Literature as the Mirror of Author’s Time: The Foundling by Stacey Hall

Trigger warning: SPOILERS

Set in the middle of eighteenth century in London, The Foundling is a book about a poor girl forced to have renounced her child. Step by step, we discover not only what has happened to the child but also to the woman, that other, who fostered it. We also learn of things and of people who, traditionally, haven’t been associated with Georgian England: people of colour, people of Slavic and Jewish descend, asexual people.

And guess what? It may be the opportunity of our new, more diverse times. But it is also by no means false or forced out as conservatives may fear. It’s just a new possibility of examining how the life of groups so far over-looked might have looked like. With introducing Black people and Balkanic immigrants, the book by no means takes space from white working class. Because diversity isn’t about taking any space from anybody.

And if there are historical books focused on unwealthy and common-born people, The Foundling is certainly one of them, and a rare one.

The main character, Bess, is a poor girl selling shrimps and dreaming of reclaiming her illegitimate daughter. Her life isn’t shown in the poverty-porn way but neither it is described like “come on, the times were different and people were glad with what they had.” Minding how often authors don’t know how to find some middle-ground about depicting poverty, it’s worth of noticing. It’s worth of noticing that lower classes are depicted themselves at all, and that the main heroine makes her social advance not through the Power of Class-breaking Love but through work and friendship. Because white working class of the past is underrepresented, and not necessarily at the culprit of mythical SJWs. If it is so, it’s often because we don’t want to claim our affiliation with it, we prefer the narration of class as having been something less important than sex and gender. Reading about Bess, I’m claiming this identity with pride.

Other underappreciated identities are shown in the novel as well. I’m not sure if the author did Keziah, a Black craftswoman and her family, entirely right, since her character falls a bit into the trope of Your Token Black Friend. But it is also important that she and her relatives are just the part of London society neither as servants nor as Others. Keziah is a Londoner, as much as Bess is.

And if the main character ends up with a charming guy of Balcanic descend, an immigrant, it’s the sign of a broader trend. Diversity isn’t about tokenism, and diversity isn’t about featuring only people of colour. It’s about showing that Great Britain people have not been only of white Anglosaxon/Celtic/Norman descent. Assuming the problems of xenophobia and racism, we need such books. In The Foundling, people of colour and white people of non-English descent don’t appear out of blue.

The same unaffected and interesting approach is taken with sexual minorities. How would life of an asexual woman look like in the eighteenth century, the period when she was supposed to be married? The Foundling gives us the answer.

Alexandra, the second protagonist of the book, perceives sex in all but the categories of love we are accustomed to nowadays. She agreed on her husband seeking lovers because she herself wasn’t interested in intimacy and because she believed that for man it’s literally like emptying one’s chamber pot. Sounds brutal? Well, if I’m to be reminded how people used to think, I still prefer this over, let’s say, pseudo-medieval brutalization sold by Mr Martin.

I also prefer people of ordinary origin who are proud with it and who don’t need to seek any “enobling” like in all those countless stories derived from Cinderella’s frame. In this book, there’s no improbable misalliance. The main protagonist ends up as a farmer and makes an agreement with the wealthier Alexandra, the foster mother of her daughter. Keziah is happy as a seamstress and her husband is happy as a musician. Alexandra has her moments of seeing simply an other human being in those at the bottom but she is no contemporary socialist either and she does some awful things. And if I mean something by all this, is that introducing minorities into historical works does not necessarily equal appeasing to our modern expectations on the not-so-bad past.

But above all, this book is full of convincing emotions. It’s about maternal love, about female friendship, about sisterhood; a good change from yet another Epic Love Story in Historical Times. It’s full of true emotions. And if I get such a book, unaffected and believable representation of minorities is an additional advantage for sure.