Dark secret of Victorian foundling

Rose Tremain Chatto & Windus, £18.99

The latest novel from the versatile Rose Tremain is a terrifying indictment of Victorian philanthropy.

Lily is abandoned as a newborn in 1850. She is found by police constable Sam Trench who takes her to the London Foundling Hospital, imagining she will be cared for.

Initially, she is, because babies are fostered and Lily spends six idyllic years with a Suffolk farming family, mothered by the kindly Nellie.

But the law then requires Nellie to return her foster daughter to the hospital. There, the children are starved, beaten and terrorised.

Lily is scrubbed with carbolic, her head shaved, and she is constantly reminded of her mother’s sins.

‘How can you lead a good life,’ Lily wonders, ‘if you have been precious to nobody and made to feel burdened by shame?’

The children are tasked with jobs in the hospital then, as teenagers, sent out to work.

Lily is apprenticed at Belle Prettywood’s Wig Emporium where she shines, having learned delicate needlework from Nellie, and Belle treats her well. However, when she is 16, she commits a murder, leaving her haunted by guilt. The mystery lies in the identity of the victim (there are several candidates) and whether her crime will be discovered.

Though Sam and his wife Joyce offer Lily a home, she believes she is beyond redemption and fears that Sam’s detective skills will send her to the gallows.

Tremain has created a feisty, rebellious heroine in the style of Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver, in a setting that owes much to Dickens.

Though sobering, Lily is also a very engaging read.