"Even the most crudely sewn initials seem to have conveyed a special kind of intimacy, sustaining the child’s individual bond with its mother." - John Styles, guest curator of Threads of Feeling, coming to the DeWitt Wallace Museum May 25.
Read more about this evocative exhibit - on loan from The Foundling Museum - in The New York Times.
Impoverished women in 18th-century Britain who dropped off babies at orphanages often left textiles and trinkets tucked amid the swaddling. The mothers hoped that the talismans would enable them to identify and reclaim their children in better times. Thousands of the fabric squares and charms survive in archives, and for recent exhibitions, the Foundling Museum in London has been reuniting them with birth names and family genealogies.
Foundling Museum, London - An 18th-century copper token left with an abandoned baby.
Read more about this evocative exhibit - on loan from The Foundling Museum - in The New York Times.
Impoverished women in 18th-century Britain who dropped off babies at orphanages often left textiles and trinkets tucked amid the swaddling. The mothers hoped that the talismans would enable them to identify and reclaim their children in better times. Thousands of the fabric squares and charms survive in archives, and for recent exhibitions, the Foundling Museum in London has been reuniting them with birth names and family genealogies.
Foundling Museum, London - An 18th-century copper token left with an abandoned baby.
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