Waifs of the City’s Slums explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Child Suffering and Exploitation

  The chapter details the abandonment, high mortality, and exploitation of children through baby-farming and insurance schemes.

• Poverty and Inequality

  Poverty is identified as the root cause of child abandonment, with only the poor leaving their children to the streets.

• Charity and Social Reform

  The chapter highlights the work of the Foundling Asylum, Sister Irene's Asylum, and the Five Points institutions as efforts to combat child suffering.

• Public Health and Disease

  The high mortality rates among foundlings and the conditions in baby-farms reflect public health crises.

Characters to notice

• Unknown

  The narrator observes and reports on the conditions of foundlings and the operations of asylums and charities.

• The Boy

  Referenced indirectly as one of the waifs or children rescued from the streets.

• Miss Ellen Collins

  Not explicitly mentioned in this chapter.

• Jesus Christ

  Referenced in the context of 'Christian civilization' and the moral failure implied by child abandonment.

• The Doctor

  Mentioned in relation to signing death certificates for babies who died on baby farms.

• Mr. A. T. White

  Not explicitly mentioned in this chapter.

• James Russell Lowell

  Not explicitly mentioned in this chapter.

Key passages

• “First among these barriers is the Foundling Asylum. It stands at the very outset of the waste of life that goes on in a population of nearly two millions of people; powerless to prevent it, though it gather in the outcasts by night and by day.”

  The Foundling Asylum marks the beginning of the tragic loss of life among the city's nearly two million inhabitants, unable to stop the flow of abandoned children despite its constant efforts.

  Introduces the central role of the Foundling Asylum in addressing child abandonment.

• “In a score of years an army of twenty-five thousand of these forlorn little waifs have cried out from the streets of New York in arraignment of a Christian civilization under the blessings of which the instinct of motherhood even was smothered by poverty and want.”

  Over twenty years, 25,000 abandoned children have testified against a Christian society where poverty has crushed the maternal instinct.

  Critique of societal and religious hypocrisy in the face of child suffering.

• “Only the poor abandon their children. The stories of richly-dressed foundlings that are dished up in the newspapers at intervals are pure fiction.”

  Child abandonment is exclusively a problem of the poor; tales of well-dressed foundlings are fabricated by the press.

  Emphasizes the link between poverty and child abandonment.

• “Murder is the true name of the mother's crime in eight cases out of ten.”

  In 80% of cases, abandoning a child is effectively murder.

  Condemns the act of abandonment as a lethal crime.

• “Of 508 babies received at the Randall's Island Hospital last year 333 died, 65.55 percent. But of the 508 only 170 were picked up in the streets, and among these the mortality was much greater, probably nearer ninety percent, if the truth were told.”

  Out of 508 babies at Randall's Island Hospital, 333 died (65.55%), but among the 170 found in the streets, the death rate was likely around 90%.

  Highlights the extreme mortality among street-foundlings.

• “An infinitely more fiendish, if to surface appearances less deliberate, plan of child-murder than desertion has flourished in New York for years under the title of baby-farming. The name, put into plain English, means starving babies to death.”

  Baby-farming is a more insidious form of child murder than abandonment, essentially starving infants to death.

  Defines and condemns the practice of baby-farming.