Bastard Daughters and Foundling Heroines: Rewriting Illegitimacy for the Eighteenth-Century Stage

ç 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2005/10204-0003$10.00 Demographers and historians refer to the eighteenth century as the “century of illegitimacy,”1 pointing out that “in every city in England and the continent for which data are available, the upsurge of illegitimacy commenced around 1750 or before.”2 Whereas scholars such as Edward Shorter, Peter Laslett, Lawrence Stone, John Gillis, and, most recently, Randolph Trumbach and Joseph Emer have offered very different reasons to explain the increase in the rate of illegitimacy that remains “unprecedented in the known history of the British population,”3 they all agree that this phenomenon must have touched everyone who lived at that time and played a crucial role in the economic, social, and cultural life of the Enlightenment. This article considers several eighteenth-century plays featuring “foundling” heroines—Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722), Edward Moore’s The Foundling (1748), and George Colman’s The English Merchant (1767)—in the context of the period’s obsessive attempts to justify, regulate, modify, and reimagine the social practices surrounding bastardy.