A Fall from Grace
Who knew that millinery could be such a perilous occupation for a virtuous young woman in Victorian and Edwardian times? Since a milliner’s job required her to visit private homes in order to deliver the hats she had made, it left her particularly vulnerable to seduction behind closed doors by unscrupulous clients – and becoming what was known as a ‘fallen’ woman, signifying a fall from the grace of God. When my grandmother Florence gave birth to my mother Blanche in 1911, she was a 21-year-old unmarried milliner and thus employed in a high-risk category when it came to preserving her virginity. In a new exhibition, The Fallen Woman, at London’s Foundling Museum, the painting Breakfasting Out, by the 19th-century artist Robert Dowling, shows a shy-looking young woman holding a hatbox – visual code for her occupation – and drinking coffee at an open-air street stall on the way to her next appointment. Another customer, a tall gentleman, is eyeing her with a clear intent that has been observed by a sniggering couple.
My mother had been the result of an encounter between Florence and Ernest, the son of a wealthy merchant. The only asset of aspiring working-class women like Florence in those days was their ‘character’ or virtuous reputation. Yet even wealthy heiresses such as Lady Edith in ITV’s Downton Abbey felt obliged to go abroad to give birth to babies born out of wedlock so as not to damage their reputation. However, Edith’s maternal instinct risks betraying her secret: she has informally adopted her illegitimate daughter, Marigold, and brought her to live at Downton in the hope that the wider world will never suspect her origin, thus providing an ongoing source of tension in the storyline of the final series.
After my mother was born, she was immediately fostered out with a family that lived on the other side of London, with Florence travelling across town to see her. Those visits unsettled my mother dreadfully and stopped her fully bonding with her foster family; as her best friend, Gladys, once told me, my mother had ‘no roots’ as a result. After a disastrous, short-lived marriage, she met my father on the rebound. Our family history then repeated itself when my mother went on to become a second-generation fallen woman, giving birth to me in an unmarriedmother- and-baby home in 1951 after being deserted by my father.
For leading Victorian artists whose works are featured in the exhibition, such as Richard Redgrave’s The Outcast and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Gate Of Memory, the fate of the fallen woman became a popular melodramatic theme carrying a moral message. The show also displays documents from real-life case histories of 19th-century fallen women at a time when attitudes towards sexual transgression had hardened with the rise of the mass middle classes, to whom respectability was everything. Yet as my mother Blanche discovered, those Victorian and Edwardian values still prevailed in the pre-Pill days of the 1950s when ‘nice’ girls were not given any sex education to protect them from predators.
My grandmother Florence was too appalled and embittered by history repeating itself to help Blanche. My mother’s eldest foster brother Sidney, a strict Baptist and the head of the family since his parents’ death, was also horrified by Blanche’s pregnancy. As her condition began to show, she had to give up her job as a clerk and stay in a total of three unmarried-mother-and-baby homes while she tried to work out how she could keep me rather than give me up for adoption. The third was an Edwardian house called Birdhurst Lodge in the London borough of Croydon where I was born.
Run by the evangelical Mission Of Hope charity, Birdhurst was known by locals as ‘the home for naughty girls’. At 40, my mother was no girl. They all slept in dormitories, were marched to church in crocodiles like schoolchildren, performed chores and knelt for group prayers and confessions of ‘sin’. A group photograph shows my humiliated-looking mother-to-be almost hiding herself away in the back row just weeks before my birth, while younger mothers put on a braver face in the front row as they prepared to leave the place. ‘There are worse things than having a baby,’ one girl defiantly told my mother. Yet Birdhurst was relatively benign by the standards of the day, providing sanctuary from a harsh world. And such was the demand for places that every stay was limited to three months: six weeks before the birth and six weeks afterwards in order to give the mothers time to decide whether to have their children adopted (registered as ‘removals’). My mother later told me how girls whose babies were adopted ‘cried and cried for weeks’.
London’s Foundling Museum stands on the site of Britain’s first home for abandoned children, the Foundling Hospital (now the charity Coram). Established in 1739 by philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coram, it provided education and apprenticeships for illegitimate children. Since conditions there were far preferable to the workhouse – where, according to the Fallen Woman exhibition’s curator Professor Lynda Nead of London’s Birkbeck College, infant mortality was more than 90 per cent – mothers without a man would queue at the gates to give up their babies to a better life.
Such was the pressure on places that the Hospital had changed its admission procedure by the early 19th century, accepting only the babies of previously respectable women bearing their first illegitimate child – they were allowed to fall from grace only once. The mothers’ petitions had to satisfy the all-male panel of governors that they were innocents who ‘had been drawn into the commission of sin and disgrace by a man who took advantage of [their] credulity’ so that the Hospital could not be seen to endorse immorality – or, as the Hospital’s enquirer (private detective) James Twiddy put it in one report, ‘an innate disposition to licentiousness’. Even the porter at the lodge gates made his own judgement on the demeanour, respectable or otherwise as he saw it, of petitioners.
In my mother Blanche’s case in the still-censorious 1950s, she grew so determined to hang on to me that she even asked her friend Gladys’s mother if she would look after me while she went out to work. The old lady was too frail, so my mother’s favourite foster sister Ethel, who had made a first marriage in late middle age to a kindly widower called Ralph, offered us a home under their roof. This remarkable couple made all the difference to my childhood, and even my mother’s foster brother Sidney came round to accepting my existence. It was a happy ending against all the odds.
The Fallen Woman until 3 January 2016 at The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London WC1: 020-7841 3600, www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk
My mother had been the result of an encounter between Florence and Ernest, the son of a wealthy merchant. The only asset of aspiring working-class women like Florence in those days was their ‘character’ or virtuous reputation. Yet even wealthy heiresses such as Lady Edith in ITV’s Downton Abbey felt obliged to go abroad to give birth to babies born out of wedlock so as not to damage their reputation. However, Edith’s maternal instinct risks betraying her secret: she has informally adopted her illegitimate daughter, Marigold, and brought her to live at Downton in the hope that the wider world will never suspect her origin, thus providing an ongoing source of tension in the storyline of the final series.
After my mother was born, she was immediately fostered out with a family that lived on the other side of London, with Florence travelling across town to see her. Those visits unsettled my mother dreadfully and stopped her fully bonding with her foster family; as her best friend, Gladys, once told me, my mother had ‘no roots’ as a result. After a disastrous, short-lived marriage, she met my father on the rebound. Our family history then repeated itself when my mother went on to become a second-generation fallen woman, giving birth to me in an unmarriedmother- and-baby home in 1951 after being deserted by my father.
For leading Victorian artists whose works are featured in the exhibition, such as Richard Redgrave’s The Outcast and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Gate Of Memory, the fate of the fallen woman became a popular melodramatic theme carrying a moral message. The show also displays documents from real-life case histories of 19th-century fallen women at a time when attitudes towards sexual transgression had hardened with the rise of the mass middle classes, to whom respectability was everything. Yet as my mother Blanche discovered, those Victorian and Edwardian values still prevailed in the pre-Pill days of the 1950s when ‘nice’ girls were not given any sex education to protect them from predators.
My grandmother Florence was too appalled and embittered by history repeating itself to help Blanche. My mother’s eldest foster brother Sidney, a strict Baptist and the head of the family since his parents’ death, was also horrified by Blanche’s pregnancy. As her condition began to show, she had to give up her job as a clerk and stay in a total of three unmarried-mother-and-baby homes while she tried to work out how she could keep me rather than give me up for adoption. The third was an Edwardian house called Birdhurst Lodge in the London borough of Croydon where I was born.
Run by the evangelical Mission Of Hope charity, Birdhurst was known by locals as ‘the home for naughty girls’. At 40, my mother was no girl. They all slept in dormitories, were marched to church in crocodiles like schoolchildren, performed chores and knelt for group prayers and confessions of ‘sin’. A group photograph shows my humiliated-looking mother-to-be almost hiding herself away in the back row just weeks before my birth, while younger mothers put on a braver face in the front row as they prepared to leave the place. ‘There are worse things than having a baby,’ one girl defiantly told my mother. Yet Birdhurst was relatively benign by the standards of the day, providing sanctuary from a harsh world. And such was the demand for places that every stay was limited to three months: six weeks before the birth and six weeks afterwards in order to give the mothers time to decide whether to have their children adopted (registered as ‘removals’). My mother later told me how girls whose babies were adopted ‘cried and cried for weeks’.
London’s Foundling Museum stands on the site of Britain’s first home for abandoned children, the Foundling Hospital (now the charity Coram). Established in 1739 by philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coram, it provided education and apprenticeships for illegitimate children. Since conditions there were far preferable to the workhouse – where, according to the Fallen Woman exhibition’s curator Professor Lynda Nead of London’s Birkbeck College, infant mortality was more than 90 per cent – mothers without a man would queue at the gates to give up their babies to a better life.
Such was the pressure on places that the Hospital had changed its admission procedure by the early 19th century, accepting only the babies of previously respectable women bearing their first illegitimate child – they were allowed to fall from grace only once. The mothers’ petitions had to satisfy the all-male panel of governors that they were innocents who ‘had been drawn into the commission of sin and disgrace by a man who took advantage of [their] credulity’ so that the Hospital could not be seen to endorse immorality – or, as the Hospital’s enquirer (private detective) James Twiddy put it in one report, ‘an innate disposition to licentiousness’. Even the porter at the lodge gates made his own judgement on the demeanour, respectable or otherwise as he saw it, of petitioners.
In my mother Blanche’s case in the still-censorious 1950s, she grew so determined to hang on to me that she even asked her friend Gladys’s mother if she would look after me while she went out to work. The old lady was too frail, so my mother’s favourite foster sister Ethel, who had made a first marriage in late middle age to a kindly widower called Ralph, offered us a home under their roof. This remarkable couple made all the difference to my childhood, and even my mother’s foster brother Sidney came round to accepting my existence. It was a happy ending against all the odds.
The Fallen Woman until 3 January 2016 at The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London WC1: 020-7841 3600, www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk