crooked house

Foundlings and Their Identifying Tokens

The Guardian has an absolutely heartrending and fascinating article about the scraps of material left with abandoned babies at London's Foundling Hospital:

In the mid-18th century thousands of poor women, similarly at the end of their tethers, deposited their newborn babies at the hospital. A sign instructed them to leave some kind of identifying token pinned to the child in the event they were one day in a position to take it home. Neither the name of the mother nor the baby would be recorded, so this token needed to be memorable and distinctive.

The hospital's thinking was not as punitive as it sounds. To give the child the best shot at a new life, the governors thought it best to erase its old identity. In that single liminal moment, one history would be wiped out and another begun – a new name, some basic schooling and, in time, apprenticeship to a useful trade. Just in case the mother's circumstances changed, though, she was advised to leave some piece of material evidence to prove the child was hers. The hospital promised that "great care will be taken for the preservation" of the item. In years to come the mother's description of that token would be her only way of proving she was the mother of the baby she had given up all those years ago.

Via Light Reading. These scraps of material are currently on display at the Foundling Museum in London, which I'd never heard of until now. I'd like to visit.

Beckett for Babies

Stimulate your infant’s intellectual development with Beckett for Babies, an introduction to some of the most important – and most difficult – literature of the twentieth century. If it is never too early to read to your baby, it is never too early to prepare her for graduate school.

Back before Luke was born, I was shopping around this board book featuring photographs of perplexed babies juxtaposed with quotes from the works of Samuel Beckett. There were no takers. (That's my little brother Den up there. Hi Den! Den has a lot more hair now.)

Beckett's work is bleak yet comic, much like parenting; on the whole it attempts to sort out such knotty problems as "the absurdity of existence" and "the mystery of the self." These are, of course, precisely the problems that infants and toddlers (not to mention their parents) struggle with on a daily basis. Beckett was deeply influenced by a strained relationship with his own mother who, early on in his literary career, enthusiastically encouraged him to get a "real" job.

I don't have a "real" job, either.

In an even more startling coincidence, I was born in 1969, the year Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

So was my old high school friend, Todd Durling. He put together these mock-ups for me.  That's him as a baby right up there, looking a little disappointed.

While Beckett didn’t even bother to show up to collect his prize – he sent his secretary instead – Todd and I made a point of attending our own births, because we knew how important it would be to our parents to have us there at such a major event in their lives.