Coram Boy Quotes

“His father was mean with the lamps and only kept one up in front for the road ahead, so Meshak hated being out on the highway at night. He was afraid of the dark. It was not just the spirit world which frightened him, but the real world of robbers and highwaymen, especially near the forest.”

‘Get on up front, boy!’ A yell from this father indicated that he had spotted someone on the roadside. Otis likes to have his “idiot’ son up next to him during certain transactions. It give him the air of being a devoted and caring father; a man you could trust and entrust with secrets. Meshak dutifully climbed up next to him.”

A rich and almost gothic drama unfolds, full of dastardly villains, cold hearted aristocrats, devoted friends and passionate lovers, and set against a background of cruelty, music, murder and the neglect of children. The story sweeps along with great exuberance.

Alexander Ashbrook, a gifted young aristocrat, is unaware that he even has a son, much less that his child has fallen into -and then been rescued from- the clutches of Otis Gardiner.

Meshak is Otis’s oppressed, simpleminded son, who finally discovers an infant he considers special enough to risk saving out of the hundreds who have succumbed to his father’s brutality.

“A fine lady went to Stowe Fair. She was pregnant for the first time and, keen to know what the future held for her, she consulted an old gypsy woman. ‘Why my dear, I do believe you will have seven babies.’ said the gypsy woman studying her hand. The fine lady went away and thought no more about it. When the time came for her child to be born, a midwife was summoned to attend the labour. ‘What have we here?’ she exclaimed as she delivered fir one baby, then another and another.”

The infant’s father is Alexander Ashbrook, a brilliant young aristocrat disinherited by his family for his devotion to a forbidden career, who is astonishingly unaware that he even has a son, much less that he has abandoned him.

“Otis Gardiner, pots man, Jack-of-all-trades and smooth tongued entrepreneur, ranted non-stop. It was side of Otis that not everyone saw; he could be so attractive, so charming, so sweetly spoken. A young man still, he had wide, appealing, brown eyes and shoulder-length

“A hidden side of eighteenth-century England: the world of infanticide and child slavery. Otis Gardiner, the Coram man, makes a vicious living disposing of the unwanted children and illegitimate offspring of distraught young women, rich and poor.

The center of this novel is the monstrous Otis Gardiner -a peddler known as “the Coram man” for his sham reputation as a representative of Thomas Coram’s famous foundling hospital in London. Utterly pitiless, Otis adds to his living by disposing of unwanted children and illegitimate offspring handed to him by distraught young women as he passes through towns and villagers and calls at wealthy country states.