Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-century EnglandIn this compelling interdisciplinary study of what has been called the "century of illegitimacy," Lisa Zunshine seeks to uncover the multiplicity of cultural meanings of illegitimacy in the English Enlightenment. Bastards and Foundlings pits the official legal views on illegitimacy against the actual everyday practices that frequently circumvented the law; it reconstructs the history of social institutions called upon to regulate illegitimacy, such as the London Foundling Hospital; and it examines a wide array of novels and plays written in response to the same concerns that informed the emergence and functioning of such institutions. By recreating the context of the national preoccupation with bastardy, with a special emphasis on the gender of the fictional bastard/foundling, Zunshine offers new readings of "canonical" texts, such as Steele's The Conscious Lovers, Defoe's Moll Flanders, Fielding's Tom Jones, Moore's The Foundling, Colman's The English Merchant, Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Evelina, Smith's Emmeline, Edgewort's Belinda, and Austen's Emma, as well as of less well-known works, such as Haywood's The Fortunate Foundlings, Shebbeare's The Marriage Act, Bennett's The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors, and Robinson's The Natural Daughter. |
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abandoned argued aristocratic bastard bastard children Beggar Girl Belford Belmont Belton's birth Burney's Cambridge century characters charity Charlotte Child Murder Clarissa comedy Conscious Lovers context Coram critical cultural Daniel Defoe daugh Defoe Defoe's discussion Doody early modern edited eighteenth eighteenth-century fiction eighteenth-century foundling Emma Emma's Emmeline Evelina Fanny fate father female bastards fictional foundlings Fidelia Fielding's Foundling Museum foundling narrative Frances Burney gender Harriet Henry Fielding heroine History Hospital’s House of Orphans Humphry Clinker Ibid illegitimacy illegitimate children Indiana infant infanticide infanticide prevention campaign inheritance innocent Jane Austen John Jones Lady legitimate literary London Foundling Hospital Lovelace Lovelace's marriage married McClure middle-class Moll Flanders Moll's Moore moral nurses observes Oxford parents play plot political protagonist readers real-life rhetoric Richard Samuel Richardson Savage sexual Sir Charles Grandison Smollett social Steele Steele's story Terence's tion Tom Jones tradition University Press virtue woman women writing young