The Fallen Woman is the latest temporary exhibition held at the Foundling Museum, which was built on the site of the eighteenth-century Foundling Hospital.  Founded in 1741, the hospital has long attracted interest from eighteenth-century researchers examining topics such as philanthropy or the survival strategies employed by poor urban women. The museum has an excellent, although small, permanent exhibition about the hospital’s foundation and use right up until the mid-twentieth century, including a poignant display of the eighteenth-century tokens left by mothers to identify their children. This temporary exhibition focuses on the nineteenth-century trope of the ‘fallen woman’, an arguably more restrictive and moralising categorisation of unmarried motherhood that provides an interesting contrast to the relative liberality and flexibility of eighteenth-century sexual mores.

The exhibition includes artworks by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Frederic Watts, alongside newspaper illustrations and petitions from the Foundling Hospital collections, with the aim to explore a prominent Victorian cultural motif of the respectable woman who falls into sin through illicit sexual activity. Given the Foundling Museum’s strong art collection, and curation by the art historian Professor Lynda Nead, the art focus is unsurprising. It is also powerful, especially considering that although we often know the names of the women who left their babies at the Hospital, we almost never get to see their faces. The paintings of the generic ‘fallen woman’ convey the sense that these women were ordinary and for the most part forgotten by history, replaced instead by a stereotype implemented through a predominantly male gaze. The most historically (rather than aesthetically) interesting images are those painted by Emma Brownlow, herself the daughter of a foundling, John Brownlow, who was later employed as a secretary and chronicler of the Hospital. Brownlow’s paintings are often of scenes in the Hospital, such as a woman reclaiming her child in The Foundling Restored to Its Mother (1858). Although idealised, they are more rooted in the everyday life of the Hospital than the typical images of doomed women sliding into prostitution. I felt that a more satisfying comparison could perhaps have been made between Brownlow’s female outlook and personal connection, and the more abstract, Pre-Raphaelite motifs.

The strength of the exhibition is however not the paintings (although I say this as a resolutely social historian, not an art historian – I do like a good Dante Gabriel Rossetti as much as the next person). The exhibition successfully uses a variety of media, including a mesmerising clip from the beginning of David Lean’s 1948 film Oliver Twist and a sound installation by composer Steve Lewinson that aims to interpret the voices of the unmarried mothers traced in the archive. There is also a set of stereoscopes, the fascinating Victorian equivalent of 3D glasses, where the viewer is reminded of the consequences of illicit sexual activity via a historical ‘before and after’ image. This is very much in keeping with the Foundling Museum’s commitment to contemporary art projects, and provides welcome variation.

For me, however, the most compelling pieces are the examples of the petitions and questionnaires compiled by the Hospital authorities regarding the background of the mothers. It is here that the experience and voices of these women comes to the fore, via the language of ordinary people. In one poignant example, a man providing a character reference for his ‘fallen’ daughter describes his feelings towards her pregnancy as a ‘continual cup of bitterness’ (Petition of Susannah Jane Keys, milliner, 1857). Although the museum also houses a permanent exhibition about the founding of the Hospital in 1741, you often don’t get to see enough of the individual stories of foundlings and their parents. There are thousands of petitions, receipts, tokens and other ephemera from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries kept in the London Metropolitan Archive, and this exhibition, understandably, barely scratches the surface. Included in the exhibition are seldom-seen material objects such as the spike on which admissions papers were filed, and the carefully folded petitions, tied in ribbon, of these desperate women. This is not only a poignant material reminder of individual physical suffering, but also of the hospital’s fairly rigid institutional practices which changed little from its founding in 1741. The curators have tried as far as possible to represent the human experience beneath the stereotype, admitting, for instance that ‘What is almost impossible to uncover in nineteenth-century sources is female sexual desire’. Eighteenth-century historians in particular have debated for decades about this, so to see it acknowledged in an exhibition is admirable.

The interpretation generally is minimal, instead relying on visitors to join the dots for themselves. I would have liked more on the change from the more inclusive, no-questions-asked, open door policy of the eighteenth-century Hospital, to the much more rigid policy adopted from 1801, when only illegitimate children were admitted and the mother was required to prove previous respectable conduct. This momentous change seems worthy of an exhibition all to itself, and hopefully The Fallen Woman will encourage contemplation of the changes not only in the governance of the Foundling Hospital but also its cultural presence in society across the boundaries of conventional periodisation.

The Fallen Woman exhibition is at the Foundling Museum until January 3rd 2016.