Age of Emotion:A Saucy Look at Love 1911 : Happy ending for workhouse orphan, 1878
This cartoon is contained in autograph albums collected Mrs Sybil Bryce of Bolton between 1909 and 1921. H Bradshaw added his signature to this artistic work in 1911.
Happy ending for workhouse orphan, 1878
Correspondence from the Flimby Workhouse records the adoption of a little girl, Jane Green, in 1878 by Ann McDonald and her husband of Penrith.
As the first letter explains, Ann's own daughters had died and she felt the young orphan could comfortably brought up with her, her husband and their two sons.
A second letter is written after Jane Green had met her proposed adoptive mother. In it Ann McDonald is making the necessary arrangements: she asks that Jane be put on the train from Cockermouth to Penrith where Ann could meet her. She also asks that the matter be treated with sensibility in the local newspaper so that the little girl will not be tainted as being 'from a Union' in her new school. The stigma of the workhouse was very real and Ann obviously wanted her adopted daughter to have the best start possible