Preliminary Programme

The abandonment of small infants to foundling hospitals was a common and growing feature of eighteenth-century Europe. In this paper, I examine the survival chances of these infants in two different hospitals: the London Foundling Hospital and the Spedale degli Innocenti of Florence. The central question of the paper is how far local conditions such as social mores, alternative charitable provision, and religion set the stage for the survival outcomes of foundling infants and young children. The statistical technique of proportional hazards modelling is used to test the impact of factors such as these, and also those capturing a measure of the organizational state of the hospitals. Attitudes towards infant abandonment and unmarried motherhood are highlighted as being of great importance in mediating mortality rates among foundlings, as was the hospitals’ ability to place children promptly with wetnurses. This indicates that the survival prospects of foundling infants and children were affected by a mixture of local factors, feeding into wider attitudes towards abandonment, illegitimacy and family formation. (Show less)

During the eighteenth century, the Hôpital Général of Paris regularly housed about 10,000 people. Since 1656, the Royal government had directed that beggars and vagrants be confined there. Once there, the idle poor were to be put to work in exchange for their room and board. The real picture is quite different. Hospital records show that children, people over sixty, sick or crippled, and in all cases mostly women, account for the largest part of hospital population. Beggars, vagabonds, and vagrants make up only 7-8% of the total and stay generally for only one or two weeks. The Great Confinement (“le Grand Renfermement") is quite limited.

Attempts to make the poor work were unprofitable. Every attempt to organize manufacturing activity failed. On the other hand, the poor were often required to work for the hospital: they frequently become regular, paid employees. Children received basic schooling, but few of them, and only boys, were given the chance to become apprentices.
The hospital had changed its primary objective, responding to societal demands to protect children, women, and the elderly. But through lack of adequate planning, organization, and financing, and because great numbers of the city’s “deserving” poor were received freely at the hospital, the institution was unable to offer the opportunities for training that would have allowed substantial numbers of inmates, young or old, male or female, to leave and find paid employment.. (Show less)

My paper takes up the “Waisenhausstreit” of the 18th century. This German controversy, not unlike recent discussions in the USA and elsewhere, considered the advisability of raising orphans in centralized institutions, where they were supposedly subjected to high mortality, poor education, and brutal discipline. The short-term result was the closing of many public orphanages and the transfer of orphans to foster families. It was, as one can imagine, a solution that “fostered” an entirely new range of problems.

Augsburg's orphanages present a striking exception to the horror-stories propagated by the Enlightened opponents of orphanage care. Its “Waisenbücher”, the matriculation records that document the admission, treatment and discharge of 5,734 orphans between 1572 and 1806, reveal mortality rates far lower than the average, educational and vocational training for boys and girls alike far beyond the norm and a disciplinary regime far short of an iron rule. From this perspective, the orphanages of Augsburg offer an opportunity for a series of reflections on the successes and failures of early modern poor relief, the virtues and vices of centralized institutions, and the relevance or irrelevance of the project of Enlightened child-rearing. (Show less)

This paper discusses the labor of Seville's orphanage wards during the "long eighteenth century." It stresses the close relationship between education and work as preparation for respectable adulthood and the diversity of young people's labor under orphanage auspices. The
diversity of wards' labor reflects not only gender differences but also the pronounced socioeconomic hierarchy that characterized the city's network of orphanages. Within the populations of specific institutions,
perceived talent also could have a strong effect on a young person's training and labor, especially at male institutions.
The paper focuses on the experiences of wards at the city's six principal orphanages during this period, including municipal male and
female orphanages, convent-based homes for girls, a maritime orphanage under whose auspices resident boys staffed ships in Spain's
trans-Atlantic and Mediterranean fleets, and an institution that functioned as both a home for waifs and a reformatory for wayward boys.
The research is based principally on archival materials from these orphanages in Seville. (Show less)