Late Modern London Young Servants Hiding “the Bun in the Oven”

I analyze, in terms of contemporaneous notions of politeness, the expressions of guilt and the excuses for being pregnant in petitions signed by girls and young women that were addressed to the Governors of the Foundling Hospital, the first home in London for babies whose mothers could not look after them. My findings indicate that over half the petitions from these servants include excuses, but less than a fifth contain confessions of guilt, while a few combine both. This suggests that admitting guilt was harder than providing excuses probably because this threatened their reputation, but both may have been a guarantee of achieving their goals despite being contrary to what counted as politeness.