Captain Thomas Coram was born at Lyme Regis, in Dorsetshire, in 1668. He emigrated to Massachusetts, where, after working a while as a shipwright, he became master of a trading vessel, made some money, and at last settled in London. In 1720, when living at Rotherhithe, and walking to and from the city early in the morning and late at night, his feelings were often keenly tried in coming across infants exposed and deserted in the streets. His tender heart at once set his head devising some remedy. ‘There were hospitals for foundlings in France and Holland, and why not in England?’
Coram was an honest mariner, without much learning or art of address; but he had energy and patience, and for seven-teen years he spent the most of his time in writing letters and visiting in advocacy of a home for foundlings. After long striking, a spark caught the tinder of the fashionable world; such an institution was voted a necessity of the age; and in 1739, the Foundling Hospital was established by Royal Charter. Subscriptions poured freely in, and in 1741 the Lamb’s Conduit estate of 56 acres was bought as a site and grounds for £5,500. It was a fortunate investment.
London rapidly girdled the Hospital, which now lies at its very centre, and from the leases of superfluous outskirts the Hospital draws an annual income equal to the original purchase-money. Hogarth was a great friend of the Hospital, and was one of its earliest Governors. For its walls he painted Coram’s portrait, ‘one of the first,’ he writes, ‘that I did the size of life, and with a particular desire to excel.’ He and other painters displayed their works in the rooms of the Foundling, and out of the practice grew the first Exhibition of the Royal Academy in the Adelphi, in 1760. The show of pictures drew ‘the town’ to the Hospital, and its grounds became the morning lounge of the belles and beaux of London in the last years of George II.
Handel also served the Foundling nobly. To its chapel he presented an organ, and for eleven years, from 1749 to his death in 1759, he conducted an oratorio for its benefit, from which sums varying from £300 to £900 were annually realized. The original score of his ‘Messiah’ is preserved among the curiosities of the Hospital.