nursing in a small cottage hospital. Towards the end of the year she
received orders from the sisterhood to leave this work and take work as
a nurse in a private case in the South of England. Walsall had not been
trained to habits of unquestioning obedience; its inhabitants and the
managers of the little hospital had already discovered Sister Dora’s
fine qualities as a nurse. They resisted the order that would have
deprived them of her services. While negotiations on this subject were
proceeding between the Walsall people and the sisterhood at Coatham,
news reached Miss Pattison from Hauxwell, to say that her father was
dangerously ill and much desired to see her. She telegraphed to the
sisterhood, telling them of her father’s serious illness, and asking
permission to visit him. The answer, which was returned almost
immediately, was a blank refusal, and she was bidden to proceed at once
to Devonshire to nurse a stranger. Incredible as this may seem, it is
still more incredible that the order was obeyed. Miss Pattison had not
escaped the paralysis of moral sense which this cast-iron system
produces; she turned her back on her home and proceeded to Devonshire.
Her father died almost immediately, without ever seeing his daughter
again. The shock of this event roused Sister Dora from the lethargy from
which she had suffered. She was almost broken-hearted, and deeply
resented the dictation to which she had been subjected. She ought to
have seen, and probably did see, that the will, like all other powers of
the mind and body, with which each one of us is endowed, is given to us
to be used; we are responsible for its right use, and when we use it
wrongly, as she did in this case (for it must have needed a very strong
effort of will to resist the appeal of love and duty), it is we
ourselves who must bear the punishment and endure the anguish of our
fault. She did not immediately sever her connection with the sisterhood,
but she began from that time to be less completely in thraldom to it.
She finally quitted it in 1875, under circumstances which have not been
made public. When a friend questioned her as to the cause, Sister Dora’s
only reply was, “I am a woman, and not a piece of furniture.”
After her father’s death, Sister Dora returned to Walsall, and in this
place practically the whole of the rest of her life was devoted to the
service of the sick and of all who were desolate and oppressed. She
plunged into her work with all the greater eagerness from her desire to
forget herself and the many inward troubles and anxieties which
oppressed her at this time. Her great desire was to become a first-rate
surgical nurse. Walsall has been described by those who lived there as
“one of the smokiest dens of the Black Country,” and the workers in the
various factories of the locality were often frightfully injured by
accidents with the machinery, or by burns and scalds. Sister Dora became
marvellously skilful in what is known as “conservative surgery,” that
is, the art of saving a maimed and crushed limb instead of cutting it
off. A good old doctor at the hospital taught her all he knew; but she
outgrew his instructions, and Miss Lonsdale gives an instance of a case
in which Sister Dora saved a man’s right arm from amputation, in spite
of the doctor’s strongly expressed opinion that the man would die unless
his arm were taken off immediately. The arm was frightfully torn and
twisted; the doctor said it must be taken off, or mortification would
set in. Sister Dora said she could save the arm, and the man’s life too.
The patient was appealed to, and of the two risks he chose the one
offered by the Sister. The doctor did not fail, proud as he was of his
pupil, to remind her that the responsibility of what he considered the
patient’s certain death would be on her head. She accepted the
responsibility, and devoted herself to her patient almost night and day
for three weeks, with the result that the arm was saved. The doctor was
the first generously to acknowledge her triumph, and he brought the rest
of his medical colleagues to see what Sister Dora had done. The
patient’s gratitude was unbounded; he often revisited the hospital
simply to inquire for Sister Dora. He was known in the neighbourhood as
“Sister’s Arm.” During an illness she had, this man used to walk every
Sunday morning eleven miles to the hospital to inquire for her. He would
say, “How’s Sister?” and on receiving a reply would add, “Tell her it’s
_her arm_ that rang the bell,” and walk back again. Sister Dora used to
say when speaking of her period of suspense and anxiety in this case,
“How I prayed over that arm!”
She was particularly skilful in her treatment of burns; sometimes she
would take two poor little burnt or scalded babies to sleep in her own
room. Those who have had experience in the surgical wards of hospitals
know what an overpowering and sickening smell proceeds from burnt flesh.
Sister Dora never seemed for a moment to think of herself or of what was
disagreeable and disgusting in such cases as these. In one frightful
accident in which eleven poor men were so badly burned that they
resembled charred logs of wood more than human beings, nearly all the
doctors and nurses became sick and faint a few minutes after they
entered the ward where the sufferers lay, and were obliged to leave.
Among the nurses Sister Dora alone remained at her post, and never
ceased night or day for ten days to do all that human skill could
suggest to alleviate the sufferings of the poor victims. Some died
almost immediately, some lingered for a week or ten days; only two
ultimately recovered. Her wonderful courage was shown not only in her
readiness to accept responsibility, but in the way in which she was able
to keep up her own spirits, and to raise the spirits of the patients
through such a time of trial as this. She would laugh and joke, and tell
the sick folks stories, or do anything that would help them to while
away the time and bear their sufferings with fortitude and courage. She
made her patients feel how much she cared for them, and that all she did
for them was a pleasure, not a trouble. She used to provide them with a
little bell, which she told them to ring when they wanted her. One poor
man was reproached by the other patients for ringing his bell so often,
especially as when Sister Dora arrived and asked him what he wanted, he
not infrequently answered that he did not know. But Sister Dora never
reproached him for ringing too often. “Never mind,” she would say
brightly, “for I like to hear it;” and she told him that she often
fancied when she was asleep that she heard his little bell, and started
up in a hurry to find it was only a dream. She was so gay and bright and
pleasant in her ways, giving her patients comical nicknames, and
caressing and coaxing them almost as a mother would a sick child, that
they regarded her with a deep love and veneration that frequently
influenced them for good all the rest of their lives. Twice while she
was at Walsall, there were frightful epidemics of small-pox, and on both
occasions she showed extraordinary courage and devotion. She did not
bear any charm against infection, and in fact generally caught anything
that was to be caught in the way of infectious disease. Her courage,
therefore, did not proceed from any confidence in her own immunity from
danger. She deliberately counted the cost, and resolved to pay it, for
the sake of carrying on her work. At the first outbreak of small-pox in
Walsall there was no proper hospital accommodation for the patients; and
Sister Dora nursed many of them in the overcrowded courts and alleys
where they lived. She was called in to one poor man who was dying of a
virulent form of the malady known as “black-pox.” He was a frightful
object: all his friends and relations, except one woman, had forsaken
him; when Sister Dora arrived, she found there was only one small piece
of candle in the house, so she gave the woman money to go out and buy
candles, and other necessaries. The temptation was too much for the poor
woman, who must, after all, have been better than the patient’s other
relatives and neighbours, for she had stayed with him when they had run
away. But when the professional nurse arrived and gave her money, she
ran away too, and Sister Dora was left quite alone with the dying man.
Just as the one bit of candle flickered out, the poor man, covered as he
was with the terrible disease, raised himself in bed and said, “Kiss me,
Sister.” She did so, and the man sank back; she promised she would not
leave him while he was alive, and his last hours were soothed by her
presence. She passed hours by his side in total darkness, uncertain
whether he were dead or alive; at last the gray light of early dawn
came, and she was at liberty. Her promise was fulfilled; the man was
dead.
At the second outbreak of small-pox at Walsall, hospital accommodation
was provided for the patients; and the ambulance, a sort of omnibus
fitted up to convey a patient and nurse, was frequently to be seen in
the streets. Sister Dora was as strong as she was courageous; she would
come to a house where a small-pox patient lay, and say she had “come
for” so-and-so. Resistance and excuses were no good; she would take the
patient, man or woman, in her arms as easily as she would a baby, and
carry the burden down to the ambulance. Her presence cheered the whole
town, and prevented the spread of that dastardly panic which sometimes
comes over a place which is stricken by disease. An eye-witness
described how every one in the town felt new courage at the sight of the
ambulance and Sister Dora, “with her jolly face smiling out of the
window.”
She spent six months at the small-pox hospital in 1875; and for a long
time she was practically alone there with the patients; the doctors of
course came by day, and three of her old patients constantly visited the
hospital for the sake of seeing if they could do anything for her; and
there were two nearly helpless old women from the workhouse, who were
supposed to do part of the work; but she was absolutely alone as regards
regular skilful assistance in the nursing and other work. The porter did
what he could, showing his devotion by getting up early to scrub and
clean for her; but he could hardly ever resist the temptation to go off
“on the drink” whenever his wages were paid; on these occasions he would
absent himself for four and twenty hours at a time. Once when this had
happened, and Sister Dora was quite alone, a delirious patient, a tall,
powerful man, flung himself out of bed in the middle of the night, and
rushed to the door trying to make his escape. “She had no time for
hesitation, but at once grappled with him, all covered as he was with
the loathsome disease ... she got him back to bed, and held him there by
main force till the doctor arrived in the morning.”
One of the trials of her work was that the small-pox patients were
nearly all “alive” with vermin; added to this was the horror of the
all-pervading smell of pox; in a letter to a friend, Sister Dora spoke
of this, and said it was impossible to get away from it. “I taste it in
my tea!” For months she never had her bonnet on, or went even as far as
the gate; and yet she was able to look back on the time she spent in
this hospital as one that had been very much blessed to her. With her
High Church feelings about Lent, she wrote cheerfully in the letter
already quoted, “Is not this a glorious retreat for me in Lent? I can
have no idle chatter.” In another letter, she wrote, “I am still a
prisoner, surrounded by my lepers. I do feel so thankful that I came....
I thank God daily for my life here.”
Endless instances might be given of her physical and moral courage;
once, when she was in a third-class railway carriage with a lot of rough
navvies, who were swearing and using horrible language, she boldly
reproved them; they laid hands on her, one of them exclaiming, “Hold
your jaw, you fool; do you want your face smashed in?” She remained
quite calm, not struggling, although they were holding her down on the
seat between them. When the train reached a station, they let her go,
and she got out of the carriage, and one of the men begged her pardon,
saying, “Shake hands, mum! you’re a good plucked one, you are; you were
right, and we were wrong.” Another time in the hospital, a half-drunken
man, flashily dressed, rang the bell in the night, and on the door being
opened forced his way into the hall, and demanded a bed. The night nurse
on duty was unable to get rid of him, and Sister Dora was summoned. The
man reiterated his determination to stay all night, and Sister Dora
contented herself with barring his access to the patients by standing
erect on the last step of the stairs with her arms spread from the wall
to the balusters. The man seated himself opposite to her, the nurse fled
shrieking, and the two waited, staring at one another, each hoping the
other would be the first to tire of the situation. Presently the man
made a rush down the passage towards the kitchen door, but Sister Dora
was too quick for him, and by the time he had reached it she was there
with her arms spread across it, as on the stairs, to bar his way. She
expected he would knock her down, but instead of doing so he muttered
some compliment to her courage, and turned on his heel and left the
place.
She had a very strong personal influence for good on the poor rough
people, both men and women, for whom she worked. Her religion was one
more of deeds than of words, and they saw that both in word and deed it
was genuine. Many a one has dated a new start in life from the time he
came under her care. Sometimes patients, waking in the night, would find
her praying by their bedsides, and it touched them deeply to see how
sincerely and truly she cared for them. Although she had the hearty
sense of fun already alluded to, no man could ever venture on a coarse
word or jest in her presence, and she inspired a good “tone” in the
wards even when they were occupied by the roughest and poorest. As time
went on there was hardly a slum or court in the lowest part of Walsall
where she was not known, and hardly a creature in the town that did not
feel he owed something to her. Although most of her time was given to
healing bodily troubles, all her patients felt that she cared for
something higher in them than their bodies. She joined heartily in
several missions that were started with the object of reaching the
lowest and most outcast; she would go quite fearlessly at midnight into
the haunts of the most degraded men and women of the town, and induce
them, for a while at least, to pause and consider what their lives had
been given to them for. Once, we are told, when she was on her way to a
patient’s house at night, she had to pass through one of the worst slums
of the town. A man ran out of a notorious public-house and said,
“Sister, you’re wanted; they’ve been fighting, and a man’s hurt
desperate.” Even she hesitated momentarily, and the thought passed
through her mind that she might be murdered. But her hesitation did not
last sufficiently long to be visible; she followed the man immediately,
taking comfort characteristically in the thought, “What does it matter
if I am murdered?” To her astonishment, as soon as she reached the group
of men, brutalised apparently almost below the level of humanity, a way
was respectfully made for her, and every hat was taken off as she passed
to the side of the wounded man.
But the time was approaching when the hand of death was to be laid upon
this wonderful woman in the midst of all her labours. She was only about
forty-four years of age, when she discovered that she was stricken by an
incurable and terribly painful disease. It was a sign both of her
strength and of her weakness that she insisted on keeping this fact
absolutely secret. She, who had always been so strong, could not bear to
acknowledge that her strength had come to an end. She, who had been so
ready to give sympathy, could not bear to accept it. She went on with
her work, bearing her pain silently and proudly, and admitting no one to
her confidence. In order more completely to conceal her illness, she
left Walsall for a time; and those who remained in charge of the
hospital did not dream but that her absence was merely temporary. With
the knowledge that her days on earth were numbered, she still went on
studying her profession. She attended some of Professor Lister’s
operations in London in order to become acquainted with his antiseptic
process, and she went to the Paris Exhibition especially to study the
surgical appliances shown there. Then presently she came back to
Walsall, in October 1878. In November of the same year the Mayor opened
a new hospital in her name; she was too ill to be present. Up to the
last the townspeople could not believe that their “dear lady” was really
to be taken from them, especially as her vitality was so strong that she
rallied again and again, when those about her thought that the end was
near at hand. She never lost her old habit of joking and making fun out
of the dismal circumstances of sickness. Her arm, which became terribly
swollen and helpless, she nicknamed “Sir Roger,” and she laughed at her
doctors because she lived longer than they had predicted she would. She
quite chuckled over the idea that she had “done the doctor again.” Her
life was prolonged till 24th December 1878. The grief throughout the
district when it was known that death had removed her was overpowering.
The veneration and gratitude of the whole town found expression in many
schemes for memorials in her honour. The working people wished most of
all for a statue of their dear lady. The wish was gratified, through
Miss Lonsdale’s generous aid, in the autumn of 1886. A pure white marble
statue now stands in a central position of the smoky town of Walsall,
commemorating the life and labours of one of the best of this generation
of Englishwomen. Her work is another illustration of the text, “He that
is greatest among you, shall be your servant.”
Footnote 5:
_Sister Dora: a Biography._ By Margaret Lonsdale.
XX
MRS. BARBAULD
ANNE LETITIA BARBAULD will probably be more remembered for what she was
than for what she did. At a time when women’s education was at a very
low ebb, and when for a woman to be an authoress was to single herself
out for ungenerous sneers, attacks, and insinuations, Mrs. Barbauld did
much to raise the social esteem in which literary women were held, and
prove in her own person that a popular authoress could be a devoted
wife, daughter, and sister.
Mrs. Barbauld’s father was the Rev. John Aikin, a Doctor of Divinity,
much esteemed in Nonconformist circles for his learning and piety. He
was for nearly thirty years the head of a well-known Nonconformist
college at Warrington, round which a little knot of learned and good men
gathered, who, it is said, did much to raise the tone, intellectually
and morally, of English society at a time when Oxford and Cambridge were
sunk in the deepest lethargy, and had comparatively no influence for
good in any direction. Among the men, whose names afterwards became
honourably known, who were connected with the social or educational life
of the Warrington Academy, may be mentioned Dr. Priestley, Dr. Enfield,
the Rev. Gilbert Wakefield, Howard the philanthropist, and Roscoe the
historian. In the midst of a society tempered by such good influences as
these, Anne Letitia Aikin grew from girlhood to womanhood. She and her
brother, John Aikin, four years younger than herself, were the only
children of their parents. She was born at Kibworth, in Leicestershire,
on 20th June 1743, where her father had a school before he became the
head of the Warrington Academy. Her mother is said to have come to the
singular conclusion that a girl brought up in a boys’ school must either
be a prude or a tomboy, and Mrs. Aikin preferred the former. Judging
from a cameo portrait of Mrs. Barbauld, taken at the request of her
friend Josiah Wedgwood, she certainly looks as if a good deal of her
time had been spent in the enunciation of the words “prunes, prisms, and
propriety.” But appearances are notoriously deceptive, and there is a
nice little story of Mrs. Barbauld’s girlhood, which shows that her
excellent mother did not succeed in entirely eradicating the tomboy
element from her daughter’s character. When only fifteen years old, Anne
had attracted the affections of a Kibworth farmer, who made a formal
application to Dr. Aikin for his daughter’s hand. The Doctor, seeing his
daughter in the garden, gave the suitor leave to go and try his
fortunes. When she understood the nature of his errand, her
embarrassment was very great, for the dilemma presented itself of having
to say “No,” and yet to spare the feelings of the swain; finding no
other way out of the difficulty, she ran up a tree, thus gaining the top
of the garden wall, and then, by one spring, the lane on the other side,
leaving her discomfited lover to admire her agility and bewail its
results.
Anne was from her birth an extraordinarily precocious child. Her mother
wrote of her in after years, comparing her with some less wonderful
grandchildren, “I once, indeed, knew a little girl who was as eager to
learn as her instructors could be to teach her, and who, at two years
old, could read sentences and little stories in her _wise book_,
roundly, without spelling, and in half a year more could read as well as
most women; but I never knew such another, and I believe never shall.”
Her father shared sufficiently in the prejudices of the period to refuse
for a long time to impart to this gifted child any of the classical
learning of which he was the master, and in which she ardently desired
to share. At length she so far overcame his scruples that she became
able to read Latin with facility, and gained some acquaintance with
Greek. The fact that her father was a schoolmaster no doubt enabled her
to enjoy many opportunities of instruction and education to which the
bulk of Englishwomen at that time were complete strangers. At a time
when it was thought enough education for most women if they were able to
read, “and perhaps to write their names or so,” it is not surprising if
schoolmasters’ daughters enjoyed an advantage in being able at least to
pick up the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table.
Anne was thirty years of age before she made her first appearance in
print with a volume of verse in 1773; but she appears to have been known
as a poet in her own circle of friends a few years earlier than this, as
there is a letter in existence from Dr. Priestley, dated 1769, in which
he asks permission to send a copy of her poem, called “Corsica,” to
Boswell, who was destined to future immortality as the biographer of Dr.
Johnson. Her first printed volume was highly successful, and passed
through four editions almost immediately. Thus encouraged, Anne and her
brother shortly afterwards printed a joint-volume, called _Miscellaneous
Pieces in Prose_, which also attracted much attention and commendation.
In Rogers’s _Table Talk_ an anecdote is given about this volume which
illustrates the amusing mistakes sometimes arising from joint
authorship. The various articles in the book were not signed by their
respective authors, and on one occasion Charles James Fox, meeting John
Aikin at a dinner party, wished to compliment him on his book. “I
particularly admire,” he said, “your essay, ‘Against Inconsistency in
our Expectations.’” “That,” replied Aikin, “is my sister’s.” “I much
like,” returned Fox, “your essay on Monastic Institutions.” “That”
answered Aikin, “is also my sister’s.” Fox thought it best to say no
more about the book.