This chapter focuses on foundlings and nurses in four case-study communities: Ackworth and Hemsworth in Yorkshire, and Chertsey and Epsom in Surrey. The aim of carrying out these detailed local studies is to examine more closely the experiences of life as a foster child, and as a nurse paid by the Foundling Hospital. The data from hospital registers are linked to those from local parish registers, situating the study of abandoned children in their local context and reconstructing the family situations of their nurses. The chapter addresses the principal questions concerning the experiences of nurses and nurslings. The disparity in nurses' ages is linked to the different use made of the four communities by the hospital. The nature of the data used in the chapter allows only speculation regarding experiences, but demographic behaviour may shed light on certain socio-cultural and medical beliefs and practices.

Beatrice Annie Pace herself 'is quite removed from this new and most interesting legal development' and had not 'the slightest knowledge of the new phase of the case'. Beatrice began building a new life. She gave notice that she would quit Rose Cottage, telling The People that she 'could not possibly live here after what has happened'. The claims made by George Mountjoy and Alice Sayes were indeed sensational, describing not only a sinister, cold-blooded crime but also portraying Beatrice as a sadistic murderess who gleefully deceived police, press and public. The vague and shifting chronology of the allegations is also suspicious: Sayes referred to poisoning attempts going back, alternatively, six or three years, Mountjoy to a plot 'extending over four years'. One vital matter had been handled before Beatrice's departure: the sale of her 'life story'. There are suggestions that the issue had caused tensions.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book draws a vocabulary for the literary study of graphic textual phenomena. It describes the role of 'the typographic muse' in contemporary Scottish writing. The book demonstrates both how and why the graphic surface has been neglected and looks at perception of the graphic surface during reading and how it may be obscured by other concerns or automatised until unnoticed. It also looks at theoretical approaches to the graphic surface, particularly those which see printed text as either an idealised sign-system or a representation of spoken language. The book examines some critical assumptions about the transformation of manuscript to novel and what our familiarity with the printed form of the book leads us to take for granted.

The 1926 General Strike provided a special opportunity for the Bright Young People (BYP) to reinvent Britishness in their own image, particularly that of the quintessential English gentleman amateur and, to a lesser degree, the charitable, gracious English lady. For young people who considered themselves deprived of the opportunity to prove themselves in the Great War, the General Strike provided an appropriately theatrical setting for another sort of dramatic enactment. The strike-time emergency lent a festive and egalitarian spirit even to dirty and tedious volunteer efforts. Media accounts emphasized the strike's levelling effect, the emergence of a cheerful, classless, spirit of fraternity among volunteers and those they helped. Detailed reports of the more strenuous volunteer work experiences did occasionally appear in newspapers but more typically in magazines. For instance, Edward Benn submitted his memoirs to the Nation, an American magazine that described him as a '"class-conscious" young author'.

This chapter discusses that the manuscript is the 'real' work and interpretation begins from the manuscript. In considering the status of the written manuscript Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is useful. The difficulty of variation between editions exposes the lack of fixity in what Fredson Bowers and other textual critics call 'accidentals' and raises the question of what actually constitutes the text. The result of mechanical reproduction is the reproduction of a uniform text; one copy being functionally the same as the next. The chapter considers the example of Tristram Shandy, the uniformity may exist only within individual editions. Individual copies of printed texts may retain an aura of sorts, of individuality if not of uniqueness, linked to our own subjectivity, individuality or egocentricity. The most convenient form for reading pages of text is the codex form.

This chapter explores the gender renegotiations by the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) as they threw themselves into the manly tasks of driving and mechanics. Evadne Price's brilliant modernist representation of the war from women's experiences underscores the silences in the FANY texts. The Royal Army Medical Corps was to be employed or commissioned by the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) to provide transport for the British sick and wounded at Calais. The chapter focuses on 1916 and features the story of FANY Unit 3 driving for the British Army. It records their activities and experiences and in particular examines their work in transport and mechanics that subverted traditional mythologies about femininity. Of all the FANY writings, the few accounts penned by Unit 3's Second-in-Command Muriel Thompson provide the bluntest descriptions of the geography of hell.

This chapter emphasises that canals formed just one component of Manchester's transport system from 1750 to 1850. Roads and railways, as well as coastal shipping, were also important elements. The competition between road and rail, like that between canals and rail, differed by geography and by commodity. The major improvements to Manchester's road system were effected by turnpikes. The triumphant opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 heralded the beginning of Manchester's railway age. In the 1830s and early 1840s, it is important to remember that railway carried goods were susceptible to loss by fire, when cinders were thrown up by the chimneys of the locomotives' steam engines. One way in which railways asserted their supremacy over canals was by their assumption of ownership or operational control of waterways.

This chapter considers questions of ill-health, which arguably gives a better impression of the everyday problems and experiences involved in caring for large numbers of small children. It also considers the health of nursling infants, set in the context of contemporary accounts of feeding methods and diseases of infants. Breastfeeding gave foundling infants their biochemically most appropriate source of nutrition, and also a supply of antibodies against pathogens encountered by the nurse. The chapter examines the procedures and policies adopted to combat ill-health among the weaned children, both while at nurse and after their return to the London Foundling Hospital. There is a significant amount of information available on the ill-health of foundling children as opposed to infants, in the form of both causes of death and records of non-fatal illness. Contagious diseases and fevers were the largest single identifiable causes of death for foundling children.

This chapter introduces the issue of women's rights in relation to the creation of modern definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when feminists and anti-feminists, Christians and Freethinkers battled over who had women's best interests at heart. These debates were fundamental to the development of feminist thought in England, but have been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the women's movement. The study treats the subjects not simply as ideologues of infidel feminism but as activists within a movement, whose ideas emerged out of the messy reality of public meetings, arguments, encounters with the enemy and attempts to carve out a space for themselves in a male-dominated world.