The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  The governors did allow one exception to their unremittingly practical curriculum: the instruction of reading and writing when required, enough to prepare the foundlings to be good Christians, able to read and quote the Bible. At some point instruction was added to the curriculum allowing for reading and writing beyond the Bible—perhaps because these skills would make the foundlings more useful to their masters. As I read up on the hospital’s history, I saw no reason to intuit any shift in the governors’ worldview in these developments—their focus remained that of preparing the children for a life of service, an endgame that hadn’t changed in the almost two hundred years between the institution’s founding and my mother’s tenure there.

  So my mother learned to sew with exacting precision, first practicing her stitches on raw mushrooms, then making clothes for foster children and mending foundlings’ uniforms so they could be worn over and over again. Her fingers would ache as she practiced straight, neat stitches, and soon became callused from so much time spent darning socks and hemming clothes. Another task was scrubbing and shining the hospital’s long hallways, which the girls would make a game of, one girl wrapping herself up in a blanket while the others pulled her around until the floors shone brightly enough that they could avoid punishment.

  My mother was given no homework or exams, and never received a school certificate or diploma. Critical thinking and independent thought were discouraged, and even practical skills—how to buy a bus ticket or make change—were neglected. Many children would leave the Foundling Hospital having never touched money at all.

  There was one exception. Foundlings were taught to carefully pen their ABC’s, a cane waiting for those who were not up for the task. Hours were spent training the young children to write with precision. It was widely reported by former foundlings, this emphasis on handwriting; but in all my research, I never discovered why it was so prized. Perhaps, I surmised, a lady’s maid might be required to write a letter on behalf of her mistress, or create name cards that would be placed on dinner tables at society parties.

  My mother’s handwriting brought her praise in her adult life, strangers often commenting on it when she signed her name or filled out forms. Our home was filled with placards, always in her precise, masterful calligraphy, with instructions on how to adjust the thermostat, fill the birdfeeder, or find the spare key. And each year the inside of our family’s annual Christmas card contained a season’s greeting penned in her own hand. Somewhere along the way she’d learned to draw, too. One year the card was imprinted with an intricate pear tree complete with a partridge, done in black ink and created with one continuous stroke of her pen.

  My mother’s talents seemed endless to me. She could play the piano, and wield a paintbrush as skillfully as she could a calligraphy pen. She accompanied me effortlessly as I played concertos by Vivaldi or Handel. A still life she’d painted hung in our dining room, just a simple bowl of fruit, but I would always marvel at how she’d captured the smooth texture of an apple, the way the light reflected off its speckled reddish skin.

  As I sifted through the stacks of books and records in my office, I wondered, more than once, how a foundling raised to scrub floors and darn socks learned to play the piano, and to create art that fit in seamlessly with the expensive tapestries and paintings that hung on our walls. I would find only some of the answers as I plunged into the Foundling Hospital’s history.

  FOR TWO CENTURIES, thousands of children like Dorothy Soames were raised to mend socks and clean chamber pots, to work in factories or be sent to sea. Music, art, and literature were luxuries reserved for the wealthy. But oddly, not long after opening its doors, the Foundling Hospital would become an epicenter for England’s greatest painters, writers, and composers.

  While the hospital was founded with the blessing of a king and a royal charter, it had been met with an insatiable demand from the very day of its opening, and funds were needed, desperately. Enter artist William Hogarth, who had become a member of the hospital’s board of governors in the years after he painted A Rake’s Progress. In 1746 he devised a plan to ease the hospital’s financial problems and advance a pet project of his own: proving to the world that England’s artists could compete on the world stage. At the time there was no academy in which artists could display their craft, and the halls of the Foundling Hospital seemed an ideal location. Members of the public would come inside, stroll through the halls, view the paintings and sculptures, and perhaps be more likely to offer financial support to the hospital, and artists would get a venue to show off their skills.

  Soon the walls of the institution were adorned with dozens of works created by London’s most sought-after painters: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Allan Ramsay, Richard Wilson, and Francis Hayman. John Michael Rysbrack, hailed as one of the most important sculptors of the time, donated a marble relief depicting the allegorical figure of Charity carrying a child. In an unexpected turn of events, the Foundling Hospital became the first public art gallery in England, and London’s elite flocked to view the work.

  In the wake of this success, a committee of artists was established. Meeting at the Foundling Hospital each year on Guy Fawkes Day, they dined on fine foods while laying the groundwork for larger exhibitions. Their ambitions would eventually culminate in the creation of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where the work of nearly every significant artist in Britain would be displayed throughout the 1800s. The school and museum still stand today on Piccadilly.

  The foundlings saw little of the majestic art hanging in the governors’ halls. A few paintings were placed in the children’s dining area, likely for the benefit of the benefactors who occasionally came by for visits. Mostly the children were confined to colorless dormitories and classrooms with simple furnishings and plain walls. Nor, at least during the early years, were they invited to share in the musical performances that followed the display of paintings and drawings at the Foundling Hospital.

  In 1749 the German-born composer George Frideric Handel joined the ranks of the leading artists associated with the cause, premiering his Foundling Hospital Anthem in the hospital’s chapel, at an event attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales. To conclude the Anthem, the composer borrowed from his own work, pilfering a chorus from another majestic oratorio—Handel’s Messiah.

  Handel had performed Messiah several times, in Dublin in 1742 and on five occasions in London between 1743 and 1745, but the piece had failed to achieve widespread acclaim. On May 1, 1750, he offered another performance of the oratorio to benefit the Foundling Hospital. This time, it was such a success that a second concert was arranged a fortnight later. After that, attending performances became an annual tradition for London’s upper class, raising significant funds for the hospital while securing the financial and historical success of the oratorio. Indeed, without the Foundling Hospital, Handel’s Messiah may have been relegated to obscurity instead of becoming acknowledged as the enduring Baroque masterpiece it is today.

  Over time, the hospital’s governors grew eager to stake a claim to the success of Messiah, eventually submitting a petition asking Parliament to vest the property rights of the oratorio to the institution upon Handel’s death. Though the composer declined to approve the scheme, he continued to attend rehearsals and performances of Messiah in honor of the hospital even after becoming virtually blind.

  Handel’s most famous work may have been the last piece of music he heard. In April of 1759, he collapsed during a rehearsal of the piece for a benefit concert that was to be held at the Foundling Hospital, and died a week later. The Foundling Hospital held a memorial concert for him (with an admission fee of half a guinea), anticipating such a large attendance that gentlemen were asked to come without swords and ladies without hoops under their skirts.

  While Handel had refused to relinquish the rights to Messiah during his lifetime, he did honor the Foundling Hospital’s role in popularizing the oratorio by gifting a pipe organ to accompany the children as they sang
in the chapel. His legacy at the institution was tended to by a blind organist named John Stanley who continued to conduct annual performances of Messiah. Despite the widely held view that poor children should not be taught to sing or play instruments, Stanley urged the governors to provide musical instruction to the foundlings, and he succeeded. Going forward, the foundlings would be trained to sing and would perform in the chapel on Sundays. As London clamored to hear their sweet voices, the governors realized that the performances might “be of great use to this Charity by adding to the Fund for the support thereof.”18

  While further cementing its reputation as a cultural center for the enjoyment of society’s elite, the Foundling Hospital would allow the children to experience the joy of music and song. Yet reminders of the hospital’s true purpose were never far away. The hymns chosen for the foundlings to sing were focused on their plight, with lyrics that hammered home the disgrace of illegitimacy:

  Wash off my foul offence,

  And cleanse me from my Sin;

  For I Confess my crime, and see

  How great my Guilt has been.

  In Guilt each part was form’d

  Of all this sinful frame;

  In Guilt I was conceiv’d and born

  The Heir of Sin and Shame.19

  Londoners cared little about the children’s shame as they gathered to hear the young voices, filling the pews and coffers of the Foundling Hospital. But what must the children have thought, practicing and performing hymns that might have provided a respite from their harsh existence but were accompanied by stern reminders of their disgrace?

  Like the children in that early choir, Dorothy Soames too had been taught to sing at the Foundling Hospital. Perhaps those memories made it too painful for my mother to raise her voice in song as an adult. Despite her musical inclinations, I can’t conjure even one memory of my mother actually singing—no lullabies drifting me off to sleep, no sing-alongs to the radio in the car. But I do remember Handel’s Messiah ringing out on our living room record player. Each Christmas its chorus would echo through the hallways of our home. Was my mother thinking of the Foundling Hospital when the glorious harmony of its hallelujahs wafted into the kitchen, mingling with the aroma of roasted turkey and her freshly baked bread? After dinner she would sit quietly on the living room couch, her hands folded, eyes closed, unfazed by the occasional skipping of the needle on the well-worn vinyl.

  Maybe one day I’ll find out how my mother learned to play the piano, an act that seems now like a rebellion against the men who stood in judgment of her beginnings, believing her to be unworthy of music and of art.

  I did manage to find out, however, why she loved to read.

  Our house was filled with books, stacks everywhere, with a dedicated library that my mother stocked with a full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, dictionaries, novels, and children’s books. On the weekends my father sat at the round table in the middle of our library, reading briefs or preparing for his next trial. I would lie on the hardwood floor nearby, thumbing through an atlas or reading a book that I had taken from the shelf. Once I had read them all, we took weekly trips to the local library. The librarians knew me by name, greeting me with smiles as I asked for recommendations. I would stack the books on my bedside table, and at night, when it was time to turn out the lights, my mother would whisper to me as she tucked me in that I could stay up all night reading if I wanted to. I often did.

  When I was young, before the bitter arguments, the slammed doors, and raised voices, she would read to me herself. These were some of the few times I can remember my mother touching me. I would climb under the covers of her bed and snuggle close to her warm body as she held a book in front of us. She always chose a classic—my favorite was Little Women, but we also read Dickens. As she read aloud from David Copperfield, she betrayed no hint of her connection with its author. I’m not sure she knew of it herself. It’s unlikely that she read Dickens as a child, but I know that she had encountered his name every day, when she and the other children filed into the dining hall and took their place at long tables according to assigned teams, each with a corresponding color: Hogarth (green), Dickens (yellow), Coram (red), and Dorothy’s team, Handel (blue).

  She must have wondered who these men were, why each held such a revered status in the Foundling Hospital’s history. Perhaps she never knew that her life, and more aptly, the lives of the foundlings who’d come before her, had inspired the author to pen some of the stories that would bring him his greatest and most enduring fame.

  In the 1840s Charles Dickens lived just around the corner from the Foundling Hospital, and he took an interest in the institution soon after his arrival in the neighborhood, renting a pew at the hospital’s chapel so he could hear the foundlings sing, or wandering the grounds and watching the children go about their daily chores. Dickens was evidently inspired by what he saw there, making unmarried mothers and children raised without parents frequent themes in his works, most notably in Oliver Twist. Other works featured the Foundling Hospital more prominently. Little Dorrit includes a character who grows up there and is named Tattycoram in homage to the hospital’s founder, Thomas Coram; in No Thoroughfare, two foundlings are given the same name, with disastrous consequences.

  I added a copy of Oliver Twist to the pile of books on my desk. I was familiar with the story as a child, but at the time, I hadn’t known of the author’s connection with my mother’s past. Like “Dorothy Soames,” the main character’s name hadn’t been carefully chosen by loving parents, but was instead foisted upon the child by an uncaring stranger; in this case, Mr. Bumble, a fat, choleric man who was head of the institution where poor Oliver Twist found himself. Mr. Bumble notably boasts that his foundlings were named in alphabetical order:

  The last was an S,—Swubble, I named him. This was a T,—Twist, I named him. The next one comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come to Z.20

  Was that how my mother had been named—the letters a stroke of fate based on the order in which she had been received?

  My own name had been chosen carefully, or so I had been told.

  “You were named after the emperor Justinian,” my mother had explained. “Your name stands for justice and law.” She took great pride in the fact that I had gone on to become an attorney, frequently reminding me of the aptness of my name.

  “What about my middle name?” I’d asked. “Why did you choose that?”

  My mother hesitated before responding. “It means Is-A-Belle,” she said. “‘Belle’ is French for pretty, like you.” At the time her words rang hollow, uncomfortably colliding with a lifetime’s worth of criticism of my appearance. Decades would pass before the true reason behind her choice would be revealed.

  As I finished reading Oliver Twist, I was struck by the hopefulness of its ending. Dickens’s works are filled with stories of fallen women in tragic circumstances, and Oliver Twist is no exception. Oliver’s mother is unmarried, her lover dead. Nancy is a member of Fagin’s gang, and her noble acts of goodness only underscore the tragedy of her short, vice-filled life. Even the innocent and transcendent Rose, Oliver’s aunt, has a mysterious past, a “stain” upon her name which she vows to “carry . . . into no blood but [her] own.”21 But Dickens provided a happy conclusion for the titular hero, at least, in having Oliver adopted by the kindly Mr. Brownlow.

  While Dickens received inspiration for his most famous character from the children raised at the Foundling Hospital, it is unlikely that the hospital’s charges were given enough instruction to read the tale of Oliver Twist, hearing the author’s name only as they ate their meager meals in a setting reminiscent of a scene from the book itself. Reading wasn’t a priority for future servants and laborers, and most teachers required only rote recitation of their charges. Even if a child was a motivated reader, there was little opportunity, as books could not be taken from the classroom.

 
For Dorothy, the gift of reading would come from unexpected sources. One was a short, matronly woman named Miss Douthie, her gray hair plaited and wound into a flat bun on each side of her head. Unlike the other teachers at the Foundling Hospital, she filled her classroom with color and activity, creating a place of learning and imagination. During the holidays, she set up a miniature village complete with Santa Claus arriving in his sleigh. Though she didn’t ask Dorothy to stay after class or give her any individual tutoring, Miss Douthie believed it was every child’s right to learn. Sometimes she would become frustrated, forming the fingers of her right hand into a claw and thumping them up and down on a child’s head, her voice rising and falling with whatever the girl was failing to comprehend, as if to push the knowledge into the little girl’s brain. The children knew instinctively that Miss Douthie’s methods were not born from anger or judgment. She didn’t care that Dorothy and the other girls were destined to change linens, cook meals, and scrub floors. She did something no other teacher did, taking the time to actually teach her students, correcting them, and prodding them to get every word right as they read aloud.

  Dorothy had never experienced the sense that an adult cared about her success. And once she learned to read, she was hungry for more. Maybe Miss Douthie would have allowed my mother to take a book from the classroom, but Dorothy didn’t dare ask an adult for a favor. Instead she started to steal books from the library, a light-filled space with arched French windows overlooking the playing fields, typically off-limits to the children. Three of the walls were lined with glass cabinets filled with donated books, and when no one was looking, my mother would slip into the library, hide a book in her knickers or under an apron, then sneak it back to the dormitory to tuck it under her mattress. If she’d been discovered, she would have been beaten and branded a thief, but the risk was worthwhile, and she managed to steal moments here and there, reading pages that filled her with wonder and provided a glimpse into a life outside of her sequestered world.