Exploring fictional foundlings

It is a long time ago that I visited the Foundling Hospital Museum and, like so many people, was awfully captivated by the tokens (identifiable items) which many mothers left with the children they felt forced to abandon but who they clearly hoped eventually to be able to reclaim.  

So it was fascinating to learn that one of the projects the Brontë Society has lit upon for this bicentenary year of Emily Brontë’s birth is to investigate this whole area - better to understand the potential background of her character Heathcliff.  Their idea has taken them to the Foundling Hospital’s Coram Foundation which put them onto one of their 2016 Fellows (Lily Cole) who has been working in this area.  I look forward hugely to finding out where she takes things.

Meanwhile, the text ‘Like the way newborn babies crave milk, you should crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation’ (1 Peter 2.2) turns out to begin in Latin with the words Quasi (like) and Modo (the manner).  I realised that I might use either word in English - using ‘quasi’ to mean ‘sort of’ and ‘mode’ to mean ‘method’.  

I hadn’t realised that when I used them together as a name (Quasimodo) I am simply quoting the text.  I learn that it was sung on the Sunday after Easter and thus became a mediaeval nickname for that Sunday – and then the source of a name for another fictional foundling baby, one discovered on that day at Notre Dame.

The picture on the other hand is simply the only vaguely decent one I’ve now been able to take of part of one of the Stations of the Cross in St James’, Cross Roads – the reflections on the varnish on the paint has otherwise defeated me.