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The abandoned baby tunnels direct to the heart. Orphaned and unwanted children are poignant enough, but the child intentionally left to the kindness of strangers (we rarely countenance the possibility of maternal indifference) somehow belongs to us all. The story of foundlings is one of mothers too poor or ashamed or incapable to cope; it is also, as Kate Adie shows in this mix of historical research and contemporary interviews, a sharp critique of societies divided by time, ideology and degrees of human sympathy.

In the former Soviet Union, women are still positively encouraged to hand over to the state any baby deemed “imperfect”. The Russians are staggered that wealthy foreigners take the disabled, maladjusted and Asiatic babies nobody else wants. In the pioneering America of the mid-19th century “orphan trains” took scrubbed, Bible-clutching children west where they were paraded before frontier families. In China, baby girls were considered “maggots in the rice ” long before the one-child policy. In Ireland, the church’s objection to adoption swelled orphanages to bursting point; in 1951, the film star Jane Russell came seeking a baby boy, highlighting Dublin, to the cardinals’ horror, as a baby emporium for the rich.

But what of the mothers, women imprisoned and committed to poorhouses, punished for their wanton lusts rather than neglect of children? At New York’s foundling hospital in the 1890s those depositing newborns were asked to stay and nurse their child and another until both were strong, a practical request but also atonement for sin.

Until the establishment of such institutions, unwanted babies perished in the streets, and, compared to the inhumane conditions in orphanages elsewhere, Britain can be proud of its first refuge for waifs and strays. At London’s Foundling Hospital, opened by shipwright Thomas Coram in 1741 with the help of Hogarth and Handel, the rich came to peer at the neatly dressed residents; some even offered them a name until said children began claiming inheritance rights. Although it never attained the glamour of the Pietà in Venice where Vivaldi taught music, Coram’s home promised education and hope of rehabilitation. Mothers were desperate to place their children inside; if successful, their sorrow at parting became a cruel public entertainment, especially when mingled with the hysteria of women denied a place.

The hospital’s disciplined, respectful charges would later help bolster congregations, and the colonies, the notion of service being seen as a form of redress for a degenerate beginning. Coram’s children were made to feel eternally grateful and “bad blood” was always thought to be in danger of erupting from the most blameless child.

Adie understands the legacy of being raised with mystery. Adopted as a baby and raised as the daughter of a pharmacist in Sunderland, she was the happy beneficiary of a loving home. She had no Christian name before adoption, and only a fleeting playground curiosity as to whether she might be the unwanted baggage of a “prozzie”. But unlike the children left in telephone boxes by anonymous mothers, she was not named after a hospital ward or the nurse who wrapped her in a blanket; she was “official” and was eventually able to trace her birth family.

The fate of the foundling still depends starkly on where it is born. After long, hard campaigning some American states have passed a “safe haven” law whereby a mother has the right to give birth anonymously in hospital. As a result, in 2002, in the New York metropolitan area, no dead babies were found for the first time in 11 years. In France the right to “accouchement sous X” is not an enlightened decriminalisation but the remnant of the German occupation, when a blonde baby could shame a woman for life. In Britain, the mother of a deserted infant under two is still technically a criminal; one reason for mothers’ reluctance to come forward is fear of prosecution.

As freedom of information becomes a right for the children of adoption and sperm donation, the true foundling has no map of the past, rarely even the tokens — coins, ribbons or broken buttons — that mothers once left in the hope of one day establishing a connection and reclaiming the child. Instead they have faded newspaper clippings and maybe a street or park to visit where nobody remembers much except that once a baby was found. That absence may be hard to bear, or may be of little concern: the interviewees here are upbeat and positive, if sometimes wistful, feeling little bitterness towards their long-lost mothers. When the past is blank, maybe one looks more determinedly to the future. For those of us who adore and coddle our children, it’s humbling to see how well they can do without us, given a little luck and a lot of love along the way.

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