[Illustration: Florence Nightingale.
(_From a model of the statue by A. G. Walker. By kind permission of the
Sculptor._)]
FLORENCE
NIGHTINGALE
A BIOGRAPHY
BY
ANNIE MATHESON
AUTHOR OF
“THE STORY OF A BRAVE CHILD (JOAN OF ARC)”
THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN, AND NEW YORK
[Illustration: “The Lady with the Lamp.”
(_From the statuette in the Nightingale Home._)]
PREFACE.
It is hardly necessary to say that this little biography is based
mainly upon the work of others, though I hope and believe it is honest
enough to have an individuality of its own and it has certainly cost
endless individual labour and anxiety. Few tasks in literature are in
practice more worrying than the responsibility of “piecing together”
other people’s fragments, and “the great unknown” who in reviewing my
“Leaves of Prose” thought I had found an easy way of turning myself into
respectable cement for a tessellated pavement made of other people’s
chipped marble, was evidently a stranger to my particular temperament.
Where I have been free to express myself without regard to others, to use
only my own language, and utter only my own views, I have had something
of the feeling of a child out for a holiday, and of course the greater
part of the book is in my own words. But I have often, for obvious
reasons, chosen the humbler task, because, wherever it is possible, it
is good that my readers should have their impressions at first hand, and
in regard to Kinglake especially, from whose non-copyright volumes I
have given many a page, his masculine tribute to Miss Nightingale is of
infinitely more value than any words which could come from me.
My publisher has kindly allowed me to leave many questions of copyright
to him, but I wish, not the less—rather the more—to thank all those
authors and publishers who have permitted use of their material and whose
names will, in many instances, be found incorporated in the text or in
the accompanying footnotes. I have not thought it necessary in every
instance to give a reference to volume and page, though occasionally, for
some special reason of my own, I have done so.
Of those in closest touch with Miss Nightingale during her lifetime,
whose help with original material has been invaluable, not more than
one can be thanked by name. But to Mrs. Tooley for her large-hearted
generosity with regard to her own admirable biography—to which I owe far
more than the mere quotations so kindly permitted, and in most cases so
clearly acknowledged in the text—it is a great pleasure to express my
thanksgiving publicly.
There are many others who have helped me, and not once with regard to
the little sketch have I met with any unkindness or rebuff. Indeed, so
various are the acknowledgments due, and so sincere the gratitude I feel,
that I scarcely know where to begin.
To Miss Rickards, for the pages from her beautiful life of Felicia
Skene, I wish to record heartfelt thanks; and also to Messrs. Burns
and Oates with regard to lengthy quotations from the letters of Sister
Aloysius—a deeply interesting little volume published by them in 1904,
under the title of “A Sister of Mercy’s Memories of the Crimea;” to Dr.
Hagberg Wright of the London Library for the prolonged loan of a whole
library of books of reference and the help always accessible to his
subscribers; and to the librarian of the Derby Free Library for aid in
verifying pedigree. Also to Lord Stanmore for his generous permission to
use long extracts from his father’s “Life of Lord Herbert,” from which
more than one valuable letter has been taken; and to Mr. John Murray for
sanctioning this and for like privileges in relation to the lives of
Sir John MacNeill and Sir Bartle Frere. To Messrs. William Blackwood,
Messrs. Cassell, Messrs. G. P. Putnam and Sons, as well as to the editors
and publishers of the _Times_, _Daily Telegraph_, _Morning Post_, and
_Evening News_, I wish to add my thanks to those of my publisher.
To any reader of this book it will be clear how great a debt I owe to
General Evatt, and he knows, I think, how sincerely I recognize it. Mr.
Stephen Paget, the writer of the article on Miss Nightingale in the
Dictionary of National Biography, has not only permitted me to quote from
that—a privilege for which I must also thank Messrs. Smith Elder, and Sir
Sidney Lee—but has, in addition, put me in the way of other priceless
material wherewith to do honour to the subject of this biography. I
have long been grateful to him for the inspiration and charm of his own
“Confessio Medici”—there is now this other obligation to add to that.
Nor can I forgo cordial acknowledgments to the writer and also the
publisher of the charming sketch of Miss Nightingale’s Life published
some years ago by the Pilgrim Press and entitled “The Story of Florence
Nightingale.”
To my friend Dr. Lewis N. Chase I owe the rare privilege of an
introduction to Mr. Walker, the sculptor, who has so graciously permitted
for my frontispiece a reproduction of the statue he has just completed as
a part of our national memorial to Miss Nightingale.
I desire to thank Miss Rosalind Paget for directing me to sources of
information and bestowing on me treasures of time and of memory, as well
as Miss Eleanor F. Rathbone and the writer of Sir John MacNeill’s Life
for help given by their books, and Miss Marion Holmes for permission to
quote from her inspiring monograph; and last, but by no means least, to
express my sense of the self-sacrificing magnanimity with which Miss
E. Brierly, the present editor of _Nursing Notes_, at once offered me
and placed in my hands—what I should never have dreamed of asking,
even had I been a friend of old standing, instead of a comparative
stranger—everything she herself had gathered together and preserved as
bearing on the life of Florence Nightingale.
When, under the influence of certain articles in the _Times_, I
undertook to write this volume for Messrs. Nelson, I knew nothing of the
other biographies in the field. Nor had I any idea that an officially
authorized life was about to be written by Sir Edward Cook, a biographer
with an intellectual equipment far beyond my own, but who will not
perhaps grudge me the name of friend, since his courteous considerateness
for all leads many others to make a like claim, and the knowledge that
he would put no obstacle in my path has spared me what might have been
a serious difficulty. Had I known all this, a decent modesty might have
prevented my undertaking. But in every direction unforeseen help has been
showered upon me, and nothing but my own inexorable limitations have
stood in my way.
If there be any who, by their books, or in any other way, have helped me,
but whom by some unhappy oversight I have omitted to name in these brief
documentary thanks, I must earnestly beg them to believe that such an
error is contrary to my intention and goodwill.
CONTENTS
Introductory Chapter 15
I. Florence Nightingale: her home, her birthplace, and her
family 25
II. Life at Lea Hurst and Embley 41
III. The weaving of many threads, both of evil and of good 55
IV. The activities of girlhood—Elizabeth Fry—Felicia Skene
again 62
V. Home duties and pleasures—The brewing of war 71
VI. Pastor Fliedner 90
VII. Years of preparation 101
VIII. The beginning of the war—A sketch of Sidney Herbert 117
IX. The Crimean muddle—Explanations and excuses 134
X. “Five were wise, and five foolish” 142
XI. The expedition 162
XII. The tribute of Kinglake and Macdonald and the Chelsea
Pensioners 172
XIII. The horrors of Scutari—The victory of the Lady-in-Chief—The
Queen’s letter—Her gift of butter and treacle 200
XIV. Letters from Scutari—Kinglake on Miss Nightingale and her
dynasty—The refusal of a new contingent 216
XV. The busy nursing hive—M. Soyer and his memories—Miss
Nightingale’s complete triumph over prejudice—The
memories of Sister Aloysius 235
XVI. Inexactitudes—Labels—Cholera—“The Lady with the Lamp”—Her
humour—Letters of Sister Aloysius 247
XVII. Miss Nightingale visits Balaclava—Her illness—Lord
Raglan’s visit—The Fall of Sebastopol 261
XVIII. The Nightingale Fund—Miss Nightingale remains at her
post, organizing healthy occupations for the men off
duty—Sisters of Mercy—The Queen’s jewel—Its meaning 274
XIX. Her citizenship—Her initiative—Public recognition and
gratitude—Her return incognito—Village excitement—The
country’s welcome—Miss Nightingale’s broken health—The
Nightingale Fund—St. Thomas’s Hospital—Reform of
nursing as a profession 292
XX. William Rathbone—Agnes Jones—Infirmaries—Nursing in
the homes of the poor—Municipal work—Homely power
of Miss Nightingale’s writings—Lord Herbert’s death 312
XXI. Multifarious work and many honours—Jubilee Nurses—Nursing
Association—Death of father and mother—Lady Verney and
her husband—No respecter of persons—From within four
walls—South Africa and America 331
XXII. India—Correspondence with Sir Bartle Frere—Interest
in village girls—The Lamp 346
XXIII. A brief summing up 360
APPENDIX 367
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Statue of Florence Nightingale by A. G. Walker _Frontispiece_
“The Lady with the Lamp.” Statuette _Facing p._ 8
Embley Park, Romsey, Hants ” 16
Florence Nightingale’s Father ” 32
Florence Nightingale (after Augustus Egg, R.A.) ” 88
Florence Nightingale in 1854 ” 112
At the Therapia Hospital ” 176
At Scutari ” 192
Miss Nightingale’s Medals and Decorations ” 280
The Nightingale Nursing Carriage ” 296
At the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich ” 304
A Letter from Miss Nightingale ” 320
Miss Nightingale’s London House ” 344
Florence Nightingale in her Last Days ” 352
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER FOR THE ELDERS IN MY AUDIENCE.
It is my hope that my younger readers may find this volume all the
more to their liking if it is not without interest to people of my own
generation. Girls and boys of fourteen to sixteen are already on the
threshold of manhood and womanhood, but even of children I am sure it
is true that they hate to be “written down to,” since they are eagerly
drinking in hopes and ideas which they cannot always put into words, and
to such hopes and ideas they give eager sympathy of heart and curiosity
of mind.
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale’s Home, Embley Park, Romsey, Hants.]
For one of her St. Thomas’s nurses, among the first nine women to be
decorated with the Red Cross, the heroine of this story wrote what might
well be the marching orders of many a good soldier in the divine army,
and not least, perhaps, of those boy scouts and girl guides who would
like better a life of adventure than the discipline of a big school or
the “duties enough and little cares” of a luxurious home; and as the
words have not, so far as I am aware, appeared in print before, it may be
worth while to give them here:—
“Soldiers,” she wrote, “must obey orders. And to you the
‘roughing’ it has been the resigning yourself to ‘comforts’
which you detested and to work which you did not want, while
the work which wanted you was within reach. A severe kind
of ‘roughing’ indeed—perhaps the severest, as I know by sad
experience.
“But it will not last. This short war is not life. But all will
depend—your possible future in the work, we pray for you, O my
Cape of Good Hope—upon the name you gain here. That name I know
will be of one who obeys authority, however unreasonable, in
the name of Him who is above all, and who is Reason itself—of
one who submits to disagreeables, however unjust, for the
work’s sake and for His who tells us to love those we don’t
like—a precept I follow oh so badly—of one who never criticizes
so that it can even be guessed at that she has criticism in her
heart—and who helps her companions to submit by her own noble
example....
“I have sometimes found in my life that the very hindrances
I had been deploring were there expressly to fit me for
the next step in my life. (This was the case—hindrances of
_years_—before the Crimean War.)” And elsewhere she writes: “To
have secured for you all the _circumstances_ we wished for your
work, I would gladly have given my life. But you are made to
rise above circumstances; perhaps this is God’s way—His ways
are not as our ways—of preparing you for the great work which I
am persuaded He has in store for you some day.”
It is touching to find her adding in parenthesis that before her own work
was given to her by the Great Unseen Commander, she had ten years of
contradictions and disappointments, and adding, as if with a sigh from
the heart, “And oh, how badly I did it!”
There we have the humility of true greatness. All her work was amazing
in its fruitfulness, but those who knew her best feel sometimes that the
part of her work which was greatest of all and will endure longest is
just the part of which most people know least. I mean her great labour
of love for India, which I cannot doubt has already saved the lives of
millions, and will in the future save the health and working power of
millions more.
Florence Nightingale would have enriched our calendar of uncanonized
saints even if her disciplined high-hearted goodness had exercised an
unseen spell by simply _being_, and had, by some limitation of body or
of circumstance, been cut off from much active _doing_: for so loving
and obedient a human will, looking ever to the Highest, as a handmaiden
watches the eyes of her mistress, is always and everywhere a humane
influence and a divine offering. But in her life—a light set on a
hill—being and doing went hand in hand in twofold beauty and strength,
for even through those years when she lay on her bed, a secluded
prisoner, her activities were world-wide.
In addition to the work for which she is most widely revered and loved,
Miss Nightingale did three things—each leaving a golden imprint upon the
history of our time:—
She broke down a “Chinese wall” of prejudice with regard to the
occupations of women, and opened up a new and delightful sphere of hard,
but congenial, work for girls.
She helped to reconstruct, on the lines of feminine common sense,
the hygiene and the transport service of our army—yes, of the entire
imperial army, for what is a success in one branch of our dominions
cannot permanently remain unaccepted by the rest. And in all her work for
our army she had, up to the time of his death, unbounded help from her
friend, Lord Herbert.
Last, and perhaps greatest of all, she initiated, with the help of Sir
Bartle Frere, Sir John Lawrence, and other enlightened men of her time,
the reform of insanitary and death-dealing neglect throughout the length
and breadth of India, thus saving countless lives, not only from death,
but from what is far worse—a maimed or invalid existence of lowered
vitality and lessened mental powers.
One of her friends, himself a great army doctor holding a high official
position, has repeatedly spoken of her to me as the supreme embodiment
of citizenship. She did indeed exemplify what Ruskin so nobly expressed
in his essay on “Queens’ Gardens”—the fact that, while men and women
differ profoundly and essentially, and life would lose in beauty if they
did not, the state has need of them both; for what the woman should be
at her own hearth, the guardian of order, of health, of beauty, and of
love, that also should she be at that wider imperial hearth where there
are children to be educated, soldiers to be equipped, wounded lives to be
tended, and the health of this and future generations to be diligently
guarded.
“Think,” she said once to one of her nurses, “less of what you may
gain than of what you may give.” Herself, she gave royally—gave her
fortune, her life, her soul’s treasure. I read in a recent contemporary
of high standing a review which ended with what seemed to me a very
heathen sentence, which stamped itself on my memory by its arrogant
narrowness. “Woman,” wrote the reviewer, “is always either frustrate
or absorbed;” and there leaped to my heart the exclamation, “Here in
Florence Nightingale is the answer; for in her we have one, known and
read of all men, who was neither the one nor the other.” That there was
supreme renunciation in her life, none who is born to womanhood can
doubt; for where could there be any who would have been more superbly
fitted for what she herself regarded as the natural lot of woman as wife
and mother? But she, brilliant, beautiful, and worshipped, was called
to a more difficult and lonely path, and if there was hidden suffering,
it did but make her service of mankind the more untiring, her practical
and keen-edged intellect the more active in good work, her tenderness to
pain and humility of self-effacement the more beautiful and just.
It has been said, and said truly, that she did not suffer fools gladly,
and she knew well how very human she was in this and in other ways, as
far removed from a cold and statuesque faultlessness as are all ardent,
swift, loving natures here on earth. But her words were words of wisdom
when she wrote to one dear to her whom she playfully named “her Cape of
Good Hope”: “Let us be persecuted for righteousness’ sake, _but not for
unrighteousness_.”
The italics are mine, because in their warning they seem so singularly
timely. And the entire sentence is completely in tune with that fine note
with which she ends one of her delightful volumes on nursing—
“I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons
now current everywhere (for they are equally jargons): of the jargon,
namely, about the ‘rights’ of women which urges women to do all that men
do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do
it, and without regard to whether this _is_ the best that women can do;
and of the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely
because they are women, and should be ‘recalled to a sense of their duty
as women,’ and because ‘this is women’s work,’ and ‘that is men’s,’ and
‘these are things which women should not do,’ which is all assertion and
nothing more. Surely woman should bring the best she has, _whatever_ that
is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these
cries. For what are they, both of them, the one _just_ as much as the
other, but listening to the ‘what people will say,’ to opinion, to the
‘voices from without’? And as a wise man has said, no one has ever done
anything great or useful by listening to the voices from without.
“You do not want the effect of your good things to be, ‘How wonderful
for a _woman_!’ nor would you be deterred from good things by hearing
it said, ‘Yes, but she ought not to have done this, because it is not
suitable for a woman.’ But you want to do the thing that is good,
whether it is ‘suitable for a woman,’ or not.
“It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should
have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad, which would
have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman.
“Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God’s work, in
simplicity and singleness of heart.”
CHAPTER I.
_Florence Nightingale: her home, her birthplace, and her
family._
In the heart of Derbyshire there is a quaint old church, once a private
chapel, and possessing, instead of a churchyard, a bit of quiet
greenness, of which the chief ornament, besides the old yew tree at the
church door, is a kind of lovers’ bower made by two ancient elder trees
which have so intertwined their branches as to form an arbour, where in
summer-time sweethearts can gossip and the children play. It belonged to
a world far away from the world of to-day, when, in the high-backed pews
reserved for the “quality,” little Florence Nightingale, in her Sunday
attire that was completed by Leghorn hat and sandal shoes, made, Sunday
after Sunday, a pretty vision for the villagers, in whose cottages she
was early a welcome visitor. It was just such a church as we read of in
George Eliot’s stories, clerk and parson dividing the service between
them, and the rustic bareness of the stone walls matched by the visible
bell-ropes and the benches for the labouring people. But the special
story that has come down from those days suggests that the parson was
more satirical than Mr. Gilfil or Mr. Tryan, and it is to be feared that
when he remarked that “a lie is a very useful thing in trade,” the people
who quoted him in Derby market-place merely used his “Devil’s text” as
a convenience and saw no satire in it at all. Have we really travelled
a little way towards honesty since those days, or have we grown more
hypocritical?
The little girl in the squire’s pew grew up in a home where religious
shams were not likely to be taken at their face value.
Her father, who was one of the chief supporters of the cheap schools
of the neighbourhood, had his own ways of helping the poor folk on his
estate, but used to reply to some of the beseeching people who wanted
money from him for local charities that he was “not born generous.”
Generous or not, he had very decided views about the education of his
two children, Florence and Parthe. They enjoyed nearly a hundred years
ago (Florence was born in 1820) as liberal a course of study as any High
School girl of to-day, and no doubt it is true that the orderliness of
mind and character, at which his methods aimed, proved of countless value
to Florence in those later days, when her marvellous power in providing
for minutest details without unnecessary fuss or friction banished the
filth and chaos of the first Crimean hospitals, and transformed them
into abodes of healing and of order. She grew up to be a beautiful and
charming woman, for whom men would gladly have laid down their lives; yet
her beauty and her charm alone could not have secured for our wounded
soldiers in the Crimea, tortured by dirt and neglect, the swift change to
cleanness and comfort and good nursing which her masterly and unbending
methods aided her commanding personal influence to win.
But this is leaping too far ahead. As yet she is only Parthenope’s
little playfellow and schoolfellow in the room devoted to “lessons” at
Lea Hall, the small maiden who climbs the hill on Sundays to the church
where the yew tree guards the door, and on week-days is busy or at play
in the house that has been the home of her father’s family through many
generations, and in the grounds of the manor that surround it.
Lea Hall is in that part of the country which Father Benson has described
in his novel, “Come Rack, come Rope,” and the Nightingale children
were within easy reach of Dethick Hall, where young Anthony Babington
had lived. It must have added zest to their history lessons and their
girlish romancings to hear of the secret passage, which was supposed to
lead right into Wingfield Manor, from the underground cellar close to
the old wall that showed still where Dethick had once reared its stately
buildings. The fact that the farm bailiff now kept his potatoes there
and could not find the opening, would only make it a constant new ground
for adventure and imagination. For they would be told of course—these
children—how Mary Stuart had once been a prisoner at Dethick, and Anthony
had vowed to be her servant in life or death and never cease from the
struggle to set her free so long as life was in him. Nor did he; for he
died before her, and it was not at Wingfield, but at Fotheringay, as
these little students very well knew, no doubt, that her lovely head soon
afterwards was laid upon the block.
Enviable children to have such a playground of imagination at their
doors! But, indeed, all children have that, and a bare room in a slum,
or a little patch of desert ground, may for them be danced over by Queen
Mab and all her fairies, or guarded by the very angel who led St. Peter
out of prison. Still, it is very exciting to have history written beside
the doorstep where you live, and if you grow up in a home where lesson
books are an important part of the day’s duties, it is pleasant to find
them making adventures for you on your father’s own estate. It mattered
nothing that the story would all be told by those contending against
Anthony’s particular form of religion, who would be ready to paint him
with as black an ink as their regard for justice would allow. To a child,
that would rather enhance the vividness of it all. And there was the
actual kitchen still standing, with its little harmless-looking trapdoor
in the roof that leads into the secret chamber, where the persecuted
priests used to hide when they came to celebrate a secret Mass. No
wonder the two children delighted in Dethick, and wove many a tale
about it. For had they not seen with their very own eyes the great open
fireplace in that kitchen, where venison used to be roasted, and the very
roasting-jack hanging from its central beam where all the roof-beams were
black with age and dark with many tragic memories?
Dethick is but one of the three villages included in the ancient manor,
the other two are Lea and Holloway; and in the days of King John, long
before it came to the Nightingales, the De Alveleys had built a chapel
there. Those who have read Mr. Skipton’s life of Nicholas Ferrar and know
their John Inglesant, will be interested to hear that half this manor had
passed through the hands of the Ferrars among others, and another portion
had belonged to families whose names suggest a French origin. But the
two inheritances had now met in the hands of the Nightingales.
It is a very enchanting part of the Midlands. The silvery Derwent
winds through the valleys, keeping fresh the fields of buttercups and
meadowsweet and clover, and in the tall hedges wild roses mingle their
sweetness with the more powerful fragrance of the honeysuckle, until both
yield to the strange and overwhelming perfume of the elder tree. The
limestone hills, with their bold and mountainlike outline, their tiny
rills, and exquisite ferns, had been less spoiled in those days by the
tramp of tourists; and the purity of the air, the peacefulness of the
upland solitudes, would have a wholesome share in the “grace that can
mould the maiden’s form by silent sympathy.”
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale’s Father.]
It was a very youthful little maiden as yet who had been transplanted
into these English wilds from the glory and the sunshine of the Italy
where she was born. After the valley of the Arno and the splendours of
Florence, it may have seemed somewhat cold and bracing at times. Rightly
or wrongly, the father of the little girls—for our heroine’s sister,
named after another Italian city, shared all her life at this time—seems
to a mere outsider a little cold and bracing too. He came of a very old
family, and we hear of his “pride of birth.” His wife, on the other
hand, whom Florence Nightingale resembled, lives before us in more warm
and glowing colours, as one who did much to break down the barriers of
caste and, with a heart of overflowing love, “went about doing good.”
Both were people of real cultivation—good breeding being theirs by a
happy inheritance—and each seems to have had a strong and distinctive
personality. It might not be easy to say to which of the two the little
daughter, who grew to such world-wide fame, owed most; but probably
the equipment for her life-work was fairly divided between the two.
There is no magnet so powerful as force of character, and it is clear
that her father possessed moral and intellectual force of a notable
sort. Love, in the sense of enthusiasm for humanity, will always be the
heaven-born gift of one in whom religion is such a reality as it was with
Florence Nightingale, but religious ardour may be sadly ineffective
if defeated by the slack habits of a lifetime, or even by a moral and
mental vagueness that befogs holy intentions. Mr. Edward Nightingale’s
daughters were disciplined in a schoolroom where slackness and disorder
were not permitted, and a somewhat severe training in the classics was
supplemented by the example of Mrs. Nightingale’s excellent housewifery,
and by that fine self-control in manners and behaviour which in the
old-fashioned days used to be named “deportment.” Sports and outdoor
exercises were a part—and a delightful part—of the day’s routine.
But let us go back a few years and give a few pages to the place of
Florence Nightingale’s birth and the history of her family. Her name,
like that of another social reformer among Englishwomen, was linked
with Italy, and she took it from the famous old Italian town in
whose neighbourhood she was born. I have tried in vain to trace the
authorship[1]—was it Ruskin or some less known writer?—who said of
that town, “if you wish to see it to perfection, fix upon such a day as
Florence owes the sun, and, climbing the hill of Bellosguardo, or past
the stages of the Via Crucis to the church of San Miniato, look forth
upon the scene before you. You trace the course of the Arno from the
distant mountains on the right, through the heart of the city, winding
along the fruitful valley toward Pisa. The city is beneath you, like a
pearl set in emerald. All colours are in the landscape, and all sounds
are in the air. The hills look almost heathery. The sombre olive and
funereal cypress blend with the graceful acacia and the clasping vine.
The hum of the insect and the carol of bird chime with the blithe voices
of men; while dome, tower, mountains, the yellow river, the quaint
bridges, spires, palaces, gardens, and the cloudless heavens overhanging,
make up a panorama on which to gaze in trance of rapture until the spirit
wearies from the exceeding beauty of the vision.”
When on May 12, 1820, Florence Nightingale was born, her parents were
staying at the Villa Colombaia, near to this beautiful City of Flowers;
and when the question of a name for her arose, they were of one mind
about it—she must be called after the city itself. They had no sons, and
this child’s elder sister, their only other daughter, having been born at
Naples, had taken its ancient and classical name of Parthenope.[2]
Their own family name had changed. Mr. Nightingale, who was first known
as William Edward Shore, was the only son of Mr. William Shore of Tapton,
in Derbyshire, and the child who was to reform England’s benighted views
of nursing, and do so much for the health, not only of our British
troops, but also of our Indian Army, was related through that family
to John Shore, a famous physician in Derby in the reign of Charles the
Second, as well as to the Governor-General of India who, twenty-three
years before her birth, took the title of Baron Teignmouth. It was
through her father’s mother, the only daughter of Mr. Evans of Cromford,
that she was linked with the family of the Nightingales, whose name her
father afterwards took. Mary Evans, her paternal grandmother, was the
niece of “Old Peter,” a rich and roystering squire, who was well liked
in his own neighbourhood, in spite of his nickname of “Madman Peter”
and the rages that now and then overtook him. Florence Nightingale
was, however, no descendant of his, for he never married, and all his
possessions, except those which he sold to Sir Richard Arkwright, the
famous cotton-spinner, came to his niece, who was the mother of Miss
Nightingale’s father. When all this landed property came into the
hands of Mr. Edward Shore, three years before his marriage and five
years before Florence was born, his name was changed under the Prince
Regent’s sign manual from Shore to Nightingale, in accordance with Peter
Nightingale’s will. But he continued to live in Italy for a great part of
every year until Florence was nearly five years old, though the change of
ownership on the English estate was at once felt under the new squire,
who was in most ways the very opposite of that “Old Peter,” of whom we
read that when he had been drinking, as was then the fashion, he would
frighten away the servant-maids by rushing into the kitchen and throwing
the puddings on the dust-heap.
Mr. Edward Nightingale, our heroine’s father, bore a character without
fear or reproach. Educated at Edinburgh and at Trinity, Cambridge, he had
afterwards travelled a good deal, at a time when travel was by no means
the commonplace that it is now.
He is described as “tall and slim,” and from the descriptions we have of
him it is clear that no one, even at a glance, could have missed the note
of distinction in his bearing, or mistaken him for other than that which
he was proud to be, the cultivated and enlightened son of a fine old
family.
When we read that the lady he married was daughter of a strong
Abolitionist, Mr. William Smith of Parndon, in Essex, we feel that the
very name of Abolitionist belongs to a bygone past.
In those days the American Civil War was still to come, but the horizon
was already beginning to blacken for it, just as in Europe, while two
happy little girls were playing hide-and-seek in the gardens of Lea Hall
and racing with their dogs across the meadows to Dethick, the hush
before the tempest did not blind wise statesmen to those dangers in the
Near East which were to overwhelm us in so terrible a war.
Mr. Smith, in desiring ardently the abolition of slavery, was ahead of
many Englishmen of his day. He was an eager philanthropist, who for half
a century represented Norwich in Parliament, and had therefore real power
in urging any good cause he had at heart. His daughter Frances, when she
became Mrs. Nightingale, did not cease to labour among the poor in the
spirit of her father and of her own benevolent heart. She was a beautiful
and impressive woman, and in her untiring service of others seems to have
been just the wife for Mr. Nightingale, who was ready to further every
good work in his own neighbourhood. He, in his artistic and scholarly
tastes, was as humane and enlightened as was the woman of his choice in
her own skill of hand and charm of household guidance.
For Mrs. Nightingale was not only a notable housekeeper and her
husband’s companion in the world of books, she was also a woman whose
individuality of thought and action had been deepened by her practical
faith, so that even at a time when England was still tied and bound by
conventions of rank, from which the last fifty years have released many
devotees, she felt the call of the Master to a deeper and wider sense of
brotherhood, and had a great wish to break through artificial barriers.
As a matter of fact, she found many innocent ways of doing so. But she
did not know in these early days that in giving to the world a little
daughter who was akin to her in this, she had found the best way of all;
for that daughter was to serve others in the very spirit of those great
ones of old—S. Teresa and S. Catharine and the Blessed Joan of Arc—to
whom the real things were so real and so continually present that the
world’s voices were as nothing in comparison. This was true also of Mrs.
Browning, whose memory has already come to mind, as linked, like that
of Florence Nightingale, though for quite other reasons, with the City
of Flowers; and although a life of action in the ordinary sense was
impossible for the author of “Aurora Leigh,” yet it is remarkable how
much she also did to arouse and set free her sisters, for she too, like
the others, was a woman of great practical discernment.
The little peasant maid of France, who was born to be a warrior and the
deliverer of her people, had this in common with the little English girl
born to a great inheritance and aiming at a higher and humbler estate
wherein she was the queen of nurses, that both cared so much for the
commands from above as to be very little influenced by the gossip round
about.