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THE LIFE OF
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

MISS NIGHTINGALE.

(From a photograph by S. G. Payne & Son.)

THE LIFE
OF
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

BY
SARAH A. TOOLEY

AUTHOR OF “PERSONAL LIFE OF QUEEN VICTORIA,” “LIFE OF QUEEN
ALEXANDRA,” “ROYAL PALACES AND THEIR MEMORIES,” “THE
HISTORY OF NURSING IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE,” ETC.

MEMORIAL EDITION

CASSELL AND COMPANY, Ltd.
LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO
THE LADY HERBERT OF LEA
THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND OF
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
THIS BOOK
IS BY PERMISSION
Dedicated

PREFACE

The writing of the Life of Florence Nightingale was undertaken with the object of marking the jubilee of the illustrious heroine who left London on October 21st, 1854, with a band of thirty-eight nurses for service in the Crimean War. Her heroic labours on behalf of the sick and wounded soldiers have made her name a household word in every part of the British Empire, and it was a matter for national congratulation that Miss Nightingale lived to celebrate such a memorable anniversary.

A striking proof of the honour in which her name is held by the rising generation was given a short time ago, when the editor of The Girl’s Realm took the votes of his readers as to the most popular heroine in modern history. Fourteen names were submitted, and of the 300,000 votes given, 120,776 were for Florence Nightingale.

No trouble has been spared to make the book as accurate and complete as possible, and when writing it I spent several months in the vicinity of Miss Nightingale’s early homes, and received much kind assistance from people of all classes acquainted with her. In particular I would thank Lady Herbert of Lea for accepting the dedication of the book and for portraits of herself and Lord Herbert; Sir Edmund Verney for permission to publish the picture of the late Lady Verney and views of Claydon; Pastor Düsselhoff of Kaiserswerth for the portrait of Pastor Fliedner and some recollections of Miss Nightingale’s training in that institution; the late Sister Mary Aloysius, of the Convent of Sisters of Mercy, Kinvara, co. Galway, for memories of her work at Scutari Hospital; and Mr. Crowther, Librarian of the Public Library, Derby, for facilities for studying the collection of material relating to Miss Nightingale presented to the Library by the late Duke of Devonshire.

In the preparation of the revised edition I am indebted to Lady Verney, the late Hon. Frederick Strutt, and Mrs. Dacre Craven for valuable suggestions.

SARAH A. TOOLEY

Kensington.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LIFE OF
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

CHAPTER I
BIRTH AND ANCESTRY

Birth at Florence—Shore Ancestry—Peter Nightingale of Lea—Florence Nightingale’s Parents.

We are born into life—it is sweet, it is strange,

We lie still on the knee of a mild mystery

Which smiles with a change;

But we doubt not of changes, we know not of spaces,

The heavens seem as near as our own mother’s face is,

And we think we could touch all the stars that we see.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Thought and deed, not pedigree, are the passports to enduring fame.—General Skobeleff.

At a dinner given to the military and naval officers who had served in the Crimean War, it was suggested that each guest should write on a slip of paper the name of the person whose services during the late campaign would be longest remembered by posterity. When the papers were examined, each bore the same name—“Florence Nightingale.”

The prophecy is fulfilled to-day, for though little more than fifty years have passed since the joy-bells throughout the land proclaimed the fall of Sebastopol, the majority of people would hesitate if asked to name the generals of the Allied Armies, while no one would be at a loss to tell who was the heroine of the Crimea. Her deeds of love and sacrifice sank deep into the nation’s heart, for they were above the strife of party and the clash of arms. While Death has struck name after name from the nation’s roll of the great and famous, our heroine lives in venerated age to shed the lustre of her name upon a new century.

Florence Nightingale was born on May 12th, 1820, at the Villa Colombaia near Florence, where her parents, Mr. and Mrs. William Shore Nightingale, of Lea, Derbyshire, were staying.

“What name should be given to the baby girl born so far away from her English home?” queried her parents, and with mutual consent they decided to call her “Florence,” after that fair city of flowers on the banks of the Arno where she first saw the light. Little did Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale then think that the name thus chosen was destined to become one of the most popular throughout the British Empire. Every “Florence” practically owes her name to the circumstances of Miss Nightingale’s birth.

It seemed as though the fates were determined to give an attractive designation to our heroine. While “Florence” suggested the goddess of flowers, “Nightingale” spoke of sweet melody. What could be more beautiful and euphonious than a name suggesting a song-bird from the land of flowers? The combination proved a special joy to Mr. Punch and his fellow-humorists when the bearer of the name rose to fame.

However, Miss Nightingale’s real family name was Shore. Her father was William Edward Shore, the only son of William Shore of Tapton, Derbyshire, and he assumed the name of Nightingale, by the sign manual of the Prince Regent, when he succeeded in 1815 to the estates of his mother’s uncle, Peter Nightingale of Lea. This change took place three years before his marriage, and five before the birth of his illustrious daughter.

Through her Shore ancestry Miss Nightingale is connected with the family of Baron Teignmouth. Sir John Shore, Governor-General of India, was created a baron in 1797 and took the title of Teignmouth. Another John Shore was an eminent physician at Derby in the reign of Charles II., and a Samuel Shore married the heiress of the Offleys, a Sheffield family.

It is through her paternal grandmother, Mary, daughter of John Evans of Cromford, the niece and sole heir of Peter Nightingale, that Florence Nightingale is connected with the family whose name she bears. Her great-great-uncle, Peter Nightingale, was a typical Derbyshire squire who more than a century ago lived in good style at the fine old mansion of Lea Hall. Those were rough and roystering days in such isolated villages as Lea, and “old Peter” had his share of the vices then deemed gentlemanly. He could swear with the best, and his drinking feats might have served Burns for a similar theme to The Whistle. His excesses gained for him the nickname of “Madman Nightingale,” and accounts of his doings still form the subject of local gossip. When in his cups, he would raid the kitchen, take the puddings from the pots and fling them on the dust-heap, and cause the maids to fly in terror. Nevertheless, “old Peter” was not unpopular; he was good-natured and easy going with his people, and if he drank hard, well, so did his neighbours. He was no better and little worse than the average country squire, and parson too, of the “good old times.” His landed possessions extended from Lea straight away to the old market town of Cromford, and beyond towards Matlock. It is of special interest to note that he sold a portion of his Cromford property to Sir Richard Arkwright, who erected there his famous cotton mills. The beautiful mansion of Willersley Castle, which the ingenious cotton-spinner built, and where he ended his days as the great Sir Richard, stands on a part of the original Nightingale property. When “old Peter” of jovial memory passed to his account, his estates and name descended to his grand-nephew, William Edward Shore.

The new squire, Florence Nightingale’s father, was a marked contrast to his predecessor. He is described by those who remember him as a tall, slim, gentlemanly man of irreproachable character. He had been educated at Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge, and had broadened his mind by foreign travel at a time when the average English squire, still mindful of the once terrifying name of “Boney,” looked upon all foreigners as his natural enemies, and entrenched himself on his ancestral acres with a supreme contempt for lands beyond the Channel. Mr. Nightingale was far in advance of the county gentry of his time in matters of education and culture. Sport had no special attraction for him, but he was a student, a lover of books and a connoisseur in art. He was not without a good deal of pride of birth, for the Shores were a very ancient family.

As a landlord he had a sincere desire to benefit the people on his estates, although not perhaps in the way they most appreciated. “Well, you see, I was not born generous,” is still remembered as Mr. Nightingale’s answer when solicited for various local charities. However, he never begrudged money for the support of rural education, and, to quote the saying of one of his old tenants, “Many poor people in Lea would not be able to read and write to-day, if it had not been for ‘Miss Florence’s’ father.” He was the chief supporter of what was then called the “cheap school,” where the boys and girls, if they did not go through the higher standards of the present-day schools, at least learned the three R’s for the sum of twopence a week. There was, of course, no compulsory education then, but the displeasure of the squire with people who neglected to send their children to school was a useful incentive to parents. Mr. Nightingale was a zealous Churchman, and did much to further Christian work in his district.

Florence Nightingale’s mother was Miss Frances Smith, daughter of William Smith, Esq., of Parndon in Essex, who for fifty years was M.P. for Norwich. He was a pronounced Abolitionist, took wide and liberal views on the questions of the time, and was noted for his interest in various branches of philanthropy. Mrs. Nightingale was imbued with her father’s spirit, and is remembered for her great kindness and benevolence to the poor. She was a stately and beautiful woman in her prime and one of the fast-dying-out race of gentlewomen who were at once notable house-keepers and charming and cultured ladies. Her name is still mentioned with gratitude and affection by the old people of her husband’s estates.

It was from her mother, whom she greatly resembles, that Florence Nightingale inherited the spirit of wide philanthropy and the desire to break away, in some measure, from the bonds of caste which warped the county gentry in her early days and devote herself to humanitarian work. She was also fortunate in having a father who believed that a girl’s head could carry something more than elegant accomplishments and a knowledge of cross-stitch. While our heroine’s mother trained her in deeds of benevolence, her father inspired her with a love for knowledge and guided her studies on lines much in advance of the usual education given to young ladies at that period.

Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale had only two children—Frances Parthenope, afterwards Lady Verney, and Florence, about a year younger. Both sisters were named after the Italian towns where they were born, the elder receiving the name of Parthenope, the classic form of Naples, and was always known as “Parthe,” while our heroine was Florence.

CHAPTER II
EARLIEST ASSOCIATIONS

Lea Hall first English Home—Neighbourhood of Babington Plot—Dethick Church.

... Those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

Are yet a master light of all our seeing.

Wordsworth.

When Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale returned from abroad with their two little daughters, they lived for a time at the old family seat of Lea Hall, which therefore has the distinction of being the first English home of Florence Nightingale, an honour generally attributed to her parents’ subsequent residence of Lea Hurst.

Lea Hall is beautifully situated high up amongst the hills above the valley of the Derwent. I visited it in early summer when the meadows around were golden with buttercups and scented with clover, and the long grass stood ready for the scythe. Wild roses decked the hedgerows, and the elder-bushes, which grow to a great size in this part of Derbyshire, made a fine show with their white blossoms. Seen then, the old grey Hall seemed a pleasant country residence; but when the north wind blows and snow covers the hillsides, it must be a bleak and lonely abode. It is plainly and solidly built of grey limestone from the Derbyshire quarries, and is of good proportions. From its elevated position it has an imposing look, and forms a landmark in the open country. Leading from it, the funny old village street of Lea, with its low stone houses, some of them very ancient, curls round the hillside downwards to the valley. The butcher proudly displays a ledger with entries for the Nightingale family since 1835.

The Hall stands on the ancient Manor of Lea, which includes the villages of Lea, Dethick, and Holloway, and which passed through several families before it became the property of the Nightingales. The De Alveleys owned the manor in the reign of John and erected a chapel there. One portion of the manor passed through the families of Ferrar, Dethwick, and Babington, and another portion through the families of De la Lea, Frecheville, Rollestone, Pershall, and Spateman to that of the Nightingales.

The house stands a little back from the Lea road in its own grounds, and is approached by a gate from the front garden. Stone steps lead up to the front door, which opens into an old-fashioned flag-paved hall. Facing the door is an oak staircase of exceptional beauty. It gives distinction to the house and proclaims its ancient dignity. The balustrade has finely turned spiral rails, the steps are of solid oak, and the sides of the staircase panelled in oak. One may imagine the little Florence making her first efforts at climbing up this handsome old staircase.

In a room to the left the date 1799 has been scratched upon one of the window-panes, but the erection of the Hall must have been long before that time. For the rest, it is a rambling old house with thick walls and deep window embrasures. The ceilings are moderately high. There is an old-fashioned garden at the back, with fruit and shady trees and a particularly handsome copper beech.

The Hall has long been used as a farmhouse, and scarcely one out of the hundreds of visitors to the Matlock district who go on pilgrimages to Lea Hurst knows of its interesting association. The old lady who occupied it at the time of my visit was not a little proud of the fact that for forty-four years she had lived in the first English home of Florence Nightingale.

The casual visitor might think the district amid which our heroine’s early years were spent was a pleasant Derbyshire wild and nothing more, but it has also much historic interest. Across the meadows from Lea Hall are the remains of the stately mansion of Dethick, where dwelt young Anthony Babington when he conspired to release Mary Queen of Scots from her imprisonment at Wingfield Manor, a few miles away. Over these same meadows and winding lanes Queen Elizabeth’s officers searched for the conspirators and apprehended one at Dethick. The mansion where the plot was hatched has been largely destroyed, and what remains is used for farm purposes. Part of the old wall which enclosed the original handsome building still stands, and beside it is an underground cellar which according to tradition leads into a secret passage to Wingfield Manor. The farm bailiff who stores his potatoes in the cellar has not been able to find the entrance to the secret passage, though at one side of the wall there is a suspicious hollow sound when it is hammered.

The original kitchen of the mansion remains intact in the bailiff’s farmhouse. There is the heavy oak-beamed ceiling, black with age, the ponderous oak doors, the great open fireplace, desecrated by a modern cooking range in the centre, but which still retains in the overhanging beam the ancient roasting jack which possibly cooked venison for Master Anthony and the other gallant young gentlemen who had sworn to liberate the captive Queen. In the roof of the ceiling is an innocent-looking little trap-door which, when opened, reveals a secret chamber of some size. This delightful old kitchen, with its mysterious memories, was a place of great fascination to Florence Nightingale and her sister in their childhood, and many stories did they weave about the scenes which transpired long ago in the old mansion, so near their own home. It was a source of peculiar interest to have the scenes of a real Queen Mary romance close at hand, and gave zest to the subject when the sisters read about the Babington plot in their history books.

Dethick Church, where our heroine attended her first public service, and continued to frequently worship so long as she lived in Derbyshire, formed a part of the Babingtons’ domain. It was originally the private chapel of the mansion, but gradually was converted to the uses of a parish church. Its tall tower forms a picturesque object from the windows of Lea Hall. The church must be one of the smallest in the kingdom. Fifty persons would prove an overflowing congregation even now that modern seating has utilised space, but in Florence Nightingale’s girlhood, when the quality sat in their high-backed pews and the rustics on benches at the farther end of the church, the sitting room was still more limited. The interior of the church is still plain and rustic, with bare stone walls, and the bell ropes hanging in view of the congregation. The service was quaint in Miss Nightingale’s youth, when the old clerk made the responses to the parson, and the preaching sometimes took an original turn. The story is still repeated in the district that the old parson, preaching one Sunday on the subject of lying, made the consoling remark that “a lie is sometimes a very useful thing in trade.” The saying was often repeated by the farmers of Lea and Dethick in the market square of Derby.

Owing to the fact that Dethick Church was originally a private chapel, there is no graveyard. It stands in a pretty green enclosure on the top of a hill. An old yew-tree shades the door, and near by are two enormous elder-bushes, which have twined their great branches together until they fall down to the ground like a drooping ash, forming an absolutely secluded bower, very popular with lovers and truants from church.

The palmy days of old Dethick Church are past. No longer do the people from the surrounding villages and hamlets climb its steep hillside, Sunday by Sunday, for, farther down in the vale, a new church has recently been built at Holloway, which, if less picturesque, is certainly more convenient for the population. On the first Sunday in each month, however, a service is still held in the old church where, in days long ago, Florence Nightingale sat in the squire’s pew, looking in her Leghorn hat and sandal shoes a very bonny little maiden indeed.

CHAPTER III
LEA HURST

Removal to Lea Hurst—Description of the House—Florence Nightingale’s Crimean Carriage preserved there.

L o! in the midst of Nature’s choicest scenes,

E mbosomed ’mid tall trees, and towering hills,

A gem, in Nature’s setting, rests Lea Hurst.

H ome of the good, the pure at heart and beautiful,

U ndying is the fame which, like a halo’s light,

R ound thee is cast by the bright presence of the holy Florence

S aint-like and heavenly. Thou hast indeed a glorious fame

T ime cannot change, but which will be eternal.

Llewellyn Jewett.

When Florence Nightingale was between five and six years old, the family removed from Lea Hall to Lea Hurst, a house which Mr. Nightingale had been rebuilding on a site about a mile distant, and immediately above the hamlet of Lea Mills. This delightful new home is the one most widely associated with the life of our heroine. To quote the words of the old lady at the lodge, “It was from Lea Hurst as Miss Florence set out for the Crimea, and it was to Lea Hurst as Miss Florence returned from the Crimea.” For many years after the war it was a place of pilgrimage, and is mentioned in almost every guidebook as one of the attractions of the Matlock district. It has never been in any sense a show house, and the park is private, but in days gone by thousands of people came to the vicinity, happy if they could see its picturesque gables from the hillside, and always with the hope that a glimpse might be caught of the famous lady who lived within its walls. Miss Nightingale remains tenderly attached to Lea Hurst, although it is eighteen years since she last stayed there. After the death of her parents it passed to the next male heir, Mr. Shore Smith, who later assumed the name of Nightingale.

LEA HURST, DERBYSHIRE.

(Photo by Keene, Derby.)

[To face p. 16.

Lea Hurst is only fourteen miles from Derby, but the following incident would lead one to suppose that the house is not as familiar in the county town as might be expected. Not long ago a lady asked at a fancy stationer’s shop for a photograph of Lea Hurst.

“Lea Hurst?” pondered the young saleswoman, and turning to her companion behind the counter, she inquired, “Have we a photograph of Lea Hurst?”

“Yes, I think so,” was the reply.

“Who is Lea Hurst?” asked the first girl.

“Why, an actor of course,” replied the second.

There was an amusing tableau when the truth was made known.

Miss Nightingale’s father displayed a fine discrimination when he selected the position for his new house. One might search even the romantic Peak country in vain for a more ideal site than Lea Hurst. It stands on a broad plateau looking across to the sharp, bold promontory of limestone rock known as Crich Stand. Soft green hills and wooded heights stud the landscape, while deep down in the green valley the silvery Derwent—or “Darent,” as the natives call it—makes music as it dashes over its rocky bed. The outlook is one of perfect repose and beauty away to Dove’s romantic dale, and the aspect is balmy and sunny, forming in this respect a contrast to the exposed and bleak situation of Lea Hall.

The house is in the style of an old Elizabethan mansion, and now that time has mellowed the stone and clothed the walls with greenery, one might imagine that it really dated from the Tudor period. Mr. Nightingale was a man of artistic tastes, and every detail of the house was carefully planned for picturesque effect. The mansion is built in the form of a cross with jutting wings, and presents a picture of clustering chimneys, pointed gables, stone mullioned windows and latticed panes. The fine oriel window of the drawing-room forms a projecting wing at one end of the house. The rounded balcony above the window has become historic. It is pointed out to visitors as the place where “Miss Florence used to come out and speak to the people.” Miss Nightingale’s room opened on to this balcony, and after her return from the Crimea, when she was confined to the house with delicate health, she would occasionally step from her room on to the balcony to speak to the people, who had come as deputations, while they stood in the park below. Facing the oriel balcony is a gateway, shadowed by yew-trees, which forms one of the entrances from the park to the garden.

In front of the house is a circular lawn with gravel path and flower-beds, and above the hall door is inscribed N. and the date 1825, the year in which Lea Hurst was completed. The principal rooms open on to the garden or south front, and have a delightfully sunny aspect and a commanding view over the vale. From the library a flight of stone steps leads down to the lawn. The old schoolroom and nursery where our heroine passed her early years are in the upper part of the house and have lovely views over the hills.

In the centre of the garden front of the mansion is a curious little projecting building which goes by the name of “the chapel.” It is evidently an ancient building effectively incorporated into Lea Hurst. There are several such little oratories of Norman date about the district, and the old lady at Lea Hurst lodge shows a stone window in the side of her cottage which is said to be seven hundred years old. A stone cross surmounts the roof of the chapel, and outside on the end wall is an inscription in curious characters. This ancient little building has, however, a special interest for our narrative, as Miss Nightingale used it for many years as the meeting place for the Sunday afternoon Bible-class which she held for the girls of the district. In those days there was a large bed of one of Miss Nightingale’s favourite flowers, the fuchsia, outside the chapel, but that has been replaced by a fountain and basin, and the historic building itself, with its thick stone walls, now makes an excellent larder.

The gardens at Lea Hurst slope down from the back of the house in a series of grassy terraces connected by stone steps, and are still preserved in all their old-fashioned charm and beauty. There in spring and early summer one sees wallflowers, peonies, pansies, forget-me-nots, and many-coloured primulas in delightful profusion, while the apple trellises which skirt the terraces make a pretty show with their pink blossoms, and the long border of lavender-bushes is bursting into bloom. In a secluded corner of the garden is an old summer-house with pointed roof of thatch which must have been a delightful playhouse for little Florence and her sister.

The park slopes down on either side the plateau on which the house stands. The entrance to the drive is in the pleasant country road which leads to the village of Whatstandwell and on to Derby. This very modest park entrance, consisting of an ordinary wooden gate supported by stone pillars with globes on the top, has been described by an enthusiastic chronicler as a “stately gateway” with “an air of mediæval grandeur.” There is certainly no grandeur about Lea Hurst, either mediæval or modern. It is just one of those pleasant and picturesque country mansions which are characteristic of rural England, and no grandeur is needed to give distinction to a house which the name of Florence Nightingale has hallowed.

Beyond the park the Lea woods cover the hillside for some distance, and in spring are thickly carpeted with bluebells. A long winding avenue, from which magnificent views are obtained over the hills and woodland glades for many miles, skirts the top of the woods, and is still remembered as “Miss Florence’s favourite walk.”

The chief relic preserved at Lea Hurst is the curious old carriage used by Miss Nightingale in the Crimea. What memories does it not suggest of her journeys from one hospital to another over the heights of Balaclava, when its utmost carrying capacity was filled with comforts for the sick and wounded! The body of the carriage is of basket-work, and it has special springs made to suit the rough Crimean roads. There is a hood which can be half or fully drawn over the entire vehicle. The carriage was driven by a mounted man acting as postilion.

It seems as though such a unique object ought to have a permanent place in one of our public museums, for its interest is national. A native of the district, who a short time ago chanced to see the carriage, caught the national idea and returned home lamenting that he could not put the old carriage on wheels and take it from town to town. “There’s a fortune in the old thing,” said he, “for most folks would pay a shilling or a sixpence to see the very identical carriage in which Miss Florence took the wounded about in those Crimean times. It’s astonishing what little things please people in the way of a show. Why, that carriage would earn money enough to build a hospital!”

CHAPTER IV
THE DAYS OF CHILDHOOD

Romantic Journeys from Lea Hurst to Embley Park—George Eliot Associations—First Patient—Love of Animals and Flowers—Early Education.

The childhood shows the man,

As morning shows the day.

Milton.

There is a lesson in each flower;

A story in each stream and bower;

On every herb o’er which you tread

Are written words which, rightly read,

Will lead you from earth’s fragrant sod,

To hope and holiness and God.

Allan Cunningham.

The childhood of Florence Nightingale, begun, as we have seen, in the sunny land of Italy, was subsequently passed in the beautiful surroundings of her Derbyshire home, and at Embley Park, Hampshire, a fine old Elizabethan mansion, which Mr. Nightingale purchased when Florence was about six years old.

The custom was for the family to pass the summer at Lea Hurst, going in the autumn to Embley for the winter and early spring. And what an exciting and delightful time Florence and her sister Parthe had on the occasions of these alternative “flittings” between Derbyshire and Hampshire in the days before railroads had destroyed the romance of travelling! Then the now quiet little town of Cromford, two miles from Lea Hurst, was a busy coaching centre, and the stage coaches also stopped for passengers at the village inn of Whatstandwell, just below Lea Hurst Park. In those times the Derby road was alive with the pleasurable excitements of the prancing of horses, the crack of the coach-driver’s whip, the shouts of the post-boys, and the sound of the horn—certainly more inspiring and romantic sights and sounds than the present toot-toot of the motor-car, and the billows of dust-clouds which follow in its rear.

Sometimes the journey from Lea Hurst was made by coach, but more frequently Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale with their two little girls drove in their own carriage, proceeding by easy stages and putting up at inns en route, while the servants went before with the luggage to prepare Embley for the reception of the family.

How glorious it was in those bright October days to drive through the country, just assuming its dress of red and gold, or again in the return journey in the spring, when the hills and dales of Derbyshire were bursting into fresh green beauty. The passionate love for nature and the sights and sounds of rural life which has always characterised Miss Nightingale was implanted in these happy days of childhood. And so, too, were the homely wit and piquant sayings which distinguish her writings and mark her more intimate conversation. She acquired them unconsciously, as she encountered the country people.

In her Derbyshire home she lived in touch with the life which at the same period was weaving its spell about Marian Evans, when she visited her kinspeople, and was destined to be immortalised in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. Amongst her father’s tenants Florence Nightingale knew farmers’ wives who had a touch of Mrs. Poyser’s caustic wit, and was familiar with the “Yea” and “Nay” and other quaint forms of Derbyshire speech, such as Mr. Tulliver used when he talked to “the little wench” in the house-place of the ill-fated Mill on the Floss. She met, too, many of “the people called Methodists,” who in her girlhood were establishing their preaching-places in the country around Lea Hurst, and she heard of the fame of the woman preacher, then exercising her marvellous gifts in the Derby district, who was to become immortal as Dinah Morris. In Florence Nightingale’s early womanhood, Adam Bede lived in his thatched cottage by Wirksworth Tape Mills, a few miles from Lea Hurst, and the Poysers’ farm stood across the meadows.

The childhood of our heroine was passed amid surroundings which proved a singularly interesting environment. Steam power had not then revolutionised rural England: the counties retained their distinctive speech and customs, the young people remained on the soil where they were born, and the rich and the poor were thrown more intimately together. The effect of the greater personal intercourse then existing between the squire’s family and his people had an important influence on the character of Florence Nightingale in her Derbyshire and Hampshire homes. She learned sympathy with the poor and afflicted, and gained an understanding of the workings and prejudices of the uneducated mind, which enabled her in after years to be a real friend to those poor fellows fresh from the battlefields of the Crimea, many of whom had enlisted from the class of rural homes which she knew so well.

When quite a child, Florence Nightingale showed characteristics which pointed to her vocation in life. Her dolls were always in a delicate state of health and required the utmost care. Florence would undress and put them to bed with many cautions to her sister not to disturb them. She soothed their pillows, tempted them with imaginary delicacies from toy cups and plates, and nursed them to convalescence, only to consign them to a sick bed the next day. Happily, Parthe did not exhibit the same tender consideration for her waxen favourites, who frequently suffered the loss of a limb or got burnt at the nursery fire. Then of course Florence’s superior skill was needed, and she neatly bandaged poor dolly and “set” her arms and legs with a facility which might be the envy of the modern miraculous bone-setter.

The first “real live patient” of the future Queen of Nurses was Cap, the dog of an old Scotch shepherd, and although the story has been many times repeated since Florence Nightingale’s name became a household word, no account of her childhood would be complete without it. One day Florence was having a delightful ride over the Hampshire downs near Embley along with the vicar, for whom she had a warm affection. He took great interest in the little girl’s fondness for anything which had to do with the relief of the sick or injured, and as his own tastes lay in that direction, he was able to give her much useful instruction. However, on this particular day, as they rode along the downs, they noticed the sheep scattered in all directions and old Roger, the shepherd, vainly trying to collect them together.

“Where is your dog?” asked the vicar as he drew up his horse and watched the old man’s futile efforts.

“The boys have been throwing stones at him, sir,” was the reply, “and they have broken his leg, poor beast. He will never be any good for anything again and I am thinking of putting an end to his misery.”

“Poor Cap’s leg broken?” said a girlish voice at the clergyman’s side. “Oh, cannot we do something for him, Roger? It is cruel to leave him alone in his pain. Where is he?”

“You can’t do any good, missy,” said the old shepherd sorrowfully. “I’ll just take a cord to him to-night—that will be the best way to ease his pain. I left him lying in the shed over yonder.”

“Oh, can’t we do something for poor Cap?” pleaded Florence to her friend; and the vicar, seeing the look of pity in her young face, turned his horse’s head towards the distant shed where the dog lay. But Florence put her pony to the gallop and reached the shed first. Kneeling down on the mud floor, she caressed the suffering dog with her little hand, and spoke soothing words to it until the faithful brown eyes seemed to have less of pain in them and were lifted to her face in pathetic gratitude.

That look of the shepherd’s dog, which touched her girlish heart on the lonely hillside, Florence Nightingale was destined to see repeated in the eyes of suffering men as she bent over them in the hospital at Scutari.

The vicar soon joined his young companion, and finding that the dog’s leg was only injured, not broken, he decided that a little careful nursing would put him all right again.

“What shall I do first?” asked Florence, all eagerness to begin nursing in real earnest.

“Well,” said her friend, “I should advise a hot compress on Cap’s leg.”

Florence looked puzzled, for though she had poulticed and bandaged her dolls, she had never heard about a compress. However, finding that in plain language it meant cloths wrung out of boiling water, and laid upon the affected part, she set nimbly to work under the vicar’s directions. Boiling water was the first requisite, and calling in the services of the shepherd’s boy, she lighted a fire of sticks in the cottage near by, and soon had the kettle boiling.

Next thing, she looked round for cloths to make the compress. The shepherd’s clean smock hung behind the door, and Florence seized it with delight, for it was the very thing.

“If I tear it up, mamma will give Roger another,” she reasoned, and, at an approving nod from the vicar, tore the smock into suitable lengths for fomentation. Then going back to the place where the dog lay, accompanied by the boy carrying the kettle and a basin, Florence Nightingale set to work to give “first aid to the wounded.” Cap offered no resistance—he had a wise confidence in his nurse—and as she applied the fomentations the swelling began to go down, and the pain grew less.

Florence was resolved to do her work thoroughly, and a messenger having been despatched to allay her parents’ anxiety at her prolonged absence, she remained for several hours in attendance on her patient.

In the evening old Roger came slowly and sorrowfully towards the shed, carrying the fatal rope, but no sooner did he put his head in at the door than Cap greeted him with a whine of pleasure and tried to come towards him.

“Deary me, missy,” said the old shepherd in astonishment, “why, you have been doing wonders. I never thought to see the poor dog greet me again.”

“Yes, doesn’t he look better?” said the youthful nurse with pardonable pride. “You can throw away that rope now, and help me to make compresses.”

“That I will, missy,” said Roger, and stooping down beside Florence and Cap, he was initiated into the mysteries.

“Yes,” said the vicar, “Miss Florence is quite right, Roger—your dog will soon be able to walk again if you give it a little rest and care.”

“I am sure I can’t thank your reverence and the young lady enough,” replied the shepherd, quite overcome at the sight of his faithful dog’s look of content and the thought that he would not lose him after all; “and you may be sure, sir, I will carry out the instructions.”

“But I shall come again to-morrow, Roger,” interposed Florence, who had no idea of giving up her patient yet. “I know mamma will let me when I tell her about poor Cap.” After a parting caress to the dog, and many last injunctions to Roger, Florence mounted her pony and rode away with the vicar, her young heart very full of joy. She had really helped to lessen pain, if only for a dumb creature, and the grateful eyes of the suffering dog stirred a new feeling in her opening mind. She longed to be always doing something for somebody, and the poor people on her father’s estates soon learned what a kind friend they had in Miss Florence. They grew also to have unbounded faith in her skill, and whenever a pet animal was sick or injured, the owner would contrive to let “Miss Florence” know.

She and her sister were encouraged by Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale in a love of animals, and were allowed to have many pets. It was characteristic of Florence that her heart went out to the less favoured ones, those which owing to old age or infirmity were taken little notice of by the servants and farm-men. She was particularly attached to Peggy, an old grey pony long since past work, who spent her days in the paddock at Lea Hurst. Florence never missed a morning, if she could help it, without going to talk to Peggy, who knew her footstep, and would come trotting up to the gate ready to meet her young mistress. Then would follow some good-natured sport.

“Would you like an apple, poor old Peggy?” Florence would say as she fondled the pony’s neck; “then look for it.”

At this invitation Peggy would put her nose to the dress pocket of her little visitor and discover the delicacy. Or it might be a carrot, held well out of sight, which Peggy was invited to play hide-and-seek for. If the stable cat had kittens, it was Florence who gave them a welcome and fondled and played with the little creatures before any one else noticed them. She had, too, a quick eye for a hedge-sparrow’s nest, and would jealously guard the brooding mother’s secret until the fledgelings were hatched and ready to fly. Some of the bitterest tears of her childhood were shed over the broken-up homes of some of her feathered friends. The young animals in the fields were quickly won by her kind nature, and would come bounding towards her. Out in those beautiful Lea Hurst woods she made companions of the squirrels, who came fearlessly after her as she walked, to pick up the nuts mysteriously dropped in their path. Then, when master squirrel least expected it, Florence turned sharp round and away raced the little brown creature up the tall beech, only to come down again with a quizzical look in his keen little eye at nuts held too temptingly for any squirrel of ordinary appetite to resist. With what delight she watched their funny antics, for she had the gift to make these timid creatures trust her.

EMBLEY PARK, HAMPSHIRE.

(From a drawing by the late Lady Verney.)

[To face p. 32.

Then in spring-time there was sure to be a pet lamb to be fed, and Florence and her sister were indeed happy at this acquisition to the home pets. The pony which she rode and the dog which was ever at her side were of course her particular dumb friends. I am not sure, however, that she thought them dumb, for she and they understood one another perfectly. The love of animals, which was so marked a characteristic in Florence Nightingale as a child, remained with her throughout life and made her very sympathetic to invalids who craved for the company of some favourite animal. Many nurses and doctors disapprove of their patients having pets about them, but, to quote the Queen of Nurses’ own words, “A small pet animal is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially. An invalid, in giving an account of his nursing by a nurse and a dog, infinitely preferred that of the dog. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘it did not talk.’”

It was a great source of pleasure to Florence in her early years to be allowed to act as almoner for her mother. Mrs. Nightingale was very kind and benevolent to the people around Lea Hurst and Embley, and supplied the sick with delicacies from her own table. Indeed, she made her homes centres of beneficence for several miles around, and, according to the best traditions of those times, was ready with remedies for simple ailments when the doctor was not at hand. Owing to the fact that Florence had never had measles and whooping cough, her parents had to exercise great caution in permitting her to visit the cottage people; however, she could call at the doors on her pony and leave jelly and puddings from the basket at her saddle-bow without incurring special risk. And she could gather flowers from the garden to brighten a sick-room, or in the lovely spring days load her basket with primroses and bluebells and so carry the scent of the woods to some delicate girl who, like Tennyson’s May Queen, was pining for the sight of field and hedgerow and the flowers which grew but a little distance from her cottage door.

Such attentions to the fancies of the sick were little thought of in those times, before flower missions had come into vogue, or the necessity for cheering the patients by pleasing the eye, as well as tending the body, was recognised, but in that, as in much else, our heroine was in advance of her time. Her love of flowers, like fondness for animals, was a part of her nature: it came too as a fitting heritage from the city of flowers under whose sunny sky she had been born.

Both at Embley and Lea Hurst, Florence and her sister had their own little gardens, in which they digged and sowed and planted to their hearts’ delight, and in summer they ran about with their miniature watering cans, bestowing, doubtless, an almost equal supply on their own tiny feet as on the parched ground. In after years this early love of flowers had its pathetic sequel. When, after months of exhausting work amongst the suffering soldiers, Florence Nightingale lay in a hut on the heights of Balaclava, prostrate with Crimean fever, she relates that she first began to rally after receiving a bunch of flowers from a friend, and that the sight of them beside her sick couch helped her to throw off the languor which had nearly proved fatal. She dated her recovery from that hour.

In every respect the circumstances of Florence Nightingale’s childhood were calculated to fit her for the destiny which lay in the future. Not only was she reared among scenes of exceptional beauty in both her Derbyshire and her Hampshire homes and taught the privilege of ministering to the poor and sick, but she was mentally trained in advance of the custom of the day. Without that equipment she could not have held the commanding position which she attained in the work of army nursing and organisation.

She and her sister Parthe, being so near in age, did their lessons together. Their education was conducted entirely at home under a private governess, and was assiduously supervised by their father. Mr. Nightingale was a man of broad sympathies, artistic and intellectual tastes, and much general cultivation, and, having no sons, he made a hobby of giving a classical education to his girls, and found a fertile soil in the quick brain of his daughter Florence. He was a strict disciplinarian, and none of the desultory ways which characterised the home education of young ladies in the early Victorian days was allowed in the schoolrooms at Embley and Lea Hurst. Rules were rigidly fixed for lessons and play, and careless work was never passed unpunished. It was in the days of childhood that the future heroine of the Crimea laid the foundation of an orderly mind and a habit of method which served her so admirably when suddenly called to organise the ill-regulated hospital at Scutari.

As a child Florence excelled in the more intellectual branches of education and showed a great aptitude for foreign languages. She attained creditable proficiency in music and was clever at drawing, but in these artistic branches her elder sister Parthe excelled most. From her father Florence learned elementary science, Greek, Latin, and mathematics, and under his guidance, seated in the dear old library at Lea Hurst, made the acquaintance of standard authors and poets. But doubtless the sisters got an occasional romance not included in the paternal list and read it with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes in a secluded nook in the garden.

If study was made a serious business, the sisters enjoyed to the full the healthy advantages of country life. They scampered about the park with their dogs, rode their ponies over hill and dale, spent long days in the woods amongst the bluebells and primroses, and in summer tumbled about in the sweet-scented hay. During the summer at Lea Hurst, lessons were a little relaxed in favour of outdoor life, but on the return to Embley for the winter, schoolroom routine was again enforced on very strict lines.

Mrs. Nightingale supervised the domestic side of her little girls’ education, and before Florence was twelve years old she could hemstitch and seam, embroider bookmarkers, and had worked several creditable samplers. Her mother trained her too in matters of deportment, and nothing was omitted in her early years which would tend to mould her into a graceful and accomplished girl.

CHAPTER V
THE SQUIRE’S DAUGHTER

An Accomplished Girl—An Angel in the Homes of the Poor—Children’s “Feast Day” at Lea Hurst—Her Bible-Class for Girls—Interests at Embley—Society Life—Longing for a Vocation—Meets Elizabeth Fry—Studies Hospital Nursing—Decides to go to Kaiserswerth.

God made her so,

And deeds of week-day holiness

Fall from her gentle as the snow;

Nor hath she ever chanced to know

That aught were easier than to bless.

Lowell.

When Florence Nightingale reached her seventeenth year she began to take her place as the squire’s daughter, mingling in the county society of Derbyshire and Hampshire and interesting herself in the people and schools of her father’s estates. She soon acquired the reputation of being a very lovable young lady as well as a very talented one. She had travelled abroad, could speak French, German, and Italian, sang very sweetly, and was clever at sketching, and when the taking of photographs became a fashionable pastime, “Miss Florence” became an enthusiast for the art. There were no hand-cameras in those days and no clean and easy methods for developing, and young lady amateur photographers were obliged to dress for their work. Nothing daunted “Miss Florence,” and she photographed groups on the lawn and her pet animals to the admiration of her family and friends, if sometimes to the discoloration of her dainty fingers.

She was also a skilful needlewoman, and worked cushions and slippers, mastered the finest and most complicated crochet patterns, sewed delicate embroideries, and achieved almost invisible hems on muslin frills. At Christmas-time her work-basket was full of warm comforts for the poor. She was invaluable at bazaars, then a newly introduced method of raising money for religious purposes, and was particularly happy at organising treats for the old people and children.

The local clergy, both at Embley and Lea, found the squire’s younger daughter a great help in the parish. The traits of character which had shown themselves in the little girl who tended the shepherd’s injured dog, and was so ready with her sympathy for all who suffered or were in trouble, became strengthened in the budding woman and made Florence Nightingale regarded as an angel in the homes of the poor. Her visits to the cottages were eagerly looked for, and she showed even in her teens a genius for district visiting. The people regarded her not as the “visiting lady,” whom they were to impress with feigned woes or a pretence of abject poverty, but as a real friend who came to bring pleasure to their homes and to enter into their family joys and sorrows. She had a bright and witty way of talking which made the poor folks look forward to her visits quite apart from the favours she might bring.

If there was sickness or sorrow in any cottage home, the presence of “Miss Florence” was eagerly sought, for even at this period she had made some study of sick nursing and “seemed,” as the people said, “to have a way with her” which eased pain and brought comfort and repose to those who were suffering. She had, too, such a clear, sweet voice and sympathetic intonation that the sick derived great pleasure when she read to them.

As quite a young girl the bent of her mind was in the direction of leading a useful and beneficent life. She was in no danger of suffering from the ennui which beset so many girls of the leisured classes in those times, when there was so little in the way of outdoor sport and amusements or independent interests to fill up time. In whatsoever circumstances of life Florence Nightingale had been placed, her nature would have prompted her to discover useful occupation.

The “old squire,” as Mr. Nightingale is still called at Lea, took a great interest in the village school, and Florence became his right hand in looking after the amusements of the children. There were many little treats devised for them from time to time, but the great event of the year was the children’s “feast day,” when the scholars assembled at the school-house and walked in procession to Lea Hurst, carrying “posies” in their hands and sticks wreathed with garlands of flowers. A band provided by the squire headed the procession. Arrived at Lea Hurst, the company were served with tea in the field below the garden, Mrs. Nightingale and her daughters assisting the servants to wait upon their guests. After tea, the band struck up lively airs and the lads and lasses danced in a style which recalled the olden times in Merrie England, while the squire and his family beamed approval.

Then there were games for the little ones devised by “Miss Florence,” who took upon herself their special entertainment; and so the summer evening passed away in delightful mirth and recreation until the crimson clouds began to glow over the beautiful Derwent valley, and the children re-formed in line and marched up the garden to the top terrace of the lawn. Meantime “Miss Florence” and “Miss Parthe” had mysteriously disappeared, and now they were seen standing on the terrace behind a long table laden with presents. As the procession filed past, each child received a gift from one or other of the young ladies, and there were kindly words from the squire and gracious smiles from Mrs. Nightingale and much bobbing of curtseys by the delighted children, and so the “feast day” ended in mutual joy and pleasure.

The scene was described to me by an old lady who had many times as a child attended this pretty entertainment at Lea Hurst, and still treasures the little gifts—fancy boxes, books, thimble cases and the like—which she had received from the hands of the then beloved and now deeply reverenced “Miss Florence.” She recalls what a sweet young lady she was, with her glossy brown hair smoothed down each side of her face, and often a rose placed at the side, amongst the neat plaits or coils. Her appearance at this period can be judged from the pencil sketch by her sister, afterwards Lady Verney, in which, despite the quaint attire, one recognises a tall, graceful girl of charm and intelligence.

In Derbyshire, Florence Nightingale’s interest in Church work was divided between the historic little church of Dethick, described in a former chapter, and the beautiful church which Sir Richard Arkwright had built at Cromford on the opposite side of the river from his castle of Willersley. To-day, Cromford Church is thickly covered with ivy and embowered in trees, and, standing on the river bank with greystone rocks towering on one side and the wooded heights of Willersley on the other, presents a mellowed and picturesque appearance. In our heroine’s girlhood it was comparatively new and regarded as the wonder of the district for the architectural taste and decoration which Sir Richard had lavished upon it. The great cotton-spinner himself had been laid beneath its chancel in 1792, but an Arkwright reigned at Willersley Castle in Miss Nightingale’s youth—as indeed there does to-day—and carried on the beneficent schemes of the founder for the people of the district. Then the Arkwright Mills—long since disused—gave employment to hundreds of people, and the now sleepy little town of Cromford was alive with an industrial population. It was something of a model village, as the neat rows of low stone houses which flank Cromford hill testify, and there were schools, reading-rooms, and other means devised for the betterment of the people. Many schemes originated with the vicar and patron of Cromford Church, and the young ladies from Lea Hurst sometimes assisted at entertainments.

We may imagine “Miss Florence” when she drove with her parents down to Cromford Church making a very pretty picture indeed, dressed in her summer muslin, with a silk spencer crossed over her maiden breast and her sweet, placid face beaming from out the recesses of a Leghorn bonnet, wreathed with roses.

It was, however, in connection with the church of Dethick and the adjoining parishes of Lea and Holloway that Florence Nightingale did most of her philanthropic work. This district was peculiarly her father’s domain, and also embraced the church and village of Crich. Like Cromford, it was the seat of a village industry. Immediately below Lea Hurst were Smedley’s hosiery mills, which employed hundreds of women and girls, many of whom lived on the Nightingale estate, and Miss Florence took great interest in their welfare. As she grew into womanhood, she started a Bible-class for the young women of the district, holding it in the old building at Lea Hurst known as the “chapel.” The class was unsectarian, for “Smedley’s people,” following the example of their master, “Dr.” John Smedley, were chiefly Methodists. However, religious differences were not bitter in the neighbourhood, and Miss Nightingale welcomed to her class all young girls who were disposed to come, whether their parents belonged to “chapel” or “church.”

The memory of those Sunday afternoons, as they sat in the tiny stone “chapel” overlooking the sunny lawns and gardens of Lea Hurst, listening to the beautiful expositions of Scripture which fell from their beloved “Miss Florence,” or following her sweet voice in sacred song, is green in the hearts of a few elderly people in the neighbourhood. A softness comes into their voice, and a smile of pleasure lights up their wrinkled faces, as they tell you how “beautifully Miss Florence used to talk.” In years long after, when she returned for holiday visits to Lea Hurst, nothing gave Miss Nightingale greater pleasure than for the young girls of the district, some of them daughters of her former scholars, to come on summer Sunday afternoons and sing on the lawn at Lea Hurst as she sat in her room above. Infirmity prevented her from mingling with them, but the girls were pleased if they could only catch a sight of her face smiling down from the window.

During the winter months spent in her Hampshire home, Florence Nightingale was also active amongst the sick poor and the young people. Embley Park is near the town of Romsey, in the parish of East Willow, and Mr. Nightingale and his family attended that church. “Miss Florence” had many friends amongst the cottagers, and a few of the old people still recall seeing the “young ladies” riding about on their ponies, and stopping with kind inquiries at some of the house doors. Although the sisters were such close companions, it is always “Miss Florence” who is remembered as the chief benefactress. She had the happy gift for gaining the love of the people, and the instinct for giving the right sort of help, though “Miss Parthe” was no less kind-hearted.

At Christmas, Embley Park was a centre from which radiated much good cheer. “Florence” was gay indeed, as, in ermine tippet and muff and beaver hat, she helped to distribute the parcels of tea and the warm petticoats to the old women. She devised Christmas entertainments for the children and assisted in treats for the workhouse poor. Local carol-singers received a warm welcome at Embley, especially from Miss Florence, who would come into the hall to see the mince-pies and coin distributed as she chatted with the humble performers. Training the boys and girls to sing was to her a matter of special interest, and she did much in those far-away days to promote a love of music amongst the villagers both at Lea Hurst and Embley. It would afford her pleasure to-day could she listen to the well-trained band formed by the mill-workers at Lea, which one hears discoursing sweet music outside the mills on a summer’s evening.

Embley overlooked the hills of the Wiltshire border, and the cathedral city of Salisbury, only some thirteen miles distant, afforded Miss Nightingale a wider field of philanthropic interest. She was always willing to take part in beneficent work in the neighbourhood, and the children’s hospital and other schemes founded and conducted by her friends Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert, afterwards Lord and Lady Herbert of Lea, formed a special interest for her in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Crimean War.

It must not, however, be supposed that in the early years of her womanhood Miss Nightingale gave herself up entirely to religious and philanthropic work, though it formed a serious background to her social life. Mr. Nightingale, as a man of wealth and influence, liked to see his wife and daughters taking part in county society. During the winter he entertained a good deal at Embley, which was a much larger and handsomer residence than Lea Hurst. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale had a large circle of friends, and their house was noted as a place of genial hospitality, while their charming and accomplished daughters attracted many admirers.

The family did not confine themselves only to county society. They sometimes came to London for the season, and Florence and her sister made their curtsey to Queen Victoria when in the heyday of her early married life, and entered into the gaieties of the time.

However, as the years passed by Florence Nightingale cared less and less for the excitement and pleasures of society. Her nature had begun to crave for some definite work and a more extended field of activity than she found in private life. Two severe illnesses among members of her family had developed her nursing faculty, and when they no longer required her attention, she turned to a systematic study of nursing.

MISS NIGHTINGALE.

(From a Drawing.)

[To face p. 48.

To-day it seems almost impossible to realise how novel was the idea of a woman of birth and education becoming a nurse. Miss Nightingale was a pioneer of the pioneers. She herself had not then any clear course before her for the future, but she realised the important point that she could not hope to accomplish anything without training. The faculty was necessary and the desire to be helpful to the sick and suffering, but a trained knowledge was the important thing. In a letter which Miss Nightingale wrote in after years to young women on the subject of “Work and Duty” she remarked: “I would say to all young ladies who are called to any particular vocation, qualify yourselves for it as a man does for his work. Don’t think you can undertake it otherwise. Submit yourselves to the rules of business as men do, by which alone you can make God’s business succeed; for He has never said that he will give His success and his blessing to sketchy and unfinished work.” And on another occasion she wrote: “Three-fourths of the whole mischief in women’s lives arises from their excepting themselves from the rules of training considered needful for men.”

This was the spirit in which Miss Nightingale entered upon her chosen work, for she was the last person to “preach and not practise.” The advice which she gave to other women, when she had herself risen to the head of her profession, had been the guiding influence of her own probation.

The beneficent work which distinguished her as the squire’s daughter had given her useful experience, and had opened her eyes to the need of trained nurses for the sick poor. What is now called “district nursing” at this period exercised the mind of Florence Nightingale, and her attention to military nursing was called forth later by a national emergency.

It was at this critical period of her life, when her mind was shaping itself to such high purpose, that Florence Nightingale met Elizabeth Fry. The first grasping of hands of these two pioneer women would serve as subject for a painter. We picture the stately and beautiful old Quakeress in the characteristic garb of the Friends extending a sisterly welcome to the young and earnest woman who came to learn at her feet. The one was fast drawing to the close of her great work for the women prisoners, and the other stood on the threshold of a philanthropic career to be equally distinguished. We have no detailed record of what words were spoken at this meeting, but we know that the memory of the heavenly personality of Elizabeth Fry was an ever-present inspiration with Florence Nightingale in the years which followed.

It was a meeting of kindred spirits, but of distinct individualities. We do not find Miss Nightingale making any attempt to take up the mantle fast falling from the experienced philanthropist: she had her own line of pioneer work forming in her capable brain, but was eager to glean something from the wide experience through which her revered friend had passed. Mrs. Fry had during the past few years been visiting prisons and institutions on the Continent, and had established a small training home for nurses in London. She was a friend of Pastor Fliedner, the founder of Kaiserswerth, and had visited that institution. The account of his work, and of the order of Protestant deaconesses which he had founded for tending the sick poor, given by Mrs. Fry, made a profound impression on Florence Nightingale, and resulted a few years later in her enrolment as a voluntary nurse at that novel institution.

In the meantime she studied the hospital system at home, spending some months in the leading London hospitals and visiting those in Edinburgh and Dublin. Then she undertook a lengthened tour abroad and saw the different working of institutions for the sick in France, Germany, and Italy. The comparison was not favourable to this country. The nursing in our hospitals was largely in the hands of the coarsest type of women, not only untrained, but callous in feeling and often grossly immoral. There was little to counteract their baneful influence, and the atmosphere of institutions which, as the abodes of the sick and dying, had special need of spiritual and elevating influences, was of a degrading character. The occasional visits of a chaplain could not do very much to counteract the behaviour of the unprincipled nurse ever at the bedside. The habitual drunkenness of these women was then proverbial, while the dirt and disorder rampant in the wards was calculated to breed disease. The “profession,” if the nursing of that day can claim a title so dignified, had such a stigma attaching to it that no decent woman cared to enter it, and if she did, it was more than likely that she would lose her character.

In contrast to this repulsive class of women, whom Miss Nightingale had encountered to her horror in the hospitals of London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, and to the “Sairey Gamps” who were the only “professional” nurses available for the middle classes in their own homes, she found on the Continent the sweet-faced Sister of Charity—pious, educated, trained.

For centuries the Roman Catholic community had trained and set apart holy women for ministering to the sick poor in their own homes, and had established hospitals supplied with the same type of nurse. A large number of these women were ladies of birth and breeding who worked for the good of their souls and the welfare of their Church, while all received proper education and training, and had abjured the world for a religious life. An excellent example of the work done by the nun-nurses is seen in the quaint old-world hospital of St. John, with which visitors to Bruges are familiar. It was one of the institutions visited by Miss Nightingale, and, religious differences apart, she viewed with profound admiration the beneficent work of the sisters.

After pursuing her investigations from city to city, Miss Nightingale decided to take a course of instruction at the recently founded institution for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine. There a Protestant sisterhood were working on similar lines to Sisters of Charity, and had already done much to mitigate the poverty, sickness, and misery in their own district, and were beginning to extend their influence to other German towns. At Kaiserswerth the ideal system of trained sick nursing which Miss Nightingale had been forming in her own mind was an accomplished fact.

CHAPTER VI
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE’S ALMA MATER AND ITS FOUNDER

Enrolled a Deaconess at Kaiserswerth—Paster Fliedner—His Early Life—Becomes Pastor at Kaiserswerth—Interest in Prison Reform—Starts a Small Penitentiary for Discharged Female Prisoners—Founds a School and the Deaconess Hospital—Rules for Deaconesses—Marvellous Extension of his Work—His Death—Miss Nightingale’s Tribute.

Just precepts thus from great examples given,

She drew from them what they derived from Heaven.

Pope.

The year 1849 proved a memorable one in the career of Florence Nightingale, for it was then that she enrolled herself as a voluntary nurse in the Deaconess Institution at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, which may be described as her Alma Mater. It was the first training school for sick nurses established in modern times, and it seems a happy conjunction of circumstances that she who was destined to hold the blue riband of the nursing sisterhood of the world should have studied within its walls.

PASTOR FLIEDNER, FOUNDER OF KAISERSWERTH.

Although she had already gained valuable insight into hospital work and management during her visits to various hospitals at home and abroad, it was not until she came to Kaiserswerth that she found her ideals realised. Here was a Protestant institution which had all the good points of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods without their restrictions. It further commended itself as being under the guidance of Pastor Fliedner, a man of simple and devoted piety and a born philanthropist.

He had had the perspicacity to see that the world needed the services of trained women to grapple with the evils of vice and disease, and to this end he revived the office of deaconess which had been instituted by the early Christian Church. The idea of training women to minister to the sick and the poor seems natural enough to-day, but in Miss Nightingale’s young womanhood it was entirely novel. The district nurse had not then been invented. The Kaiserswerth institution combined hospital routine and instruction with beneficent work among the poor and the outcast.

Pastor Fliedner, the founder, was indeed a kindred spirit, and it seems fitting to give a little account of the man who exercised such a remarkable influence over our heroine in the days of her probation. Theodore Fliedner was just twenty years her senior, having been born in 1800 at Eppstein, a small village near the Rhine. He was “a son of the manse,” both his father and grandfather having been Lutheran clergymen. At an early age he showed a desire to become a power for good in the world, and his sensitive feelings were much hurt when a child, by his father playfully calling him “the little beer-brewer” on account of his plump round figure. The jest caused little Theodore much heart-searching and made him feel that his nature must be very carnal and in need of great discipline. In these days he would probably have resorted to Sandow’s exercises or a bicycle.

Of course Theodore was poor and had to work his way from school to college. He studied at the Universities of Giessen and Göttingen, giving instruction in return for food and lodging, and was not above doing manual labour also. He sawed wood, blacked boots, and did other odd jobs. He also mended his own clothes, but in a somewhat primitive fashion, for in a letter to his mother he says that he sewed up the holes in his trousers with white thread which he afterwards inked over. His vacations were spent in tramping long distances and subsisting on the barest necessaries of life, in order to gain an acquaintance with the world. He studied foreign languages, read widely, and as a college student showed the after bent of his mind by collecting songs and games for children which later were used in his own kindergarten, and have spread throughout the world. He also learned the use of herbs and acquired much homely knowledge on the treatment of disease.

After leaving college he became tutor in a private family at Cologne, and the mother of his pupils took his deportment in hand. Possibly this lady had physical culture views about the rotundity of his figure. However, Theodore in speaking of the benefit derived from lessons in deportment quaintly confesses that “gentle ways and polite manners help greatly to further the kingdom of God.” While at Cologne he assisted a clergyman of the place in parish work, and occasionally preached in the prison, thus gaining an insight into the unhappy condition of discharged prisoners which inspired his later beneficent work on their behalf.

When he had reached the age of twenty-two, Theodore Fliedner received a call to become the pastor of a struggling Protestant community at the little town of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, near Düsseldorf, which he accepted. At Eppstein, his native village, he was ordained, surrounded by a delighted family circle. It is characteristic that the young pastor set out on foot for Kaiserswerth, and arrived before he was expected in order to save his parishioners the expense of giving him a reception.

His position was humbler even than Goldsmith’s Vicar, for he received the modest yearly stipend of 180 thaler (£27), and had to share the parsonage with the mother of his predecessor, while in order to relieve his own widowed mother he took two younger brothers and a sister to live with him. Hardly was his modest household arranged, than a velvet-factory upon which the Protestant population of Kaiserswerth depended failed, and the young pastor found himself with a destitute flock. He received two other calls, but his heart was fixed at Kaiserswerth, and he determined to set forth staff in hand like the Apostles, and tramp through the Protestant countries seeking aid for his people. He visited Germany, Holland, and England, and received help and encouragement.

The most important friendship which the young Lutheran pastor made in London was with Elizabeth Fry. The work of this noble philanthropist amongst the prisoners of Newgate was a revelation to him, and he returned to his parish of Kaiserswerth burning with zeal to do something for the prisoners of his own land. He began work in the neighbouring prison of Düsseldorf, where he became a regular visitor and started services. On June 26th, 1826, he was instrumental in founding at Düsseldorf the first German society for improving prison discipline.

The great problem which confronted him was how to protect the discharged female prisoners from the life of evil to which their unhappy circumstances drove them when the term of their imprisonment ended. They had as a rule neither home nor protector, and were cast upon the world with the prisoner’s brand upon them. He determined to devote himself to the rescue and protection of these unfortunate women.

In September of 1833 he began his experiment by preparing with his own hands an old summer-house, some twelve feet square, which stood in a retired part of his garden as a refuge for discharged female prisoners. He protected it from wind and rain, made it clean and habitable, and placing there a bed, a table, and a chair, prayed that God would direct some outcast wanderer to its shelter. One night a poor forlorn woman presented herself, and the pastor and his good wife led her to the room prepared. This destitute creature housed in the old summer-house was practically the inauguration of the now famous Kaiserswerth institution. In the course of the winter nine other women voluntarily sought the refuge, and the work went forward until a new separate building was erected near the pastor’s house, having its own garden and field and affording accommodation for twenty women. Madame Fliedner, the founder’s wife, and Mademoiselle Göbel, a voluntary helper, had charge of the penitentiary.

Some of the women had children, and Pastor Fliedner’s next step was to start an infant school on very much the same lines as a modern kindergarten. Now it was that the children’s games and songs which it had been his hobby to collect during his tramps abroad when a college student became of use. Teachers were needed for the increasing school, and in course of time a Normal school for the training of infant-school mistresses was started.

MISS NIGHTINGALE.

(From the bust at Claydon.)

This bust was presented to Miss Nightingale by the soldiers after the Crimean War, and was executed by the late Sir John Steele.

[To face p. 61.

However, the idea which most actively dominated the pastor’s mind was the training of women in hospital work and to tend the poor. In his parish of Kaiserswerth there was much poverty and incompetence amongst the people and no provision for dealing with disease. Three years after he had founded the penitentiary for discharged female prisoners, as already described, he started his more important venture of founding a hospital for the reception of poor patients and for the training of nurses or deaconesses.

On October 13th, 1836, the “Deaconess Hospital, Kaiserswerth,” was opened, practically without patients and without deaconesses. For his hospital the pastor had secured a part of the deserted factory, the stopping of which had plunged his people into destitution in the first year of his pastorate—a singular example of the realisation of poetic justice. He fitted the “wards” with mended furniture, cracked earthenware, and such utensils as he could beg. His stock of linen embraced only six sheets. But cleanliness cost nothing, and the hospital certainly had that. On the Sunday morning after the opening the first patient, a poor suffering servant girl, knocked at the door for admittance. Four other sick persons came during the month, and in the course of a year sixty patients had been received in the primitive hospital, and funds were coming in for the support of the work.

Almost simultaneously with the patients came the nurses. First a solitary candidate presented herself for training as a deaconess and several probationers followed. In the course of a year seven nurses had entered the institution. There was nothing haphazard about their admission, for the pastor, when he instituted his order of Protestant deaconesses, made a simple code of rules. No deaconess was to be under twenty-five years of age, and although she was engaged for a term of five years, she was free to leave at any moment. The candidates were solemnly received into the community and consecrated to their work by the laying on of hands by the pastor, who invoked a final blessing in the words: “May God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three Persons in one God, bless you; may He stablish you in the Truth until death, and give you hereafter the Crown of Life. Amen.”

The dress of the deaconesses is very quaint and simple, but not unbecoming. It consists of a plain blue cotton gown, a white apron, large white turned-down collar, and a white muslin cap surrounding the face in the old style and tied under the chin with a large bow. The young girl probationers look very sweet and attractive in the cap, which has a tendency to heighten the beauty of a fresh young face while it seems singularly appropriate to the elderly women who have passed from active service to the Home of Rest, later provided.

Unlike their Roman Catholic sisters, the Kaiserswerth deaconesses were not fettered by a vow. Their vocation was to be the servants of Christ and the servants of the sick and poor. They could at any time return to their families if their services were needed, and were at liberty to marry, but not to remain in the hospital afterwards, as it was considered that the new ties would interfere with entire devotion to their work.

Pastor Fliedner was a man of social instincts and had himself married twice. His first wife lived only a short time, and the story of his second wooing is quaintly told in his journal. He went to Hamburg to ask Amalia Sieveking to take charge of a deaconess home. She was unable to comply with the request, but recommended in her place a young friend and pupil, Caroline Bertheau, who had been nursing in the Hamburg Hospital. The pastor was so pleased with the substitute that he offered her the choice of either taking charge of a deaconess home or becoming his wife. Caroline demurely elected to do both. They were married at once, and spent their honeymoon in Berlin for the purpose of establishing the first five deaconesses in the Charité Hospital, returning in due course to Kaiserswerth, where the young wife became the Deaconess Mother of the institution and the devoted helpmeet of her husband in all his after-work.

But to return to the training of the deaconesses. After the institution had become established in all its branches, a candidate decided on entering whether she wished to train as a teacher or as a nurse, and was enrolled in the Krankenschwestern or Lehrschwestern according to her choice. Each probationer goes through a course of practical housework. She learns to cook, sew, iron, and scrub by taking a share in the menial work of the hospital, and this fits her to be of real help when she comes to enter the homes of the poor. The probationer also has instruction in simple book-keeping, letter-writing, and reading aloud. After she has gone through the general course, she goes into particular training according to her choice. If she desires to become a nurse, she enters the surgical and medical wards of the hospital; and if a teacher, she trains in the kindergarten and the other schools.

The Kaiserswerth deaconesses receive no salaries, the primary idea being that they should give themselves to the work. They have free board and are supplied each year with two blue cotton gowns and two aprons, and every five years with a new blue woollen gown and a black alpaca apron for best wear. They receive at intervals new outdoor dress, which consists of long black cloaks and black bonnets which fit closely over the white cap. If a deaconess has private property, she retains the full control of it, and on her death it reverts to her nearest of kin unless she has otherwise disposed of it by will. Each deaconess is allowed a small sum for pocket money.

During the first ten years of the founding of Kaiserswerth Pastor Fliedner spread his system of deaconesses until he had established sixty nurses in twenty-five different centres, and calls were coming from all sides. In 1849 he resigned his pastorate in order to journey about establishing branch houses in different parts of the world. His first long journey was to the United States, to conduct deaconesses to Dr. Passavant’s German parish at Pittsburg; and the second was to Jerusalem, where he founded a “mother house” with four deaconesses on Mount Zion in a building given by the King of Prussia. This branch undertakes to nurse all sick persons irrespective of creed, and forms a training school for nurses in the East.

From Jerusalem he proceeded to Constantinople, established a branch there, and then proceeded to Alexandria, Beyrout, Smyrna, Bucharest, and other places. He had already started a deaconess home in London. The institutions spread rapidly through Germany, and to-day there is scarcely a town of any size in the Fatherland which has not its deaconess home which sends nurses to the poor without charge and supplies middle-class families at moderate fees. The last years of the pastor’s life were passed in bodily suffering, but he still kept his hand on the helm. His last work was to found at Kaiserswerth a Home of Rest for retired deaconesses. The good man was much cheered not only by the marvellous extension of his work—he left behind him a hundred houses attended by four hundred and thirty deaconesses—but at the fruit which seeds of his sowing had produced in the heart of the English lady who became the heroine of the Crimean War. It was with peculiar interest that he followed the work of Florence Nightingale in that campaign, for her deeds shed a reflected lustre on her Alma Mater.

On October 4th, 1864, Pastor Fliedner, to use Miss Nightingale’s words, “passed to his glorious rest.” Almost his last words were: “As I look back upon my life, I appreciate how full it has been of blessings; every heart-beat should have been gratitude and every breath praise.”

Commenting upon his work, Miss Nightingale made this characteristic summary: “Pastor Fliedner began his work with two beds under a roof, not with a castle in the air, and Kaiserswerth is now diffusing its blessings and its deaconesses over almost every Protestant land.”

CHAPTER VII
ENTERS KAISERSWERTH: A PLEA FOR DEACONESSES

An Interesting Letter—Description of Miss Nightingale when she entered Kaiserswerth—Testimonies to her Popularity—Impressive Farewell to Pastor Fliedner.

The travelled mind is the catholic mind educated from exclusiveness and egotism.—A. Bronson Alcott.

When Florence Nightingale entered the Deaconess Hospital at Kaiserswerth, the institution, if we count the first primitive penitentiary, had been in existence sixteen years. It already consisted of a hospital and training home for deaconesses, a seminary for infant-school teachers, a kindergarten, an orphan asylum, and a penitentiary, but was small compared with the extensive settlement of to-day. It was managed on very simple and primitive lines, and the nurses came almost entirely from the peasant class. The fashion of “lady” nurses was practically unknown. Deaconess Reichardt, the first sister enrolled in the institution, was still there at the time of Miss Nightingale’s sojourn.

An interesting bit of autobiography regarding her Kaiserswerth days is given by Miss Nightingale in a letter preserved by the authorities of the British Museum. The letter was sent in reply to their request for a copy of the little history of Kaiserswerth which Miss Nightingale published after her return from the institution, and was hastily written in pencil. It is dated September 24th, 1897, from her house 10, South Street, Park Lane, and runs as follows:—

“Messrs. Dubau,—

“A gentleman called here yesterday from you, asking for a copy of my Kaiserswerth for, I believe, the British Museum.

“Since yesterday, a search has been instituted—but only two copies have been found, and one of those is torn and dirty. I send you the least bad-looking. You will see the date is 1851, and after the copies then printed were given away, I don’t think I have ever thought of it.

“I was twice in training there myself. Of course, since then hospital and district nursing have made great strides. Indeed, district nursing has been invented.

“But never have I met with a higher love, a purer devotion than there. There was no neglect.

“It was the more remarkable because many of the deaconesses had been only peasants—(none were gentlewomen when I was there).

“The food was poor—no coffee but bean coffee—no luxury but cleanliness.

“Florence Nightingale.”

One can imagine the flutter of excitement amongst the good simple deaconesses as they flitted about in their blue cotton gowns, white aprons, and prim muslin caps when it was known that an English lady of wealth and position had come to study amongst them. That such a woman should voluntarily undertake the duties of a hospital nurse, tending the sick poor with her own delicate hands, was at that time almost unprecedented. But the “Fraulein Nightingale” was quickly at home amongst her fellow-nurses and eager to learn all that the more experienced could teach her. She took both day and night nursing and entered into all branches of work. Garbed in the simple nurse’s dress she moved through the wards of the hospital carrying the charm of her presence from bed to bed, as she was later to do at Scutari. Was there a difficult case to attend or an operation to be performed, the English Fraulein was sure to be on the scene.

At this period Miss Nightingale was in the strength and beauty of her early womanhood. She was tall, slight, and graceful, with abundance of brown hair neatly arranged on either side her high broad forehead, and had penetrating grey-blue eyes and a mouth which though firm indicated a sense of humour. The deaconesses, with whom she could talk in their own language, found her a diverting companion, for she had a sharp incisive wit, a certain homely shrewdness of expression, and a knowledge acquired not only from a superior education, but from a good experience of foreign travel. Above everything else she was distinguished by the power of adapting herself to circumstances, and she settled down to the humble fare and simple routine of life at Kaiserswerth as easily as though she had never known the refined luxuries of her father’s house. It is small wonder that the sweet old faces of the retired deaconesses, living out the last spell of life in the Kaiserswerth Home of Rest, light up with smiles to-day at the mention of the “Fraulein Nightingale.” Some can recall her gracious kindly presence amongst them, and all feel a community of satisfaction that her honoured name is enrolled among the sisterhood.

Sister Agnes Jones, the devoted and famous nurse of Liverpool, was at Kaiserswerth in 1860, and records the impression which Miss Nightingale’s personality had left on the deaconesses. She wrote in a letter to a friend: “Their love for Miss Nightingale is so great; she was only a few months there, but they so long to see her again. I was asking much about her; such a loving and lovely womanly character hers must be, and so religious. Sister S. told me many of the sick remembered much of her teaching, and some died happily, blessing her for having led them to Jesus.”

Although training in hospital work was Miss Nightingale’s primary object in going to Kaiserswerth, she was deeply interested in all Pastor Fliedner’s schemes for helping the poor in his parish, and did a good deal of what in these days would be termed “district visiting,” along with Frau Fliedner. She also took a keen interest in the school and the teachers’ seminary, and formed a warm friendship with Henrietta Frickenhaus, the first schoolmistress at Kaiserswerth, who was still in charge of the seminary, and had at that time trained four hundred candidates.

Pastor Fliedner had given up parish work to travel abroad and found deaconess institutions in various towns at the time when Miss Nightingale first came to Kaiserswerth, but they occasionally met, and during the latter part of her residence he was at home and took, as may be readily imagined, a deep interest in the training of so brilliant and distinguished a pupil. Mr. Sidney Herbert visited Kaiserswerth during Miss Nightingale’s probation, and had therefore an opportunity of seeing the efficient training of the lady who was later to be his honoured coadjutor in hospital and nursing reforms.

A very impressive scene took place when Florence Nightingale left Kaiserswerth. The present head of the institution, Pastor Düsselhoff, tells me that his mother, the eldest daughter of Pastor Fliedner, vividly recalls the scene to-day. After bidding good-bye to the deaconesses, Miss Nightingale bent her head to the pastor and asked for his blessing. With hands resting on her head, and face upturned to heaven, he prayed that her sojourn at Kaiserswerth might bear precious fruit and her great powers be dedicated to the service of humanity. Then, repeating his usual formula—“May God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three Persons in one God, bless you; may He stablish you in the Truth until death, and give you hereafter the Crown of Life. Amen”—he sent her forth dedicated to the service of the sick and suffering. Little did he think what the magnitude of that service was to be. Teacher and pupil were not destined to meet again, but the good pastor lived to hear the name of Florence Nightingale resound through the world.

After Miss Nightingale’s return home from her second sojourn at Kaiserswerth, she published in 1851 a booklet on the institution, and in the introduction gives some excellent advice to the girls of the time. Her remarks may seem a little out of date to-day, but are interesting as showing the desire for useful work which was beginning to actuate women of the leisured classes and which needed to be directed into fitting channels. There was then the great cry of the untrained. Women were longing for occupation, but few had received definite courses of training.

Miss Nightingale was at this period a pioneer of her sex and a decidedly “advanced” woman, but the desire for freedom of action was tempered by a naturally well-balanced nature. She put forward the plea on women’s behalf that they should be encouraged to seek occupation and properly trained for their work. In Kaiserswerth she deals more particularly with the vocation of a nurse or deaconess, but as a prelude to the little work she refers to the position of women in her own century. There is “an old legend,” she writes, “that the nineteenth century is to be the century of women,” but she thinks that up to the present (1851) it has not been theirs. She magnanimously exempts man from blame. The fault, has not been his, for “in no country has woman been given such freedom to cultivate her powers” as in England. “She [woman] is no longer called pedantic if her powers appear in conversation. The authoress is courted not shunned.” Women, she thinks, have made extraordinary intellectual development, but as human beings cannot move two feet at once, except they jump, so while the intellectual foot of woman has made a step in advance, the practical foot has remained behind. “Woman,” says Miss Nightingale, “stands askew. Her education for action has not kept pace with her education for acquirement. The woman of the eighteenth century was perhaps happier, when practice and theory were on a par, than her more cultivated sister of the nineteenth century. The latter wishes, but does not know how to do many things! The former, what she wished at least that she could do.”

It appears that when Miss Nightingale was a young woman, the fashion for extolling the single girl as against her sister who had entered the bonds of matrimony was coming into vogue, but on this point our heroine was racily sincere. “It has become of late the fashion,” she says, “to cry up ‘old maids,’ to inveigh against regarding marriage as the vocation of all women, to declare that a single life is as happy as a married one, if people would but think so. So is the air as good an element for fish as the water, if they did but know how to live in it. Show us how to be single and we will agree. But hitherto we have not found that young Englishwomen have been convinced. And we must confess that, in the present state of things, their horror of being ‘old maids’ seems justified ... a life without love, and an activity without an aim, is horrible in idea and wearisome in reality.”

Miss Nightingale does not touch on the point that the disparity between the numbers of the sexes makes singleness not a choice but a necessity to many women, and that in the interests of those who must remain unwed, training for a definite calling in life should be given to girls as well as to boys.

She goes on to speak of the longing of women for work and the ennui which results from the lack of it, and draws the picture of five or six daughters living in well-to-do houses with no other occupation than taking a class in a Sunday-school and of the middle-class girls who become burdensome to fathers and brothers.

She expends some characteristic witticisms on the young ladies who try to drive away ennui by a little parish visiting, and because of their want of knowledge only succeed in demoralising the poor. In evidence of this, Miss Nightingale tells the story that one day on entering a cottage which was usually neat and tidy she found everything upside down.

“La! now! why, miss,” said the cottage woman at her visitor’s look of astonishment, “when the district-visiting ladies comes, if we didn’t put everything topsy-turvy they would not give us anything.”

“To be able to visit well,” says Miss Nightingale, commenting upon the foregoing incident, “is one of the rarest accomplishments. But when attained, what a blessing to both visitors and visited!”

These remarks in regard to the work of women were by way of preliminary to introducing the subject of deaconesses. Miss Nightingale had returned from Kaiserswerth full of enthusiasm for the vocation of trained nurse and visitor to the poor, and was endeavouring to introduce the then highly novel subject to her young countrywomen as a way of getting rid of listlessness and ennui. That she felt the ground to be dangerous is shown by the detailed account of the connection of the office of a deaconess with the early Christian Church, which she deemed it necessary to give in order to allay the Protestant fear that a deaconess was a nun in disguise.

In these days, when women are actively employed in Church work and philanthropy, and when their assistance is welcomed by the clergy in parishes all over the land, it seems strange to find how cautiously Miss Nightingale recommended the office of deaconess. She labours through scholastic arguments and cites the Fathers. St. Chrysostom speaks of forty deaconesses at work in Constantinople in the fourth century. Holy women of the order worked amongst the Waldensian, Bohemian and Moravian Brotherhoods. Luther complained of the lack of deaconesses in his neighbourhood, adding, “Women have especial graces to alleviate woe, and the words of women move the human being more than those of men.” Under Queen Elizabeth, deaconesses were instituted into the Protestant Church during public service. The Pilgrim Fathers when first driven to Amsterdam and Leyden carried their deaconesses with them, and Miss Nightingale cites the improving example of the Amsterdam deaconess who sat in her place at church with a little birchen rod in her hand to correct the children, and relates how she called upon the young maidens for their services, when they were sick, and she was “obeyed like a mother in Israel.”

She considers it clearly proved that before the establishment of the order of sisters of mercy by St. Vincent de Paul in 1633, the office of deaconess had been recognised by all divisions of Christians, and was therefore not borrowed from the Roman Catholic Church. The reason why such sisterhoods had not flourished among Protestants was owing to the lack of preparatory schools and training homes. This want had been supplied at the Kaiserswerth institution, and she proceeds to give a history of its foundation and growth. There she had found her ideal, and for the next few years her life was devoted to philanthropic and religious work. Military nursing had not as yet dawned upon her horizon.

CHAPTER VIII
A PERIOD OF WAITING

Visits the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris—Illness—Resumes Old Life at Lea Hurst and Embley—Interest in John Smedley’s System of Hydropathy—Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert’s Philanthropies—Work at Harley Street Home for Sick Governesses—Illness and Return Home.

They also serve who only stand and wait.—Milton.

Three years had yet to transpire before Florence Nightingale was called to her great life work. After leaving Kaiserswerth, she stayed for a time on her way home with the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris. She was without religious bigotry in the pursuit of knowledge, and sincerely admired the devoted and unselfish work of this Roman Catholic sisterhood. They were indeed sisters of mercy, and the hospitals and schools of their community had obtained world-wide renown. Their institutions had the advantage over Kaiserswerth, at that period, of being in long-established working order. In Paris, too, Miss Nightingale found opportunity for studying surgery in the hospitals. The skill of the Paris surgeons stood remarkably high, and she could scarcely have had a better ground for observation than the French capital. With her good friends the sisters, too, Miss Nightingale visited the homes of the poor and made a minute inspection of their methods of organised charity.

SIR WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL.

(Photo by Elliott & Fry.)

[To face p. 80.

While pursuing this interesting work, Miss Nightingale was taken ill. She had now a personal experience of the skill and tender care of the sisters, who nursed her back to convalesence.

As soon as she was able to travel, she returned to her family and completed her restoration to health in the beautiful surroundings of her well-loved homes of Embley Park and Lea Hurst. There she spent the ensuing months in her old work of quiet benevolence amongst the poor and infirm in the parishes, where her name was even then a household word. Added to her kindness of heart, which the people had long known, “Miss Florence” had now returned from “furren parts” with a knowledge of sick nursing which astounded the rustic mind. It was rumoured that she could set a broken leg better than the doctor, and had remedies for “rheumatiz” and lumbago which made old men feel young again, and as for her lotions for the eyes, “Why, they was enough to ruin the spectacle folk.”

At this period the immediate vicinity of Miss Nightingale’s Derbyshire home was the scene of the labours of “Dr.” John Smedley, the Father of Hydropathy and the founder of the now famous “Smedley’s Hydropathic” at Matlock Bank. Although Miss Nightingale did not, I believe, specially ally herself with hydropathy, she has always been an advocate for the simple rules of health and diet as against the drug treatment. She could not fail to have been deeply interested in the experiments which good John Smedley and his mother were conducting practically at her own door, and they form a part of the environment which was shaping her mind at this period.

The old stone house in which John Smedley lived while he was experimenting still stands near the bottom of the steep road leading to Lea Hurst. It has been divided into three small dwellings, but the outside railings over which Mrs. Smedley used to hand her son’s simple remedies to the villagers, and to the employees at Smedley’s Mills, on the opposite side of the road, are still pointed out by old inhabitants. The hamlet was particularly good for pioneer work of this kind, because of the hundreds of workers, chiefly women and girls, from the surrounding countryside who obtained employment at Lea Mills. The Derbyshire quarries and smelting works in the vicinity also yielded further patients for treatment. In course of time John Smedley started two free hospitals near his house, one for men and one for women, and the patients were subjected to the hydropathic regimen with such beneficial results that he started the hydropathic establishment known by his name at Matlock.

When at Embley, Miss Nightingale was much interested in the benevolent schemes of Mr. Sidney Herbert, afterwards Lord Herbert of Lea, and his accomplished and beautiful wife, who were friends and neighbours. The Herberts’ residence, Wilton House, was a few miles from Embley on the Wiltshire border, and at this period they were engaged in the founding of a children’s hospital, schools, and other philanthropic ventures, and were actively interested in schemes for the emigration of poor women. We shall, however, deal later with the very congenial friendship existing between Miss Nightingale and Lord and Lady Herbert of Lea.

As soon as Miss Nightingale had recovered her health she left the quiet surroundings of her country homes for a life of philanthropic activity in London. She was greatly interested in the Ragged School work of the Earl of Shaftesbury, and devoted the proceeds of her recently published booklet on Kaiserswerth, which had been printed by the inmates of the London Ragged Colonial Training School, to charitable objects.

In choosing a line of benevolent activity, Miss Nightingale was at this period actuated by a desire to help poor ladies, so many of whom were suffering silently and unheeded, and largely through their lack of proper training for remunerative callings. Reference has already been made to her common-sense plea that women should receive training to fit them for work, in her advocacy of a revival of the order of deaconesses. But while she sought to influence the girls of the future, Miss Nightingale made it a present duty to soothe and brighten the lives of poor ladies who had fallen helpless in the race of life. With this end in view she took in charge the Harley Street Home for Sick Governesses,[A] which was in a very unsatisfactory condition.

[A] Now known as the Hospital for Invalid Gentlewomen.

Much has been written on the underpaid and badly treated private governess in days gone by. Her woes, and sometimes her machinations, were the stock-in-trade of romancers. When a pretty young creature in cheap mourning appeared at the Grange as governess to the younger children, you might predict a proud, harsh mistress, troublesome and insulting pupils, and a broken heart by reason of the squire’s son, almost to a certainty. But the novelist rarely followed the governess beyond the interesting age of youth and beauty; if he had, there would have been sad tales to tell of friendless old age, penury, and want. The Harley Street Home had been founded to help such, more particularly those who were in bad health. In this institution Miss Nightingale found a work which brought into active use the knowledge of sick nursing which she had been acquiring, gave a vent for her womanly benevolence, afforded a field for the exercise of her organising abilities, and proved a valuable preparation for what lay in the future.

The Home had been languishing through mismanagement and lack of funds, and its new superintendent set to work with characteristic method. She got donations from her friends, inspired old subscribers with a new confidence, and managed to get the institution on its feet again, but not without a serious strain of overwork.

A lady who visited her at this time speaks of the untiring labour which Miss Nightingale gave to the institution. “She was to be found,” she writes, “in the midst of the various duties of a hospital—for the Home was largely a sanatorium—organising the nurses, attending to the correspondence, prescriptions, and accounts; in short, performing all the duties of a hard-working matron as well as largely financing the institution.”

Miss Nightingale shut herself off entirely from outside society and only occasionally received her most intimate friends. Her assiduity bore fruit in the improved state of the Home, not only on its comfort which she brought to it. The task of dealing with sick and querulous women, embittered and rendered sensitive and exacting by the unfortunate circumstances of their lives, was not an easy one, but Miss Nightingale had a calm and cheerful spirit which could bear with the infirmities of the weak. And so she laboured on in the dull house in Harley Street summer and winter, bringing order and comfort out of a wretched chaos and proving a real friend and helper to the sick and sorrow-laden women. At length the strain proved too much for her delicate body, and she was compelled most reluctantly to resign her task.

Again she returned to Embley Park and Lea Hurst to recruit her health. When a few months later the supreme call of her life came and she was summoned to the work for which a special Providence seemed to have been preparing her from childhood, she was found ready.

CHAPTER IX
SIDNEY, LORD HERBERT OF LEA

Gladstone on Lord Herbert—Early Life of Lord Herbert—His Mother—College Career—Enters Public Life—As Secretary for War—Benevolent Work at Salisbury—Lady Herbert—Friendship with Florence Nightingale—Again Secretary for War.

Formed on the good old plan,

A true and brave and downright honest man.

Whittier.

None knew thee but to love thee,

None named thee but to praise.

Halleck.

“I wish,” wrote Gladstone to Richard Monckton-Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton) in October, 1855, “that some one of the thousand who in prose justly celebrate Miss Nightingale would say a single word for the man of ‘routine’ who devised and projected her going—Sidney Herbert.”

Acting on such distinguished advice I propose to attempt a slight account of the career and personality of this singularly attractive man, who was at the head of the War Office when Florence Nightingale and her staff of nurses were sent to the aid of the soldiers wounded in the Crimea. No Life of Lord Herbert of Lea has at the time of writing been published, although one is, I understand, in course of preparation. The name of Sidney Herbert is distinguished as that of the War Minister who, in defiance of official tradition, enlisted the devotion and organising power of women on behalf of our soldiery perishing in the pestilential hospitals of the East.

Sidney Herbert was born at Richmond in Surrey on September 16, 1810, and was the second son of George Augustus, eleventh Earl of Pembroke, by his second wife, Countess Catherine, only daughter of Count Woronzoff, Russian Ambassador to the British Court. His maternal uncle, Prince Michael Woronzoff, was a companion in arms of Wellington, and the founder of the prosperous era in the Crimea. Sidney Herbert’s mother, though of Russian birth, was chiefly brought up and educated in this country, and owing to her father’s official position, moved as a girl in the atmosphere of the Court. He owed much to her example and training. She is described as having been a woman of quick intelligence and sound judgment, of large generosity and noble bearing. Her husband, Lord Pembroke, died when their son Sidney was about seventeen, and her influence moulded his early manhood.

He was educated at Harrow under Dr. Butler, and matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1828, where he was counted an elegant scholar and noted as a speaker at the Union Debating Society, when he matched his strength beside Gladstone, Roundell Palmer, and other distinguished young orators. Upon his entrance into public life, as M.P. for South Wiltshire in the first Reformed Parliament of 1832, Sidney Herbert was considered a graceful and accomplished young Tory.

Sir Robert Peel on taking office in 1834 offered Sidney Herbert a post in the Government, and it was characteristic of him that he refused the Lordship of the Treasury because the duties were slight, and accepted the laborious post of Secretary to the Board of Control, which he held during Peel’s Administration. He returned to office with his old leader in 1841 as Secretary to the Admiralty. While holding that position Sidney Herbert set to work to reform the Naval School at Greenwich, which then contained some eight hundred boys and was the nursing-ground for the navy. While thus engaged he exhibited that administrative faculty which was later so conspicuously shown in his efforts on behalf of the sister service.

In 1845 he was transferred to the office of Secretary of War, with a seat in the Cabinet. He gave special attention to the regimental schools and introduced very necessary reforms in their management, and also instituted an inquiry into the state of the Royal Military Asylum at Chelsea. On the resignation of Sir Robert Peel’s Ministry, Sidney Herbert left office, and his work of military reform remained in abeyance.

He remained out of office for six years, and during that period devoted himself largely to private philanthropy in the vicinity of his home, Wilton House, near Salisbury. He had married in 1846 Elizabeth, the daughter of General Aske A’Court and the niece of Lord Heytesbury, a young lady of singular beauty and charm, who entered most sympathetically into his many philanthropic enterprises, and herself instituted several benevolent schemes. She became the authoress of several books dealing with biography and travel.

Florence Nightingale was a frequent visitor at Wilton House and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert were amongst her dearest and most sympathetic friends. She took a great interest in the home for scrofulous children which they had founded and maintained at Mudiford in Hampshire, and was able to give much practical help in its management. Having heard from Miss Nightingale of a particular bath which she had seen employed with good effect at Kaiserswerth, Mr. Herbert procured the ingredients from that distant institution for use in the Mudiford home. One can readily imagine how useful her technical knowledge was to her friends in their various undertakings, and how congenial interests drew them more and more together.

Humanity in every form appealed to Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert. They erected at Wilton a model lodging-house for agricultural labourers, and formulated schemes for the emigration of poor women. So actively interested were they in the latter that they frequently accompanied parties of emigrants on to the vessel to speed them on their way. Some of their later schemes were for the establishment of day-rooms and institutes in the rural districts around their county town of Salisbury.