Threads of feeling

One winter's day in 1767 a shabby woman called Sarah Bender made her way to the London Foundling Hospital, an impressive building in the semi-rural suburb of Bloomsbury. Under her arm was tucked her baby boy, Charles. She had come to the painful conclusion that little Charles would be better off in the Foundling Hospital than at home with her. She had probably heard good things about the institution: it was run on "enlightened" lines, the people were said to be kind. She was certain this would be a temporary arrangement. One day, she wasn't sure when or how, she was determined to return and claim her darling boy.

In the mid-18th century thousands of poor women, similarly at the end of their tethers, deposited their newborn babies at the hospital. A sign instructed them to leave some kind of identifying token pinned to the child in the event they were one day in a position to take it home. Neither the name of the mother nor the baby would be recorded, so this token needed to be memorable and distinctive.

The hospital's thinking was not as punitive as it sounds. To give the child the best shot at a new life, the governors thought it best to erase its old identity. In that single liminal moment, one history would be wiped out and another begun – a new name, some basic schooling and, in time, apprenticeship to a useful trade. Just in case the mother's circumstances changed, though, she was advised to leave some piece of material evidence to prove the child was hers. The hospital promised that "great care will be taken for the preservation" of the item. In years to come the mother's description of that token would be her only way of proving she was the mother of the baby she had given up all those years ago.

The hospital had been opened in 1739 by a group of charitably minded professional men and grandees appalled at the numbers of "exposed and deserted young children" abandoned on London's filthy streets. Money was raised by subscription and the Foundlings of Bloomsbury soon became a fashionable cause. Admission policy varied over time – at one point the hospital took only 200 babies a year, at another 4,000 – but from 1741 to 1760 16,282 babies entered the institution anonymously.

The vast majority of mothers failed to heed the instruction to leave an identifying token, perhaps because they were too beaten down by rotten lives to imagine a time when they would be able to provide a warm, clean home for their baby. All the same, 5,000 of the infants deposited came with some kind of token attached. And by some lucky chance these tokens, mostly comprising bits of fabric carefully pinned to the baby's admission billet, have survived. Over the past few decades they have been stored not at the museum itself but at London Metropolitan Archives where they have tended to languish, overlooked. Now, these slivers of everyday Georgian life are making a triumphant return to their original home where they will form the basis of the museum's new exhibition, Threads of Feeling.

The exhibition's curator, Professor John Styles of Hertfordshire University, is emphatic about the significance of these 5,000 scraps of fabric, mundane and beautiful, lumpy and sheer. They comprise, he explains, nothing less than the biggest archive of 18th-century materials surviving in Britain, probably in the world. Historians who have tried to investigate the dress of the common people in the Georgian period – including Styles himself – have always fallen into a black hole where the evidence ought to be. The clothing of elite groups – fashionable merchants' wives, duchesses with an eye for style – have survived in countless stately homes and museums. You can feast your eyes on silk and velvet, on silver buckles and pearl buttons, but you will search in vain for evidence of what ordinary working people wore to keep themselves dry and more-or-less warm.

There are hints, of course, in paintings and cartoons, including those drawn by Hogarth (who was a governor of the hospital), but it is impossible to know whether these are strictly accurate. The prostitutes and fishwives who tumble through the satirist's street scenes may well be based on close observation, but they are also exaggerations and fantasies, caricatures held up for the viewer's pity, mirth and scorn. It is the Foundling tokens, snipped from either the mother's or baby's garments, that provide our only solid evidence of what ordinary clothing looked and felt like.

To examine these samples is to enter a world of dizzying names and textures. Some are familiar – calico, flannel, gingham and satin – although the relationship between the 18th-century fabric and its modern equivalent often turns out to be stretched pretty thin. Other textiles boast names utterly mysterious to us, opening up a lost world of camblet and fustian, susy and cherryderry, calimanco and linsey-woolsey. What stands out is the high proportion – almost a third – of printed cottons and linens among the Foundling collection.

From the 1740s and 1750s British manufacturers had begun to produce moderately priced fabrics stamped with the flower and bird patterns beloved of the fashionable classes. While ladies of leisure had the real thing – silk from Lyon or Spitalfields carefully worked with elegant motifs – working-class girls could achieve something approaching the same effect with a piece of stamped cotton. The big benefit here, apart from cost, was practicality: unlike finicky silks, these cottons could be washed without any danger of the dye running. What's more, the light background (so different from the dark camblets, calimanco and stuff that working women had been obliged to wear earlier in the century) resembled that of a bright silk frock. No one would mistake a dress of printed cotton for its fancy counterpart, but wearing one of these garments meant you were in the game, able to engage with the visual and material culture that was exploding all around.

This last point is important to historians because it suggests the working classes who experienced industrialisation (in 1764 Hargreaves would invent the spinning jenny to be followed later by Arkwright's spinning frame) were not shut out from its benefits and pleasures. In the 1960s and 70s social historians tended to assume that labouring men and women in the mid-18th century were the passive victims of Britain's shift to a consumer-driven economy. Their only contact with the slew of new goods pouring into the market was as labourers working for low wages. While the middle and upper classes decked themselves and their homes in a riot of fancy new goods, the ordinary people were left to trudge along in gloomy black and white.

But the evidence from the Foundling Museum suggests something quite different. The tokens deposited there demonstrate that even women at the very bottom of the pile – obliged to give up their babies because of poverty, illness and family breakdown – were able to participate in the new economy of pretty things. Their dress may not have been a new one, but they had managed to acquire something that pleased the eye and soothed the touch. They had, perhaps, been able to express a preference for spots over stripes or wondered whether blue was more flattering than green. The tokens left behind at the hospital show a remarkable variety of design. Indeed, reports Styles, it is rare for the same pattern to recur among the hundreds of different prints. Even poor women, it seems, were able to pick and choose.

Another third of the Foundling textiles consists of ribbons. Mostly made from silk, ribbons were a cheap and cheerful way for a young woman to add a touch of glamour to the most stubbornly workaday of frocks. Manufactured in a seemingly infinite variety of patterns, they were also the perfect identifiers for the Foundling babies. Ribbons were also a symbol of romantic courtship, especially in their role as fairings, the gifts exchanged between lovers at fairs and holidays. But romance and courtship did not always lead to the altar. A stock character in 18th-century ballads was the young woman courted at the fair with tokens of love and promises of marriage who becomes pregnant only to be deserted by her lover. It must have been a common enough experience among those mothers who left their illegitimate babies – about two-thirds of the total – at the hospital.

What is clear, then, is that a substantial minority of Foundling mothers were desperate to leave clues as to their baby's identity. Although they were forbidden from giving a name, many found ways of smuggling the information past the admitting clerk. One, for instance, inked in the words "my name is Andrews" on a piece of ribbon. Others stitched initials so shaky that it becomes impossible to work out quite what they were trying to convey. Others stuck to the rules but came up with strategies to ensure no one would ever mistake their baby for someone else's. One cut her child's shirt in two, retaining one half. Another deposited one sleeve with her baby and kept the other.

Other mothers, meanwhile, employed a language of colour and symbol to express their complicated feelings about what they were doing when they handed over their child. They tracked down fabric printed with images of buds, flowers, acorns, birds and butterflies and carefully snipped out the one that spoke to them most. A bud suggested a potentially beautiful life still to come, an acorn hinted at a future harvest. Birds and butterflies implied the baby was being deposited at the hospital as a way of enabling it to fly free from its present grim circumstances. And then there were the heart motifs, which come in every form imaginable. Mothers left hearts drawn on paper, metal hearts, embroidered hearts, hearts cut out in fabric.

Many of the babies who were deposited at the hospital were loved very much indeed. Of course, there were exceptions: a boy admitted in 1757 was described as "Clothed with Rags Swarming with Varmen". Another was "A Mear Skilinton Covered with Rags with a hole in the Roofe of the Mouth". But the received notion that the women who abandoned their children at the hospital were prostitutes wanting to get rid of the inconvenient by-product of their trade simply will not do. These mothers faced pressures that are strikingly familiar: unemployment, ill-health, bereavement, separation. Giving up a child was a last, desperate act and one that, in many cases, a woman was hopeful could be reversed when better times returned.

Whether the mothers' fierce hope that their babies would be better off at the hospital was justified is hard to say. Two-thirds of the foundlings died, which sounds shocking until you remember that nearly half the children born in London at the time would perish in infancy. Certainly it looks as though the hospital administrators realised the damage a toxic city environment could have on small and vulnerable constitutions. Within a few days of being received the children were shipped out to the country, where they were suckled by wet nurses. If they managed to survive for six years, they returned to Bloomsbury for some solid if rudimentary schooling. From there the boys were apprenticed in a variety of trades and the girls prepared for a life in service. The hospital took its duties as quasi-parent seriously. Any whiff of exploitation and the children were recalled. One female employer who savagely mistreated her foundling apprentice was prosecuted and hanged.

The mothers may have been over-optimistic, too, in their belief that one day they would be in a position to reclaim their baby. Out of the 16,282 infants admitted between 1741 and 1760, only 152 were ever called for. Some women, though, clearly had the drive and determination to execute their plan come what may. One of the most extraordinary pieces of fabric in the exhibition belongs to Sarah Bender. Attached to her baby was a piece of elaborate patchwork, made up of bits of printed fabric, on which she had embroidered a heart in red thread. She retained the matching piece. Eight years passed, during which time the child, renamed Benjamin Twirl, was presumably farmed out to the country, and made stout and ruddy enough to eventually be brought back to the city.

Then, one day nearly a decade after she had first trudged out to Bloomsbury, Sarah Bender banged on the door of the Foundling Hospital and presented her piece of patchwork. Something in her circumstances must have changed. Charles/Benjamin would be coming home. This was one heart that had been mended.

Threads of Feeling is at the Foundling Museum, London WC1, from 14 October to 6 March 2011. www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk