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:
“The lover as baby is a less troubling idea than the baby as lover.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“... 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)
“‘Tis too plain that with the material power the moral progress has not kept pace. It appears that we have not made a judicious investment. Works and days were offered us, and we took works.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My mother ... believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: “Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.””
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Vodka is our enemy, so let’s finish it off.”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)