Baby Farming in Works of Fiction or Popular Culture
- The titular character in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist spends his first years in a "baby farm."
- The eponymous heroine puts her newborn "out to nurse" with a baby farmer in George Moore's Esther Waters (1894).
- The main character in Perfume, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, was orphaned at birth and brought up by baby farmers. (It was actually an orphanage and his mother had been hanged shortly after his birth)
- The character of Mrs. Sucksby in Sarah Waters's novel Fingersmith is a baby farmer.
- The Gilbert and Sullivan opera H.M.S. Pinafore, the character of Buttercup reveals that, when a baby farmer, she had switched two babies of different social classes. This is part of a satire of class hierarchy in Victorian England.
- The book Mama's Babies by Gary Crew is the story of a child of a baby farmer in the 1890s.
- The silent film Sparrows (1926) with Mary Pickford was set in a baby farm in the southern swamps.
- In The Fire Thief trilogy of novels, a baby farm is prominent.
- Australian musical The Hatpin features a mother's experience with a baby farmers and was inspired by the true story of Amber Murray and the Makin family.
See Coram Boy, a children's novel by Jamila Gavin. It was published in 2000 and it won Gavin a Whitbread Children's Book Award. The story sheds light on the corruption and child cruelty that flourished in Foundling Hospitals in large cities, because unscrupulous people took advantage of the situation of women with illegitimate children by promising desperate mothers to take their unwanted children to care facilities, for a fee.
Read more about this topic: Baby Farming
Famous quotes containing the words baby, farming, works, fiction, popular and/or culture:
“For Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail
Always used to say that stout and ale
Was good for a baby in a milking pail.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“... farming conservatism, which consisted in holding that whatever is, is bad, and any change is likely to be worse.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.
My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“... all fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.”
—Shirley Abbott (b. 1934)
“The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)