Two interesting items:. The author's article in New York Archives. A letter regarding foundlings in The Riverdale Press. In the nineteenth century, foundlings-children abandoned by their desperately poor, typically unmarried mothers, usually shortly after birth-were commonplace in European society. There were asylums in every major city to house abandoned babies, and writers made them the heroes of their fiction, most notably Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist . In American cities before the Civil War the situation was different, with foundlings relegated to the poorhouse instead of institutions d