Foundling Museum.(Report from Europe)(The Foundling Hospital)

In early eighteenth-century London, about a thousand babies a year were abandoned. In 1739 the Foundling Hospital was founded by the entrepreneur and philanthropist Captain Thomas Coram (who made his fortune by establishing trading posts in the American colonies). The governing body of the hospital was known as the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children. Its royal charter, granted by George II, described the purpose of the organization as being "for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children." The composer George Frideric Handel and the artist William Hogarth were subsequently named founding governors of the hospital.

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Since its inception, the hospital has cared for some twenty-seven thousand children, who were fed, housed, clothed, and educated until the age of fourteen. The organization then remained responsible for them until they were twenty-one. By involving a musician and a painter, the children's intellectual development was also looked after. The foundation was dissolved in 1953 and replaced by an institution now known as the Coram Family, which is concerned with the care of vulnerable children and their families.

Hogarth became involved with the Foundling Hospital partly for altruistic reasons and partly because at ...