The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Life as a 20th-century foundling
A memoir uncovers the truth about London’s Foundling Hospital – which only closed its doors in 1954
THE SECRET LIFE OF DOROTHY SOAMES by Justine Cowan
320pp, Virago, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £13.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
The summer before last, a weekend babysitting my seven-year-old niece was spent playing Victorian school, which mostly involved me being rapped over the knuckles with a ruler or standing in the corner wearing a makeshift dunce’s cap while lamenting my own foolishness at having tried to make history fun. Far happier feeding her Victorian obsession from afar, I sent her a copy of Jacqueline Wilson’s novel Hetty Feather, the heroine of which is abandoned as a baby at the Foundling Hospital in London. That stalwart institution couldn’t be more Dickensian if it tried, I thought. Imagine my surprise, then, when reading Justine Cowan’s extraordinary memoir, The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames, to learn that the Foundling Hospital did not close its doors until 1954.
It was founded in 1739 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram to care for those whose impoverished parents could not. Although by the 20th century unwanted babies weren’t being abandoned in the street in the same way that had been common 200 years earlier – think of the street scenes of destitution and vice depicted by Hogarth (a man, incidentally, who helped to establish the hospital as a public art gallery, a means by which it originally raised money) – in the 1930s, which is when Cowan’s connection to the institution begins, illegitimacy still carried a huge stigma.
For years, Cowan – who was born in America, and is now an environmental lawyer – believed that her mercurial mother hailed from the British nobility. What she eventually discovered, though, was an origin story at the very opposite end of the class spectrum. Cowan’s mother always implied she was descended from Welsh landed gentry; she also claimed to have studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music. Neither were true. In fact, she was a foundling, handed over to the hospital by her unmarried mother in a desperate bid to save her reputation and afford her child a respectable start in life. Instead though, while the wider world was embracing modern life, the child’s existence was like something out of Dickens – or, as Cowan herself suggests, The Handmaid’s Tale – marked by physical deprivation, psychological torture, and bereft of even the most rudimentary love and affection.
Unlike many memoirs in this vein, Cowan’s labours aren’t driven by the promise of catharsis. Although telling a deeply personal
story, she painstakingly gathers her material as if assembling testimony for a day in court. She is also admirably honest about her fraught relationship with her mother. So far beyond repair were relations between them, that even when her mother did eventually try to tell her the truth about her background, Cowan initially wasn’t interested. In was only after the older woman’s death that she began her research proper.
The result is this fascinating, moving book; part history of the Foundling Hospital and the development of child psychology, part Cowan’s own story, and part that of Dorothy Soames (the name Cowan’s mother was given at the hospital); the latter pieced together from “the trail of administrative breadcrumbs” in the hospital’s files and the eye-opening recollections that Cowan’s mother perspicaciously penned – why?
Cowan is never quite sure, but she’s glad they exist. They tell a gruelling story of the cruelties inflicted on the foundlings by those in charge – the hospital’s matron carried a leather strap around with her for impromptu beatings, and would lock Dorothy inside a dark closet for hours at a time – and the deficiencies of a life lived on society’s margins. Despite the supposedly benevolent aims of the institution, while it freed those like Cowan’s grandmother from a life of shame, the foundlings themselves were forever tarnished by their illegitimacy, treated like damaged goods.
That Cowan’s mother’s adult life looked like a fairy tale – she emigrated to America, married a GI and lived an enviable existence in an affluent part of San Francisco – did little to ease the trauma of her desolate early years. Instead, as her daughter slowly comes to understand, she was left with “a lifetime’s worth of emotional scars”. Meeting Lydia, one of her mother’s former classmates, Cowan struggles to articulate the magnitude of the strain between herself and the woman Dorothy grew up to be. “Of course,” Lydia replies with devastating clarity. “How would she have known how to be a mother?”