Bastards and foundlings: Infanticide, illegitimacy, and gender in eighteenth-century British literature

My dissertation offers a new perspective on the insistence with which eighteenth-century writers, such as Defoe, Steele, Richardson, Fielding, Moore, Smollett, Burney, and Edgeworth, turned to the image of the abandoned child. Whereas many scholars have analyzed this image as merely a trope drawn from classical romance, I contend that depictions of foundlings in eighteenth-century literature should be correlated with contemporary concerns about the social, political, and economic repercussions of illegitimacy. Particularly, I demonstrate how the cultural differentiation between “foundlings” (born within lawful if ill-starred wedlock) and “bastards” (born to unmarried women) was appropriated now to justify the socioeconomic disenfranchisement of illegitimate children, now to radically question such disenfranchisement as fundamentally incompatible with the progressive outlook of the British Enlightenment.; Chapter one shows how the bastard-foundling binary played itself out in the history of the infanticide-prevention campaign in eighteenth-century England. I argue that the champions of the London Foundling Hospital adopted the imagery associated with the benign, legally born foundling to portray their institution (designed, after all, to take care of bastards) as the means of an enlightened containment of otherwise unruly sexual and social forces. I also demonstrate how the appropriation of this imagery might have influenced the estrangement of upper- and middle-class women from the Hospital in the 1750s. Chapters two and three discuss the development of the gender-based demarcation between docile and chaste foundlings (e.g., Indiana, Fidelia, Evelina, Virginia) and adventurous and often promiscuous bastards (e.g. Richard Savage, Tom Jones, Humphry Clinker) in works of fiction. The fourth chapter explores a striking exception from the eighteenth-century “virtuous-female-foundling-vs.-promiscuous-male-bastard” rule—Defoe's Moll Flanders. It shows that Moll—the “unnatural” foundling—embodied the tension implicit in the cultural bastard-foundling division and suggests that because Defoe had radically challenged the cultural notion of a “virtuous” female foundling, his novel could not aspire to the ranks of “polite” literature even though his treatment of the figure of the abandoned child seemed to respond to the desire to comprehend and make intelligible on the personal level the momentous political and economic transformations of contemporary British society.