Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  Florence, left alone more and more with her father, was in her element. For four years she was utterly content to learn what her father taught her and revelled in becoming his intellectual companion. But of course her father, no more than her mother, had never for one moment intended that this fine education Florence was receiving should actually lead anywhere. Indeed, where could it lead? The whole object was simply to make her cultured without in the least planning anything else. It was an end in itself. This was laudable but, as far as Florence was concerned, also cruel. Unlike her father she was not lazy. She had inherited his intelligence but her sense of purpose and will-power were her own. At sixteen what she most wanted was to put her education to some use, the very thing denied to her. Instead, the whole family set off on a European Tour when Florence was seventeen (in 1837). This seemed at first the perfect solution to her growing restlessness and she even pleased her mother by developing a passion for dancing. She was the belle of balls in Genoa, Pisa, Florence and Geneva. She was admired for her looks and vivacity wherever she went and recorded in one of her “private notes” to herself that she enjoyed the admiration and must subdue this base desire to shine in society. The only kind of society she wished genuinely to shine in was the intellectual variety and her chance came when the family stopped off in Paris on the way home. Here Florence met Mary Clarke, the friend (and later wife) of Julius Mohl, a distinguished Oriental scholar. Mary had many such friends and Florence was entranced by her company. She was unconventional and yet accepted by the best society and she lived a kind of life quite different from anything Florence had come across. She gave the young, impressionable Florence a glimpse of what life might be like among stimulating companions who appeared to make no distinction between a man and a woman in all matters that were important. Women, in Mary Clarke’s circle, seemed equal, so far as Florence could see.

  But once back home Florence realized that for her Mary Clarke’s life was a mirage. Her own life could not come near it. In April 1839, just before she was nineteen, Florence was presented at court and began her first London season. Once more she was dancing at balls, once more excelling in this worthless way. The whole summer was spent cavorting and then came autumn and the day of reckoning. For the first time it was forced upon Florence that her whole future was decided for her. Her education was over, her “duties” had commenced – “faddling twaddling and the endless tweedling of nosegays in jugs” as Mary Clarke put it to her. She was filled with a raging discontent all the harder to bear because so far as she could see no other woman seemed to feel it. “Look at the poor lives we lead,” she wrote years later when she had had even more experience of life at home for an unmarried woman. “It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad.”10 And yet no one seemed to agree. She looked around her and was bound to conclude that if other women felt what she felt they hid it very well. They even seemed to connive at their own imprisonment. She hated the way women told each other to “come in any morning you please” as though nothing could possibly be more important than a tête-à-tête. This, in fact, was the real puzzle: women did nothing at all of importance and yet they were always busy. She found that her own “duties” left her with no time at all to herself and yet what did these inescapable duties amount to? Sorting out the china cupboard, picking and arranging flowers, sewing useless ornamental articles, going on visits and worst of all talking, talking, talking but never ever saying anything. “Why is it more ridiculous,” she asked, “for a man than for a woman to do worsted work and drive out every day in a carriage? Why should we laugh if we were to see a parcel of men sitting around a drawing-room table in the morning and think it all right if they were women?”11 But nobody else seemed to agree with her (except Mary Clarke who was a long way away). “I like riding about this beautiful place, why don’t you?” her contemporaries in Hampshire said to her. “I like walking about the garden, why don’t you?”12 Why didn’t she? She herself did not know. She tried desperately to conform but could not still the raging frustration inside. Gradually, she grew tired of trying. If she was discontented, so be it – better to acknowledge the discontent, better perhaps to start regarding it as a privilege, as meaning she was clear-sighted when others were not. It occurred to her that Jesus Christ, if he had been a woman “might have been nothing but a great complainer.”13

  Faced with this truth which she had divined – that her problem was that she was a woman – Florence tried hard to come to terms with it. It was her misfortune to belong to a highly conventional family and her further misfortune to love them too much to hurt them by outright rebellion. There was never much hope that she would be able to convert either her mother or her sister to her point of view but she continued to try to engage her father’s sympathies. He, at least, did not think her peculiar for not wanting to fritter her time away, but on the other hand he did not see why she could not be content with private study – why was anything else necessary? Florence tried to explain her feelings of claustrophobia and uselessness but her father, encouraged by her mother, persisted in misunderstanding her. He thought her restlessness only a phase which would pass, especially when she married. But the thought of marriage made Florence despair even more. Marriage was worse than spinsterhood. Upon marriage, a woman took on a man’s way of life and was even more securely trapped. The idea of marriage bringing self-fulfilment made her laugh – “The intercourse of man and woman – how frivolous” she wrote, “how unworthy it is! Can we call that the true vocation of woman, her high career?”14 Marriage, on the contrary, was something to be strongly resisted.

  But if she ruled out marriage there had to be some other alternative to her stifling existence. At first Florence thought satisfaction might come through a different kind of study. She went to stay with her Aunt Mai, her father’s younger sister, and from her house wrote asking permission to study mathematics because this was a disciplined, hard subject. She had begun on her own but quickly discovered she could not get far without lessons and for those she needed a teacher and for that she needed permission. It was refused. Her father was a little troubled at this refusal but her mother had no doubts – it was quite absurd for a girl to devote herself to mathematics. Florence was resigned. The idea of pursuing a proper course of study was abandoned. Instead, she turned to the only other “work” available – charitable work. There was a ban on a studious daughter but none on a philanthropic one. That was quite in order, gratifyingly charming in fact. She began leaving the big houses where she lived or stayed with relatives and visiting the cottages on the estates. She became conscious, in her early twenties, of the awful sufferings outside her own privileged sphere and the knowledge appalled her. What she saw on her charitable visits was harrowing – “my mind is absorbed with the idea of the sufferings of man”15 – but far from putting her off it only increased her interest. From visiting she made tentative steps towards helping. She not only took food on her visits but stopped to perform small, obvious acts of the most basic nursing. This pleased her. She felt involved, not totally an observer. It began to occur to her that here was “work” and at the same time that if it was work it had to be learned properly to be done properly. Yet she had no idea how to go about learning to nurse. She knew no nurses. They hardly existed outside convents and those store houses for the sick called hospitals which no woman of her rank ever entered. She asked the advice of an American philanthropist visiting the family – “Do you think it would be unsuitable and unbecoming for a young English girl to devote herself to works of charity in hospitals and elsewhere as Catholic sisters do?” He said he thought not, which encouraged her and gave her hope. “I dug after my little plan in silence,”16 she recorded.

  But however hard she dug she always had grave misgivings. She knew perfectly well that charitable visits were one thing but training another. Training would introduce a stigma. And so she began to employ a certain degree of conscious cunning. Realizing that the emotive words were “training”, “nursing”, “h
ospitals” Florence avoided them. She began to make a speciality of volunteering to look after sick relatives and in the process both escaped from home and gained a sort of training through experience. This pleased her mother – how kind of dear Flo to go and look after her ill granny or aunt – and was acceptable to her father although he missed her company. For a while it even satisfied Florence herself, although never completely, but inevitably she reached the stage when she saw she was simply learning the same things over and over again and that all the time the skill needed to alleviate suffering efficiently was not hers. She needed to know more than how to soothe a fevered brow – she needed to know how to treat the fever itself.

  In 1844, when she was twenty-four, she resolved to ask permission to go for three months into Salisbury Infirmary to study nursing and become as trained as it was then possible to be. The resulting scenes were even worse than she had thought they would be. Her mother and sister became hysterical and even her father called her “spoiled” and “ungrateful”. The mere thought, of Salisbury Infirmary gave Fanny Nightingale convulsions. Florence could only want to go there, she said, because she must have “an attachment with some low, vulgar surgeon.” Her request was not just a personal insult but socially quite offensive. Nurses were drawn from the domestic-servant class and the taint of that class could not be overlooked. Faced with this vehement hostility, Florence at once gave in. She never once thought of defying her family and going ahead with her plan. If they could not be persuaded she must give in and carry on as before, hoping that one day she would convert them.

  The strain of doing this was tremendous and led her to a nervous breakdown. Instead of seeing that it was having her ambitions thwarted which had precipitated ill-health her parents believed it was having such ambitions at all. Until Flo got them out of her head, they concluded, she would never be well and “normal”. Hoping that a change would help to distract her, they let her go to Rome with some relatives to convalesce. Unfortunately for them, Florence met Sidney Herbert (then Secretary to the Admiralty) in Rome and was immediately drawn into an intellectual companionship with him which made her more determined than ever to do something with her life. Once back home, she made other friends through Sidney Herbert all of whom were interested, as she was, in the conditions of the poor and in hospital reform. Since these friends were all impeccably well-connected the Nightingales had no idea how Florence’s ambitions were being stimulated. Nor had they any idea that she was getting up before dawn to study Blue Books, those Government reports on social conditions which formed the basis for all reforms. It was her way of preparing herself, of making sure that she was well-informed about this subject which so troubled her. She could only manage to get through the monotonous days being the perfect dutiful daughter if meanwhile she could occupy her mind with something more demanding.

  The Blue Books were certainly demanding. One of the first Florence obtained was the 1840 report from the Select Committee on the Health of Towns and it is a good example of exactly what she taught herself to grapple with. It consisted of twenty pages of summary followed by two hundred and twenty-two pages containing the three thousand five hundred and twenty-two questions (with answers) asked by the inspectors. Florence read the statistics on population returns, on mortality rates, on fever rates. She absorbed details on the condition of Liverpool, where, she read, 7,800 cellars were inhabited by 39,000 people. “These melancholy details . . . can scarcely be read without shuddering . . .” said the report but Florence wanted to read them because she wanted to be in possession of the facts. She did not flinch from reading how “excrementitious matter” was mixed with water and poured straight into the gutters; how “the putrid effluvia” arising from dead bodies made grave-diggers ill; how the people of Bethnal Green lived “perfectly in the condition of the wigwams of the vilest savages.” She studied maps of back-to-back houses and of the position of privies. She read how children were killed through lack of proper sewerage provisions. Nothing was spared in this report. She read that one child died in Drury Lane of gangrene of the mouth contracted from the disgusting filth in his home. The gangrene “successively destroyed the whole of the roof of the mouth, perforating the palate bones and eventually opening a communication between the mouth and the nose by the mortification of all the intervening parts. The nose was next attacked and removed; the upper lip, detached from its adhesion to the jaw fell down . . .” It was the kind of thing no lady was supposed to know about, the kind of hideous detail guaranteed to produce a faint. But Florence did not faint. She read on and on, challenging as she did so the whole concept of what a lady should or should not be told. Then when she had finished she got dressed, went downstairs in her silk dress, breakfasted with her family in the beautiful Embley morning room and began her day of “duties” without once betraying the turmoil in her mind.

  By the time she entered her thirtieth year, in 1849, Florence had become an expert on Government Social Statistics. Her opinion was sought by Sidney Herbert and his friends and she was pleased to give it. Such meetings with like-minded people were the only occasions upon which she felt truly in control. Otherwise, she felt she was going mad. Far from gradually winning her family over to agreeing to let her nurse she had antagonized them by clinging to the idea. Her father called her “theatrical” and her mother, who longed to have her married, called her “wilful”. What was even harder to bear was the knowledge that marriage, which would make them all happy, now actually tempted her.

  She had met a man, Richard Monckton-Milnes, who attracted her. She met him originally in the summer of 1842 at a dinner-party given by the Palmerstons. He was an only son and heir to a wealthy Yorkshire estate. Thackeray said of him that he always put people in a good humour with his gentle wit and everyone liked him. He was popular, sociable and had many different sides to his character. The side that particularly attracted Florence, apart from the physical attraction she felt, was his love of children and his philanthropic efforts on their behalf. In 1849, after they had met many times over this long period since the first dinner party, Richard proposed. Florence wrote he was “the man I adored”,17 but she turned him down. Every night, she confided in her “private notes” to herself, she dreamed of him and the pencilled writing trembles on the page as she records her reasons for refusing him. “I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction and that would find it in him. I have a passional nature which requires satisfaction and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active, nature which requires satisfaction and that would not find it in his life. Sometimes I think I will satisfy my passional nature at all events because that will at least secure me from the evil of dreaming. But would it? I could be satisfied to spend a life with him in combining our different powers in some great object. I could not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things.”18 It all sounds very rational, very cool, but later Florence wrote (and here the pencil stops wavering and digs into the paper) “I do not understand it . . . I am ashamed to understand it . . . I know that if I were to see him again . . . the very thought of doing so quite overcomes me. I know that since I refused him not one day has passed without my thinking of him, that life is desolate without his sympathy.”19 Still she had not done with agonizing. Finally, she came to the conclusion that although it hurt she had made the right decision. “I know that I could not bear his life, that to be nailed to a continuation, an exaggeration of my present life without hope of another would be intolerable to me – that voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide.”20

  Suicide, in spite of her strong religious faith, was very much on her mind. She felt little desire to live with so little prospect ahead of any real change. Richard Monckton-Milnes seems to have made no attempt to try to present to her a different view of marriage or to persuade her that it could be a beginning and not an end. He took himself off and never bothered her
again. (What he took himself off to, according to Thackeray, was a secret life of debauchery and an interest in the works of the Marquis de Sade as well as other more worthy pursuits, so perhaps Florence had a lucky escape.)

  Her parents were exasperated and thought their daughter was deliberately making herself ill again. They sent her on a cruise to Greece to try to get her over her depression and on the way home she visited the Institution of Deaconesses at Kaiserworth in Germany. Kaiserworth, near Düsseldorf, had been founded in 1833 by Pastor Theodore Fliedner as a home for discharged female convicts and had grown to include a hospital, a lunatic asylum, an orphanage and two schools. It did not train nurses (“The nursing was nil and the hygiene horrible,”21 commented Florence) but it did care for the sick in a way not unlike the modern hospice. Florence was not, of course, by any means the first English woman to visit it but she was the first to be inspired by it. When she reached home she could talk of nothing else. Her one aim was to return.

  She was now thirty and yet still she asked and waited for permission. When it went on not being granted the extraordinary thing was the lack of hate this aroused. She continued to love her parents so much that if she could not have their co-operation she could not go ahead. Even when she was staying with a relative she asked permission to extend her stay – “Perhaps you will decide what you wish me to do and tell me your decision”,22 she would write. She would apologize constantly for her absence – “I am very sorry to leave home just when you are going to be alone” . . . “I am very sorry to be so long away from home” . . . “I remain at your disposal.”23 Her anxiety to please was painful but it was genuine. So was the concern felt for her welfare by her parents. If they appear now to be cruel and domineering in their resolute refusal to allow Florence to become a nurse they did not seem so then, even to her. They were doing what they thought best for a daughter whose happiness was their main, if not only, objective. When Florence announced that she intended to return to Kaiserworth for a longer visit, the Nightingales were not pleased but they did not absolutely forbid her to go. Even Fanny had begun to realize how serious Florence’s depression was and she was becoming a little frightened. If going to Kaiserworth made her happy it was perhaps worth going along with.