TY - BOOK ID - 77871469 TI - Abandoned : foundlings in nineteenth-century New York City PY - 2008 SN - 081476441X 0814795692 9780814795699 9780814764411 9780814757253 0814757251 9780814757260 081475726X PB - New York : New York University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Abandoned children KW - Children, Abandoned KW - Exposed children KW - Homeless children KW - History KW - abandoned. KW - asylums. KW - children. KW - foundlings. KW - heartbreaking. KW - interacted. KW - lived. KW - people. KW - story. KW - them. KW - they. KW - true. KW - urban. KW - with. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77871469 AB - Two interesting items:. The author's article in New York Archives. A letter regarding foundlings in The Riverdale Press. In the nineteenth century, foundlings-children abandoned by their desperately poor, typically unmarried mothers, usually shortly after birth-were commonplace in European society. There were asylums in every major city to house abandoned babies, and writers made them the heroes of their fiction, most notably Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist . In American cities before the Civil War the situation was different, with foundlings relegated to the poorhouse instead of institutions d ER -