Alison Duke, Collections Manager, writes: Hannah Brown (1866-1973) entered the care of the London Foundling Hospital in 1866 as her mother, Emma Johnson, as a single mother had few other options to care for her child. After leaving the Hospital, Brown entered domestic service before having a happy marriage and a career late in life as a self-taught artist. The hardships of her early life led her to campaign for vulnerable children. In 1922, she was invited to make a submission to a Parliamentary Select Committee looking into recommendations for the protection of adopted and other care-experienced children. In 1919, Brown published an anonymous memoir of her time at the Foundling Hospital under the name of ‘A Foundling’.
Brown’s book is the only known first-hand account of a 19th-century foundling child. Such accounts are extremely rare and, in the first 180 years of the Foundling Hospital’s existence, there are only two accounts of life at the Hospital from the perspective of a foundling child – Hannah Brown’s and that of George King, an 18th-century foundling whose handwritten ‘autobiography’ is part of the Foundling collections. The Museum has created an archive of oral histories from former Foundling Hospital pupils, who grew up in the Hospital in the 20th century. By acquiring The Child She Bare we are now able to bridge the gap between the beginnings and final decades of the Foundling Hospital, and offer a fascinating comparison between the similarities and differences in the children’s lives and experiences.
The Foundling Hospital story has been overwhelmingly told from a male perspective: only men could be governors until the 20th century; all bar one of the Hospital’s 18th- and 19th-century portraits are of men all are by male artists; all the 20th-century published accounts by former pupils are written by men. Having Brown’s account significantly helps us to redress the balance and support the Museum’s wider project better to represent women in our historic story and collection.
This acquisition has enabled us, for the first time, to bring Brown’s remarkable life to the attention of our visitors and a small display is now on show in our Introductory Gallery. Supported by curatorial research from Rosie Canning, of the University of Southampton, and Dr Josie Orrell-Pearce, we have sourced images of Hannah Brown for this display alongside an account of her extraordinary life, with the volume of The Child She Bare taking centre stage.
