Christopher Turner's piece Inventory/The Tokens introduces the objects found at the Foundling Museum, relics from the days in which the London hospital was used as the drop-off site for unwanted babies. The hospital gave women a safe place to shed their unwanted "baggage," however the pretense of "do-gooding" is questionable: by 1756, more than a decade after the hospital's opening, two-thirds of the 1,500 children admitted had died. One thing that really struck me was how in this process, the babies themselves were objectified and consequently made inhuman and commercial. Once the hospital changed practices after accusations of encouraging "vice and illegitimacy," they instituted a new rule that "if any peculiar marks are left with the child great care will be taken for their preservation." Besides the blatant arbitrariness of the notion that those infants given a "token" deserve greater care, it absolutely shocked me how some women felt comfortable leaving not just one important part of themselves but also another - may it be a medal, necklace, brooch, or the like - in the hands of strangers.
The exchange of babies and tokens thus became a transaction of goods, however not one devoid of emotion. As Turner writes, "These trinkets are transitional objects - severed umbilical cords - that embody the grief of separation" (17). The process is both intimate and distant, harmonious and dissonant. Something about the listing of the children's attire and their distinguishing features gave me chills. It seems like such a cold way to approach the process. In no way can the tangibility of an object a baby cannot even begin to comprehend (literally or figuratively) replace the missing presence of such intangibles as love, hope, and compassion.
Apparently, the mothers' tokens were put on display in order to attract more charitable donors to the hospital. Even today some of the objects remain on display behind their glass vitrines: "a hazelnut; a coin with five holes; a brass cross; a crushed thimble; an ivory gambling token in the form of a fish; a penknife handle...a tiny ring, with a heart-shaped stone, is inscribed, "qui me neglige me perd..." (17). The range of the items is simultaneously fascinating and heartbreaking. It makes me wonder what made these objects so significant. The article states that the tokens were often used as identifiers rather than gifts, objects that could prove kinship; because of this, the women often halved their tokens in order to prove a match when reunited. But only 152 of the 16,282 children admitted between 1741 and 1760 were ever reclaimed.
I have luckily never been in a situation where I had to make a decision to keep or get rid of a child. I hope I never am. Because of this, I am reticent to judge the women who left their babies at the Foundling Hospital, never to return. I realize the difficulties of rearing a child, especially in a time when single mothers were considered whores, travesties of motherhood, outsiders. But even when I focus solely on the objects the article describes, I feel so unsettled. Everything they represent - loss, transition, love, sadness, regret, anticipation - overwhelms me. As I said above, maybe it's the way they, to an extent, dehumanize the recipient. Or maybe it's the perfect and absolute fracturing of an entity. Although the dictionary offers many definitions for a token, one states, "a small part representing a whole." The women, pulling away from their center, scattered babies and tokens. Though the process may have been unconscious or gone unacknowledged, in doing so, these women broke not only themselves but also those extensions of their beings, simultaneously losing and finding who and what they were and would come to be.
Fabric scraps as a token for orphans
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