Bess’s moment of passion has an almost inevitable consequence, and in the dingy rooms she rents with her father and brother, she gives birth to a healthy baby girl. In my opinion, the British shrimp is fiddly to prepare but spectacularly more tasty than its larger cousin.īess has, to put it politely, ‘an encounter’ in a dingy back street, with an attractive young merchant who deals in whalebone – the staple component of 18 th century corsets and also a carvable alternative to the more expensive tusks of elephants. For American readers it is worth explaining that British shrimps are tiny crustaceans, not ‘shrimp’, the larger creature we call ‘prawns’. Her father gets up at the crack of dawn to buy Essex shrimps from Billingsgate Market, and Bess puts the seafood in the brim of a broad hat and, clutching a tiny tankard to measure them out, she walks the streets of 1750s London selling her wares.

London had its Foundling Hospital, and it is the centre of The Foundling, the new novel by Stacey Halls.īess Bright is a Shrimp Girl. Back in time, Paris had its Maison de la Couche pour les Enfants Trouvé s while in Florence the Ospedale degli Innocenti is one of the gems of early Renaissance architecture. Abandoning babies is not something consigned to history: modern Germany has its Babyklappe, and Russia its Колыбель надежды – literally hatches – rather like an old fashioned bank deposit box – built into buildings where babies can be left. Thankfully, there have been charitable institutions over the centuries which have done their best to provide some kind of home for foundlings. The fact is, however, that since Adam had his way with Eve, biology has trumped human intention, and babies have come into the world unloved and unwanted.

Eing a middle class British father and grandfather, the concept of abandoning a newly born baby is totally beyond my experience of life and (the fault is perhaps mine) my comprehension.

Stacey halls the foundling