 1759, the Foundling Hospital officials suddenly announced that they wanted to transfer the oldest children in the Dorking area to new country hospitals to make way for the torrent of babies still arriving at the hospital gates in London. Forced to surrender their orphans after two years—instead of the usual five or six—the wet nurses protested loudly. “The poor Women think it Extreamly hard to come up in Harvest & to leave their Children so Young,” complained Kerr. “If these Children could be left here untill next Spring the poor Women after all their trouble would have some small comfort of them this Winter,” he begged. Unusually, the governors acceded to appeals from two families near Dorking who had grown so fond of their foundlings they could not bear to part with them. No such request came from Mary Penfold.

At two-and-a-quarter years old, her bright coppery curls about level with the ears of wheat waiting to be harvested in the fields, Ann was brought by Mary Penfold back to the London Foundling Hospital on August 14, 1759, and separated from her foster mother forever. One Foundling Hospital clerk, who supervised a band of orphans being parted from their foster mothers the previous month, recorded that the nurses “shewed the most lively sorrow in parting with them” and the children “cried very much after their Mammys.” Himself a former foundling, he spoke from the heart.

No sooner had she said goodbye to her “Mammy” than Ann was taken to one of the hospital’s huge dormitories where she spent the next two nights. Two days later she was placed in a horse-drawn wagon padded with straw with eleven other girls and six boys for a grueling eight-day journey to Shrewsbury. Accompanied by nine nurses sent from Shropshire for the purpose, the sizable party stopped overnight at inns on the long and bumpy journey.

With the Shrewsbury Orphan Hospital still only a blueprint, the wagon pulled up outside a converted warehouse, where Ann and her fellow infants were lifted down. Institutional life would wait. Inside the temporary
orphanage Ann was presented to a new nurse, Ann Casewell, along with another foundling who had also been transferred from Dorking at the same time, named Deborah Verner, who was a year younger. Like Mary Penfold, Ann Casewell was illiterate; she signed the receipts for her two foundlings and their respective clothing with a cross. Like Mary Penfold, she was married with young children—a four-year-old daughter, Mary, and a son, Robert, who was nearly two.

Growing up with her new foster family and her foundling “sister” Deborah in the Shropshire countryside, Ann remained for the next six years, as the Shrewsbury Orphan Hospital rose slowly on the distant horizon. She was almost eight years old, in April 1765, when she and Deborah were brought to live in the orphanage for the first time. After nearly six years with the Casewell family, it must have been another wrenching separation.

Brought up in their small foster family within a tightly knit rural community, the two girls no doubt felt overwhelmed by the vast orphanage with its tall windows, high ceilings and great oak staircase, alive with the sound of whirring looms and spinning wheels, along with the hubbub of more than 500 children. At first they were probably inoculated against smallpox and isolated for several weeks in a nearby house—as were all the new arrivals—before being introduced into the girls’ dormitory. But if it all seemed strange and new there was no time to stop and stare.

Between chores in the kitchens and laundry, lessons in the schoolroom and work in the weaving and spinning rooms—where the children produced the woolen cloth for which the orphanage was renowned—there were few opportunities for leisure. In common with its London headquarters and five other country branches, the Shrewsbury orphanage kept to a rigid timetable for meals, lessons, work, prayers and bedtime in its efforts to inculcate habits of order and discipline in its young wards.

The Shrewsbury governors, who had been responsible for hundreds of orphans since their first arrival from London in 1759, supervised their upbringing with a mixture of paternalistic affection and pragmatic realism. Volunteers who were recruited from the ranks of the local gentry and aristocracy, they watched over the “nurslings” growing up in their foster families and took turns to visit the orphanage to check on the children’s welfare. According to hospital rules, staff had “to behave with Tenderness”
toward the orphans and see that “all Regulations concerning the Children are observed.” One governor, making a spot check on the orphanage on a Sunday morning, recorded indignantly in the Visitors Book that the children were about to leave for church “with large holes in their stockings their Cloaths dirty & likewise their faces.”

Pressed by the board in London, the governors pared costs and trained the children for work in the mills. Not only did the orphans produce their own uniforms in their manufactory, they sold surplus cloth in the Shrewsbury market and even made bespoke livery for the local sheriff’s men and greatcoats for the governors. But careful not to overtax their charges, unlike the mill owners who worked child laborers to death in the nearby factories, the governors never managed to turn a profit from this hive of industry since “The Days are short & the Children Novices.”

However well intentioned the regime, it was impossible—in an age before effective medical care—to stem the onslaught of disease and the steady roll call of deaths. When one of the girls, named Sweet Rose, recovered from smallpox there was evident rejoicing—“she is a very Good Girl, and one of our best Spinners,” the secretary informed London. But when another died of convulsions he deemed her death a blessing “as it was the Greatest Cripple that I ever saw.” The unfortunately titled Waste Book, which recorded daily events, notes without comment the names of farm animals giving birth or being butchered, staff being appointed or sacked and children arriving from their nurses, being apprenticed or dying.

As she grew accustomed to this stark but caring regime, Ann learned her lessons and performed her chores in every expectation of her lowly station in life. She seems to have been selected to perform housework rather than being trained for a job in the woolen trade; a register of children’s occupations lists her as “in the house” between 1765 and 1768 rather than in the spinning or weaving rooms. When she was not doing housework, she took her seat in the schoolroom. Like all Georgian children who were fortunate enough to enjoy an education, whether rich or poor, the Shrewsbury orphans were taught in large classes to read from improving books—mainly the Bible—and to learn by rote religious texts. At its peak in 1766, when Ann was nine, the orphanage boasted four schoolmasters and six schoolmistresses. It was a point of pride that all the foundlings
could perform simple sums and read, if not write, by the time they left for their apprenticeships.

The children rose at six in the morning in summer and seven in winter, and each day passed with little variation. There was meat three times a week, church on Sundays and plum pudding every Christmas. Growing up, Ann mastered her alphabet, learned to count, practiced her catechism and labored over her chores. Although the orphans worked long hours, they were sent outdoors to play after lunch and before bedtime. The only significant change came in the ebb and flow of children arriving from their nurses or leaving for apprenticeships and dying from disease. In April 1768, when Ann was eleven, a measles epidemic swept through the orphanage and affected more than 200 children although—remarkably—only four died.