The Foundling Hospital in Regency London - Audioblog

The Foundling Hospital was a charity established in the 1740s to protect illegitimate babies who might otherwise have been abandoned.

It attracted well-known benefactors including George Frederic Handel, artist
Allan Ramsay and caricaturist William Hogarth.

The hospital was active through the late Georgian and Regency, and Victorian eras,

Sources include:
A Copy of the Royal Charter for Establishing an Hospital for the maintenance and education of exposed and deserted young children (1739).
Ackermann, Rudolph, and Pyne, William Henry, The Microcosm of London or London in miniature Volume 2 (Rudolph Ackermann 1808-1810, reprinted 1904).
Feltham, John, The Picture of London for 1809 (1809).
Howell, Caro, Foundling Museum - an introduction (2014).

00:00 Introduction
00:26 The founding of the Foundling Hospital
01:48 Who did the Foundling Hospital help?
03:06 Where was the Foundling Hospital?
03:44 What was the Hospital like?
04:29 Who was admitted to the Foundling Hospital?
05:12 What was the admissions process?
06:26 Where there enough places for every applicant?
07:33 What happened to baby admitted to the Foundling Hospital?
08:35 What happened to the foundlings?
09:44 Were foundlings ever reconciled with their parents?
10:01 How was the Hospital financed?
10:41 The Foundling Hospital chapel
11:44 Hogarth and other benefactors
12:29 Handel at the Foundling Hospital
12:47 Visiting the charity
13:04 What happened to the Foundling Hospital?

This is an audio version of a blog post we published in 2024.