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.
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Famous quotes containing the words baby, farming, works, fiction, popular and/or culture:
“The cohort that made up the population boom is now grown up; many are in fact middle- aged. They are one reason for the enormous current interest in such topics as child rearing and families. The articulate and highly educated children of the baby boom form a huge, literate market for books on various issues in parenting and child rearing, and, as time goes on, adult development, divorce, midlife crisis, old age, and of course, death.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“He was one whose glory was an inner glory, one who placed culture above prosperity, fairness above profit, generosity above possessions, hospitality above comfort, courtesy above triumph, courage above safety, kindness above personal welfare, honor above success.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)