(To Miss Nightingale from her Father.) July 21 [1861].… I could realize you, while I turned the pages on the Progress of Man towards that Perfection so sure tho' so slow to come, creating for himself that better world which he had so foolishly thought was to be given him for the asking. Was ever faith in[504] the “perfect law of Love and Goodness”, like yours?—the more of disappointment, the more suffering, the stronger faith. I also can rely on the invisible Power; but can I give a more reasonable account of my Faith than he who believes in Atonements, Incarnations, Revelations, and so forth? Was ever sentence truer than yours?—“God's plan is that we make mistakes; in them I will try to learn God's purpose.”[366] I also feel myself mistaken all day long in thought, feeling, or doing—but what help do I find? do I learn therefrom? do my three score years and more give me the repose of a life spent in helping others or even in helping myself?… [Then he turns from such reflections as if too hard for him, describes to her the doings of her favourite cats, and talks of the hills and streams of her old home—hoping against hope, it may be, to lure her back, and jotting down his wandering thoughts the while.] But you will say, “Tell me no more of my idle cats; I have cares enough, and thoughts enough elsewhere. My other belongings, where are they? I relied on a Secretary of State, where is he? where, my Hospitals? where all my many friends on whom I placed my work? where is my strength? My mind still strains over the immeasurable wants of the Army I have served, and I am left alone, with my physical powers confining me to my chamber.” How vain then is my thought that here, if you had wings, you might be at rest—at this calm peaceful window where the hills keep creeping down into the far-receding valley and multiply my thoughts as it were into Eternity. You will (in your mind's eye at least) rejoice with me, while I recount a day too soon gone, too full perhaps of erring reflection, too short of inspiration.
The relations between father and daughter had been made more intimate by her book of religious and philosophical speculation. Mr. Nightingale, it may be added, had enlarged Florence's allowance at the time of the marriage of his other daughter. Henceforth he undertook to pay, without question, all her bills for board and lodging, and to allow her £500 a year besides. She had made, too, a considerable sum by her Notes on Nursing, and was able to enlarge the scale of her benefactions. Among the first uses which she made of her enlarged means was to give £500 for the improvement of the school near Lea Hurst, in which her cousin Beatrice (who during these years often lived there with Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale) was greatly interested, especially for the sanitary improvement, for which purpose she asked her friend Mr. Chadwick to go on a visit to her parents and inspect the school buildings. She was careless of her own sanitary improvement, Dr. Sutherland had said; but she was very particular about that of her relations. When Mr. William Shore Smith—“her boy” of earlier days—was about to be married, and was house-hunting, she obtained from him a written promise, signed, sealed, and attested, that he would enter into no covenant until Dr. Sutherland had reported to her on the drains. When another of her cousins was to be married, Miss Nightingale's last good wishes, before the event, took the form of strict orders that the bride should put on “thick-soled fur slippers over her shoes in walking to the church. Tell her nothing depresses the spirits so much as a damp chill to the feet. She will wonder why she is so low.” I suspect some double entendre. Miss Nightingale, as we know, was not an enthusiast on marriage in the abstract. When at a later time one of her younger cousins wrote to announce her engagement, Aunt Florence's answer (by telegram) was strictly non-committal: “A thousand, thousand thanks for your letter.”
Miss Nightingale's correspondence during these years was mostly upon business, but she sometimes found time for the kind of letters which connoisseurs in that pleasant art account the best—letters about nothing in particular. In this kind, her old friend, Madame Mohl continued to be favoured, and these letters seldom lacked the caustic touch which their recipient relished, as in this:—
(Miss Nightingale to Madame Mohl.) June 6 [1859].… Balzac somewhere says how all the world, friends and enemies, se fait complice de nos défauts. And I have heard you observe that English mothers act Greek chorus to their children. Do, you philosophers (I am passée and off the philosophizing stage), come over and explain to us English society now—where everybody has some little moral reason for doing everything that he likes, where health is made the excuse for neglecting every duty and at the same time the not being able to perform said duty is deplored as the “only cross”—how much more dangerous are our moralities than our immoralities. Everybody has everything[506] both ways here. When I lived in society (English) it seemed to me that, in conversation, people, but more especially women, were always doing one or more of three things:—(1) Addressing themselves: as when they adduce those little moral reasons for doing whatever they like. (2) Saying something to mean something else. Since I began what M. Mohl calls my War against Red Tape, the commonest argument brought against me both by men and women, the best and cleverest, and within the last week too, is that I am led by “dishonest flatterers” and that they trust I may “awaken to a sense of my duty as a woman.” Now they don't really believe that I am led by “dishonest flattery.” But they think I shall not like it to be supposed that I am. This is only an anecdote (I hate anecdotes, don't you?). But it is a very fair illustration of my No. 2. (3) Acting an amiable or humble idea: as when people tell an ill-natured story and then its palliation, and then say “We might have been worse.” And all the while all they mean to be in your mind is, how amiable they are and how humble they are, and they mean you to believe the story and not the palliation.… I have done with being amiable. It is the mother of mischief.
Miss Nightingale may have “done with being amiable”; but she had certainly not done with a lively sense of humour. At the Burlington one day, or rather one night, there was a domestic catastrophe. Miss Nightingale's dressing-room was flooded. She sent a characteristic account of the subsequent proceedings to her cousin:—
(Miss Nightingale to Miss H. Bonham Carter.) [1861.] … I have just re-enacted the Crimea on a small scale. Everybody “did their duty,” and I was drowned. But so distrustful was I of the results of their duty that I extorted from Mr. X. a weekly inspection of the cistern. I acted myself and no one has yet been drowned again. Mr. X. convinced four men—Sir Harry Verney, Papa, Uncle Sam, Uncle Octavius—whom I brought under weigh, that it was the frost and that he had done all that was possible. Then I had up Mr. X., and he admitted at once that it was nothing to do with the frost, and that what the workmen had done, viz. not altering the waste-pipe, was “rascally.” I said he came off with an excuse. And I came off with a “severe internal congestion,” vide Medical Certificate. I have had a larger responsibility of human lives than ever man or woman had before. And I attribute my success to this:—I never gave or took an excuse. Yes, I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act and they make excuses.
Landlords might be brow-beaten; servants had to be bribed. The prophetess had no honour in her own hotel. The maids at the Burlington had not mastered the elements of household hygiene as set out in Notes on Nursing. Amongst Miss Nightingale's papers there is this document: “August 16, 1860. If for one fortnight from this time I find all the doors shut and all the windows open, and if … I will give the servants a Doctor's Fee, viz. One Guinea.—Signed, F. Nightingale.”
The Burlington Hotel continued to be Miss Nightingale's principal home till August 1861. The house, No. 30 in Old Burlington Street, still stands, and a memorial tablet might well be affixed by the London County Council or the Society of Arts. No other spot, in this country, has associations with so much of Miss Nightingale's public work. It was there that she wrote the famous Report on her experiences in the Crimea, and there that she had the historic interview with Lord Panmure—the starting-point for the great and manifold reforms which she and Mr. Herbert carried out for the health of the British Army. It was there, too, that she wrote her Notes on Hospitals and Notes on Nursing—the books which helped to make a new epoch in hospital reform and to found the art of modern nursing; and there that she thought out the scheme for professional training which has made “Nightingale Nurses” known throughout the world. Soon after Lord Herbert's death in August 1861, Miss Nightingale left Old Burlington Street. She was fond of the house. She had found no other place in London so convenient for her work. She had preferred to stay there rather than to accept the royal invitation to Kensington Palace. But the associations of the Burlington, as she said to many friends at the time, had now become too painful. After the loss of her “dear Master,” she never visited it again. The death of Sidney Herbert closed a chapter in the life of Florence Nightingale.
Footnotes:
[302] At Aylesbury, Sept. 21, 1864.
[303] Nutting, vol. ii. pp. 207–8.
[306] Speech on Lord Ebrington's Resolutions, May 11, 1858.
[307] Notes on Hospitals, 1859, pp. 100, 108.
[308] Under-Secretary for War, when Mr. Herbert was made a Peer.
[309] Mr. Nightingale bought Embley from the Heathcote family.
[310] Eldest son of the John Bonham Carter mentioned above (p. 29); M.P. for Winchester; first cousin of Miss Nightingale and of Mrs. Galton.
[311] Miss Sellon had called her attention to the sad plight through unemployment of the Spitalfields weavers, as had Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge to that of those at Coventry. Miss Nightingale, with help from Mr. Bracebridge, enlisted Mr. Adshead in a scheme for migrating them to Lancashire. He and she took infinite pains in the matter, but the scheme came to little. When it reached the point, Miss Sellon's friends were not ready to go.
[312] A Contribution, p. 3 (Bibliography A, No. 14).
[313] Hospital Statistics (Bibliography A, No. 28).
[314] Hospital Statistics. Of course the statistics would have to be interpreted.
[315] See Bibliography A, No. 28.
[317] Lords' debate, July 24; principal Commons' debate, July 12, 1860.
[319] Kaiserswerth, p. 15.
[320] Times, April 15, 1857.
[322] Forster's Life of Dickens, vol. ii. p. 30.
[324] Hospitals and Sisterhoods. London, John Murray, 1854 (2nd ed., 1855). Anonymous, but known to be the work of Miss Mary Stanley.
[325] “Report on the Nursing Arrangements of the London Hospitals” (at the time and twenty years before) in the British Medical Journal, Feb. 28, 1874.
[326] St. John's House: a Record, p. 10.
[327] See his Address to the Abernethian Society in 1885 given in his Memoir and Letters, 1901, p. 351.
[328] Facts relating to Hospital Nurses.… Also Observations on Training Establishments for Hospitals, 1857, pp. 11, 16.
[329] A Century of Family Letters, vol. ii. p. 174.
[330] Saturday Review, Jan. 21, 1860.
[331] Hornby, p. 306.
[332] “The chapter on Minding the Baby,” wrote Mr. Jowett (Aug. 24, 1868), “is excellent. I particularly like the parenthesis (‘though he's not our baby’) in which a world of morality is contained.”
[333] Bibliography A, No. 32.
[334] The saying is recorded in C. R. Leslie's Autobiographical Recollections, vol. i. p. 169, as made to Lady Holland. “Oh!” said the lady, tapping him with her fan, “you have lived among such a rantipole set.” “I happen to know,” wrote Monckton Milnes to Miss Nightingale, “who Lord Melbourne's nurse was.”
[335] Reprint from Quain's Dictionary, p. 12.
[336] Life and Labour of the People in London. Final volume, 1903, p. 154.
[337] The 50th anniversary of the event, not noticed, I think, in England, was celebrated in America: see Vol. II. p. 421.
[338] The Council consisted of Mr. Herbert, Mr. Bracebridge, Lord Ellesmere, Sir Joshua Jebb, Sir James Clark, Dr. Bowman, the Dean of Hereford, Sir John McNeill, and Dr. Bence Jones.
[340] “Your letter strikes me,” wrote Mr. Herbert (March 22), “as a little too curt for the occasion.” He suggested another form of words to her which she adopted.
[342] British Medical Journal, Dec. 31, 1892. Mrs. Wardroper retired in 1887, and died in 1892.
[343] British Medical Journal, Dec. 31, 1892.
[344] St. James's Magazine, April 1861. The writer was Mrs. S. C. Hall.
[345] Report of the Committee of the Council of the Nightingale Fund for the year ending June 24, 1861.
[346] On April 11, 1861, Sir James Paget wrote to Miss Nightingale begging her to send him a scheme as “Bartholomew's is beginning to consider the training of nurses.”
[347] History of Nursing, vol. ii. p. 184.
[350] Mill's two letters on Suggestions for Thought are those printed, as “To a Correspondent,” at vol. i. pp. 238–242 of the Letters of John Stuart Mill (1910).
[351] The Subjection of Women, chap. iii. p. 144: “A celebrated woman, in a work which I hope will some day be published, remarks truly that everything a woman does is done at odd times.” A good deal of Mill's treatment of this branch of his subject recalls Miss Nightingale's Suggestions.
[352] Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, by Abbott and Campbell, vol. i. p. 270.
[353] “And there may be some tender and delicate woman among us, who feels that she has a Divine vocation to fulfil the most repulsive offices towards the dying inmates of a hospital, or the soldier perishing in a foreign land” (Essays and Reviews, 1860).
[354] In some testamentary instructions, made early in 1862, she expressed a desire that the “stuff” should be “revised and arranged according to the hints of Mr. Jowett and Mr. Mill, but without altering the spirit according to their principles with which I entirely disagree. But he who would have done this is gone”—doubtless a reference to Mr. Clough. In 1865 she asked Mr. Jowett himself if he would edit the “stuff” for her. But he remained of his former opinion that it required to be recast entirely: it was, he said (April 24), “rather the preparation or materials of a book than a book itself.”
[356] From a letter to her father.
[357] Letters of Benjamin Jowett, 1899, p. 245.
[358] The article on Cavour was in July; that on Tocqueville, in October.
[359] For an application of her religious views to the care of India, see the passage quoted in vol. ii. p. 1.
[360] In 1867 he proposed to close the hospital which her friends the Nuns of Bermondsey had opened in Great Ormond Street. They of course “went to Miss Nightingale.” She persuaded Lady Herbert to intercede for the nuns, but Manning would not yield further than to refer the case to Rome. Miss Nightingale then organized a party at Rome on the side of the nuns. There is an extensive correspondence amongst her papers on this subject. She defeated Manning in this matter.
[361] Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, 1883, vol. i. p. 19.
[362] Cleanthes, freely rendered by J. A. Symonds.
[363] George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters, vol. ii. p. 84.
[364] Notes on Nursing, ed. 1860, p. 88.
[365] Tacitus, Agricola.
[366] Suggestions for Thought, vol. ii. p. 90.
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Transcriber's Note
The original spelling and minor inconsistencies in the spelling and formatting have been maintained.
Inconsistent hyphenation is as in the original.
| The table below lists all corrections applied to the original text. |
| p xxvi: reforms in that country → country. |
| p 11: Hilary. Your affecte → affect |
| P 30: almost passionate fulness → fullness |
| p 36: her such a fulness → fullness |
| p 38: and tears of ectasy → ecstasy |
| p 73: quite made us start → startle |
| p 92: They staid → stayed |
| p 92: die mit überfliezendem → überfließendem |
| p 92: beherbergt” Eine → (Eine |
| p 132: I came. Mr. → M. |
| p 132: F. N → F. N. |
| p 156: solely under your controul → control |
| p 187: Mary Aloysius, p. 17 → p. 17. |
| p 239: “ … The first time → … The first time |
| P 259: to learn that that → to learn that |
| p 367: by a complete breakdown → breakdown. |
| p 367: and could not, take → take. |
| p 416: children's hospitals there → there. |
| p 432: men and hospital officials → officials. |
| P 437: OLD BURLINGTON St. → ST. |
| p 491: 1858–1861 → (1858–1861) |
| p 514: [English Men of Letters. → Letters.] |