Coram Boy [antikvár]

Foreword It was a passing remark which triggered the story - as is so often the way with writers. A friend murmured something about 'the Coram man' in the eighteenth century: someone who collected abandoned children, ostensibly to deliver them to the newly founded Coram Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Children. But the Hospital had never employed such a man, and any so-called Coram man was acting on his own, and most likely in his own interests without any regard for either the abandoned children, or the miserable women who had entrusted their pathetic offspring into his safe-keeping. Indeed, the highways and by-ways of England were littered with the bones of little children. Children in the eighteenth century were routinely brutalised, whether it was at home or at Eton College, whether it was in the parish orphanages, which were no more than dying houses, or in the cathedral choir schools. It was often entirely a matter of luck if a child was kindly and lovingly reared, and it was to redress this that Captain Thomas Coram opened his hospital in 1741. It was people like him who gradually changed the whole perception of child care and who touched the conscience of the nation. When I heard this, it was as if my brain became a stage. The story seemed to have been there all along, and my