Sharing names - Heritage

[Mandy]

No: HPFGUIDX 98758

> Gina wrote:
> I might add that in those days (ever seen or read Nicholas 
Nickleby?) that if a father did not want a son, he could pay to have 
him sent  away - school, orphanage etc. and more often than not it 
was a  horrible place they landed.

> Sylvia wrote:
> But Dickens was writing in the 1830's, when it was easier to 
dispose of unwanted children.   By the time Tom Riddle was born, I 
wouldn't have thought it was so easy to summarily dump an unwanted 
baby. It would, of course, have been possible to pack him off to a 
boarding school, but not, I think, to an orphanage.


Mandy here:
But if you have enough money and power in a relatively small 
community you can do anything.  It was still a huge stigma to have a 
child out of wedlock in the 1940s and 50s.  If indeed Miss Marvolio 
was unwed and died in childbirth the child would have been wisked 
strait to an orphage, no questions asked.  If she was wed, and he 
abandoned her it would have been easy for Tom Riddle Sr.'s family to 
have arranged for baby Tom to have been packed away.   It might seem 
impossible to us now, but very easy 50 years ago.

Mandy