Threads of feeling

Photograph by The Foundling Museum



The Threads of Feeling exhibition has been running at the Foundling Museum since October and is soon to close on March 6th. The exhibition shows the pieces of fabric that mothers gave along with each baby who was left at the Foundling Hospital between 1741 and 1760. The purpose of the hospital retaining the fabric was originally intended to mean that should a mother be in a position to reclaim her baby she would be able to prove their bond by arriving with a matching swatch of fabric. I also imagine though, that leaving a little of their own identity served to help mothers feel that they were leaving their baby with some care; that a fragment of herself travelled on with the child (if the child arrived without a token from the mother, then a small fabric swatch was instead cut from the child's own clothing).

Photograph by The Foundling Museum

Over 250 years later, the hospital's collection is now being shared with the public and the fabrics are of interest on many levels (although I have to confess that my own interest in them is almost entirely sentimental):

"The textiles are both beautiful and poignant, embedded in a rich social history. Each swatch reflects the life of a single infant child. But the textiles also tell us about the clothes their mothers wore, because baby clothes were usually made up from worn-out adult clothing. The fabrics reveal how working women struggled to be fashionable in the 18th Century." - The Foundling Museum Website.

Photograph by The Foundling Museum

I have been planning to visit the exhibition with my mother since she tore out a newspaper article about it several months ago but, upsettingly, the weekend has never materialised when it felt right to leave my family and disappear to London for a day (they have been surprisingly high maintenance these last few months!). I still have high hopes for the final week that it runs following half-term, and will be planning a break-away around even a glimmer of opportunity. However, I feel so certain that this exhibition will be utterly wonderful (possibly in a tear-stained way that may require the taking along of hankies), that I wanted to post about it in case anyone near London has missed the press about it and might like to go along themselves. You can find the details here. For those who, like me, find themselves unable to go or are far away from London, then you can view the online exhibition (although unfortunately this has only made me more desperate to go along in person and I imagine that the watching of it could result in overnight train journeys and long-haul flights being undertaken. Don't say that I didn't warn you).

Wishing you a lovely half-term week,
Florence x