It is reminiscent of those who used to picnic in front of the guillotine. I can quite imagine the wealthy standing about drinking and eating while watching desperate and distraught young women hoping, yet dreading, that their child would be one of the lucky ones who won a place. I don’t know if it is true that tickets were sold for the privilege of watching the lottery take place, but it does seem to have the ring of truth to it. They admitted only a certain number and the places were drawn by lottery. The Foundling Hospital, established in the 1740s in London, was the first to take babies at risk of being abandoned. It is a light read, but it is also touching. MY THOUGHTS: Don’t expect this to be a deep and gritty read, because it’s not.

But her past is threatening to catch up with her-and will soon tear her carefully constructed world apart. When her close friend-an ambitious doctor at the Foundling Hospital-persuades her to hire a nursemaid for her young daughter, she is hesitant to welcome someone new into her home and her life. Less than a mile from Bess’s lodgings in a quiet town house, a wealthy widow barely ventures outside. Her life is turned upside down as she tries to find out who has taken her little girl-and why. Dreading the worst-that Clara has died in care-the last thing she expects to hear is that her daughter has already been reclaimed. Six years after leaving her newborn, Clara, at London’s Foundling Hospital, young Bess Bright returns to reclaim the illegitimate daughter she has never really known. Some of us would leave with our arms empty some would carry our children home again.ĪBOUT THIS BOOK: London, 1754. At the north end of the west wing the door stood open, throwing light onto the stone. Two long and splendid buildings were pinned on either side of a courtyard that was connected in the middle by a chapel.

I hadn’t known that a hospital for abandoned babies would be a palace, with a hundred glowing windows and a turning place for carriages.

We stood clustered around the pillared entrance, thirty or so of us, like moths beneath the torches burning in their brackets, our hearts beating like papery wings. I’d bound Clara in an old blanket that had waited years to be darned, and now never would be. Some of them were dressed finely – though their mothers were not – in tiny embroidered sleeves and thick shawls, for winter had arrived, and the night was biting. EXCERPT: All the babies were wrapped like presents ready to be given.

The lost orphan by stacey halls