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 popular culture, baby, farming, works, fiction, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We can see that the baby is as much an instrument of nourishment for us as we are for him.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“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)
“The obvious parallels between Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz have frequently been noted: in both there is the orphan hero who is raised on a farm by an aunt and uncle and yearns to escape to adventure. Obi-wan Kenobi resembles the Wizard; the loyal, plucky little robot R2D2 is Toto; C3PO is the Tin Man; and Chewbacca is the Cowardly Lion. Darth Vader replaces the Wicked Witch: this is a patriarchy rather than a matriarchy.”
—Andrew Gordon, U.S. educator, critic. “The Inescapable Family in American Science Fiction and Fantasy Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (Summer 1992)
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“I’ve finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)