Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  To appreciate the joy of the soldiers, and their sincere worship of Seacole and Nightingale, you have to remember what they had just been through. They had seen their comrades die in staggering numbers, at the hands of an enemy more lethal than the guns of Sevastopol, more vicious than the sabres of the Cossacks.

  Like all Londoners of the mid–nineteenth century, they had learned to have a terror of disease. No one had a scientific grasp of what caused the outbreaks of cholera that ravaged the city, but everyone had seen the speed with which it carried off its victims. They knew that within the space of a day a hale and hearty human being could be transformed into a Stilton-cheeked wraith with sunken eyes and wrinkled skin and a humiliating and terminal dysentery. The typhus louse ran riot in the rookeries and fever-nests of Clerkenwell, Holborn and St. Giles.

  For the millions of the working poor there was no hope of medical treatment, and no idea of nursing whatever. They died in such droves that the very graveyards overflowed, and the burial grounds themselves became a source of contagion. In the richest city on Earth, the heart of the greatest empire ever seen, life expectancy fell to thirty-five—lower than in the days of Hadrian.

  Mid-nineteenth-century London was the victim of its own success. The population grew by about 20 percent in every decade that Florence Nightingale was alive. At the apex of the pyramid were certainly people of astonishing wealth. As ever in the history of the city, there were bankers who made money so fast that their fortunes soon equalled those of the landed aristocracy. There were Barings and Rothschilds—and then there were figures of ruthlessness and cynicism, satirised by Trollope in the figure of Augustus Melmotte, a man first hailed as a great financier, drumming up excitement in a Latin American railroad, and then exposed as a dirty, bullying, ignorant charlatan. Of the forty richest men who died between 1809 and 1914, fourteen were merchant bankers.

  For every such tycoon there were a thousand Pooters—the lower-middle-class clerk of The Diary of a Nobody. And ranged beneath every Pooter-like clerk were the legions of the poor, their numbers swelled and their misery intensified every month by fresh additions from the countryside.

  In his book Ragged London, John Hollingshead calculated that a third of the city’s population lived in filthy and ill-constructed lanes and courts. The French writer Hippolyte Taine described his shock at seeing life in the alleys behind Oxford Street, the stifling lanes encrusted with human exhalations, the troops of pale children nestling on the muddy stairs. Journalist Henry Mayhew saw elderly people living on hard, dirty crusts they picked out of the road, washing them and steeping them in water before eating them.

  The greatest connoisseur of urban squalor was Charles Dickens himself, and the pages of Bleak House and Oliver Twist must be among the most powerful pieces of campaigning literature ever written. He created a landscape by which we identify and remember the worst of Victorian London; and yet even Dickens failed sometimes to do justice to the brutality of nineteenth-century capitalism.

  Henry Mayhew interviewed a sixty-year-old woman who had once had a good education but was now widowed and penniless. She lay exhausted and feverish at the end of her labours, trying to recover her strength on a cellar floor. She had become one of London’s 250 pure-collectors. That is, she literally scoured the streets for dog turds and took them to Bermondsey to sell them to the tanners. She had no understanding of the risks she was running with her health—and nor, frankly, had Mayhew.

  As an organism, London was sick, and getting sicker.

  In 1815 it was decided that homes should be allowed to make use of Joseph Bramall’s increasingly popular water closet and discharge their waste directly into the sewers. By 1828, 140 sewers emptied directly into the Thames. By 1834 people started to appreciate the full horror of waterborne pollution. In the words of Sydney Smith, canon of St. Paul’s, “he who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women and children on the face of the globe.”

  But still the link between sewage and disease was misunderstood. It was the sheer smell, the “miasma,” that sickened people, they decided. They called it “pythonogenesis.” The social reformer Edwin Chadwick tried to address the stench by commanding yet more of London’s filth to be pumped into the Thames—with disastrous consequences.

  In 1849 there was another outbreak of cholera, in which fourteen thousand people died. By 1854, when Nightingale and Seacole were preparing to leave for the Crimea, the mystery was still unsolved. They were both deeply ignorant of what we would now call basic hygiene—and yet that was the least of the barriers that they faced.

  In their different ways both women had conceived a burning desire to consecrate their lives to helping the sick. They were both important in creating the idea of the professional nurse.

  To achieve her ambition, each woman faced prejudice and discrimination of a kind we find outlandish today. Let us trace their lives, as they converge on that momentous encounter in a hospital in Turkey. I hope I will not be accused of political correctness if I say that Nightingale’s career was a triumph of the will; but Seacole’s advance in some ways was even more amazing.

  Florence Nightingale’s maternal grandfather had made his fortune from lead mines. The family had both an estate in Derbyshire and a mock-Tudor Schloss in Hampshire called Embley Park. They took their holidays abroad in Florence (her birthplace, in 1820) and Paris, where she caught glimpses of celebrities. As soon as she was able to think about her future, Florence concluded that she was going to disappoint her parents.

  Her fate ought to have been to marry an eligible young man. She had no such intention. She wanted to be a nurse. She practised her arts on her sister and her dolls, and even set the paw of her dog in splints.

  As she grew older, the feeling became stronger. She wanted to be esteemed for doing something, for practical action. She tried to slope off to become a nurse at Salisbury Hospital and was frustrated by her parents. She had a visionary scheme to found a kind of Protestant sisterhood, without vows, for women of educated feeling. No dice, said Mama.

  A nurse in the Victorian lexicon was either Juliet’s nurse, a sentimental old milch-cow; or she was a Mrs. Gamp, slurping liquor and hiccupping; or else she was too free with the male patients. No, said Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale to their daughter: nursing was not a suitable activity for a nice young gel. “It was as if I wanted to be a kitchen maid,” she wailed.

  For eight years she struggled to overcome this rejection. She pored over vast reports by medical commissions; she devoured pamphlets about sanitation; in the intervals of the London season she would bunk off to ragged schools and workhouses, drinking in the atmosphere of destitution. One minute she would be with her mother and sister as they strolled through some foreign capital; the next she would pop up in the slums.

  She was courted by an ineffably suitable cravat-sporting poet and politician named Richard Monckton Milnes—and turned him down, much to the chagrin of Mama. Not that Florence was incapable of lustful thoughts. “I have a passional nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him,” she mused. But she concluded: “I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction, and that I would not find it in his life.”

  It was one of the tragedies of the Victorian age—admittedly a fairly minor tragedy—that it does not look as though Florence Nightingale ever fulfilled the “passional” side of her nature. She never had sexual relations with a man.

  This was not, perhaps, because she was a lesbian or because she was unattractive to men (she inspired the devotion of all sorts, including the romantic feelings of the great Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett). The problem surely was that any such entanglement would have amounted in her own eyes to a surrender, a submission, a loss of that autonomy she yearned to express.

  “To be nailed to a continuation and exaggeration of my present life . . . to put it out of my power
ever to seize the chance of forming a full and rich life”—that would be suicide. It was appalling, she wrote in her torrential memoirs, that a talented and energetic young woman should face that choice: between fulfilling her professional dream or marrying some dope with muttonchop whiskers.

  “The thoughts and feelings I now have I can remember since I was six years old,” she said. “A profession, a trade, a necessary occupation, something to fulfil and employ all my faculties, I have always felt essential to me, I have always longed for. The first thought I can remember, and the last, was nursing work. . . . Everything has been tried, foreign travel, kind friends, everything. My God! What is to become of me?”

  God answered the question soon enough. One day she was travelling in Thebes in Egypt, when the Almighty “called” her. Those of us who have never been lucky enough to take a call from God can only wonder what it is like.

  Perhaps it is like the interruption of normal programming by a party political broadcast; or maybe there is literally a kind of ringing in the head. Hello, switchboard here, I have God on the line. Will you take the call?

  At any rate, she said, “God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone.” Florence assented, with the massive seriousness of the Victorians. She went to work in a hospital in Germany, and in 1853 her determination paid off.

  She became Superintendent of the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street. Mrs. Nightingale wept. “We are ducks, who have hatched a wild swan,” she said. Her mother was wrong. In the phrase of the biographer Lytton Strachey, it was not a swan her mother had hatched, but an eagle. The following year she spread her wings and soared. Britain may have possessed the greatest empire the world had ever seen, but that did not make London complacent. The government was chronically nervous of Russian intentions towards India, and when some argy-bargy arose between Russia and Turkey over the management of the Holy Places of Jerusalem, it seemed a good moment to teach the bear a lesson.

  But where? They consulted their maps. Big place, eh, Russia. Battle was eventually joined in the Crimea, a large peninsula in the Black Sea, and by September 1854 a British force was on its way to Turkey.

  It wasn’t long before the troops were hellishly ill, with eight thousand suffering from either cholera or malaria. The Times ran a letter heavily criticising the medical facilities. The eagle’s eye locked on her target.

  She wrote a letter to Sidney Herbert, the Secretary for War, offering her services. It shows how plugged in Nightingale was to the Establishment that Herbert had already written to his friend Florence to invite her to do just that. The letters crossed in the post.

  She took a detachment of thirty-eight nurses, including her aunt Mai, and soon they were bouncing across the Bosphorus, looking up at the vast and mouldering barracks of Üsküdar (Scutari) and debating which of the gels should be charged with getting the troops into the bath.

  It was thanks to the miracle of newspapers that these events were brought to the notice of a chubby fifty-year-old as she sat on the veranda of her hotel in Panama. Despite her age (she was fifteen years older than Nightingale), her stoutness, her skin colour, her complete lack of any formal qualifications and her ignorance of Russia, she knew she had to be there. She decided to travel to England to volunteer as a nurse—and to “experience the pomp, pride and circumstance of glorious war.”

  Mary Jane Seacole had been born in 1805, the year of Trafalgar, in Kingston, Jamaica. She was the daughter of a female “doctress,” or healer, and a Scottish army officer named Grant. So she was not entirely black—indeed she boasted that she had “good Scots blood” coursing through her veins; but she looked Afro-Caribbean, and all her life she sympathised and identified with people of colour.

  It was her mixed race, she speculated, that gave her the natural buoyancy and energy that propelled her around the globe, in an age when respectable women were supposed to be chaperoned wherever they went. “Some have called me quite a female Ulysses,” she boasted.

  As a young woman she travelled to Britain, the Bahamas, Cuba and Haiti. She married a mysterious Englishman named Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole, who was supposed to be the illegitimate offspring of Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Whoever Edwin was, he lacked his wife’s robust constitution, and died in 1844. Their nine years of marriage rate barely a mention in her autobiography.

  Mary lived by her wits. She was an accomplished cook. She made curries, she picked guavas and made jellies. Like her mother, she was in Jamaican parlance a “doctress” who learned to treat all sorts of dreadful tropical plagues. She was a hostess who ran a series of hotels cum convalescent homes, the first of which was in Kingston, where “one of the hardest struggles of my life was to resist the pressing candidates for the late Mr. Seacole’s shoes.”

  We have a watercolour portrait of Mary from about 1850, and though she is a bit on the plump side, we can see that she is very pretty, with a sweet and honest expression. When her first hotel burned down, she built another, and then went off to run a riotous establishment in Panama. She went prospecting for gold. She roasted and ate iguanas. She had a (possibly fictitious) encounter with Lola Montès, the noted sexpot and adventuress.

  She cared throughout for the many who were afflicted by cholera. “I used mustard emetics, warm fomentations, mustard plasters on the stomach and back, and calomel first in large and then in gradually smaller doses,” she said. She took pride in the apparent success of these decoctions, but such was her mental vigour that she was always prepared to learn.

  There was a fearful cholera epidemic in Panama in 1849, and when a year-old baby died in her care, Mary was sufficiently inquisitive to steal down to the banks of the river, take out a scalpel and perform an autopsy.

  “I need not linger on the scene, or give the reader the results of my operation; though novel to me, and decidedly useful, they were what every medical man knows.” She had a bout with the sickness herself, survived, and in 1852 she decided to return to Jamaica. Her optimism and dynamism are all the more interesting when you consider that she was not only female but black, and she was sensitive to racism all her life.

  In 1821 she had travelled to London with a young female friend a few shades darker than herself. They were teased by the street urchins, she recorded, and without any police to reprimand the little beasts “our progress through the London streets was sometimes a rather chequered one.” Yet she came back to London the following year, in the hope of selling her stock of West Indian pickles.

  She always maintained that the racial prejudice of Britons was nothing like that of the Americans. One evening before her return to Jamaica, she was attending a Fourth of July dinner in Panama, when an American stood up and made a speech of death-defying crassness. “God bless the best yaller woman he ever made,” he said, in what he imagined to be a compliment.

  “I imagine, gentlemen, that you’re as vexed as I am that she is not wholly white—but I do reckon on your rejoicing with me that she’s so many shades removed from being entirely black.” He went on to say—and please remember that this cretin thought he was making himself pleasant to Mary—that “if we could bleach her by any means we would and thus make her acceptable in any company as she deserves to be.”

  The man may have been drunk; the occasion may have been a party in a hotel in Panama; but Mary was not going to be spoken to like that. She made a fierce reply. She would have been happy to have a complexion as “dark as any nigger’s,” she said, and called for “the general reformation of American manners.”

  Mary’s “autobiography” is not a straightforward text. Though her voice and character ring true to me, there is no doubt that her account has been very substantially edited by “WJS,” the London hack who buffed it up for publication. Never forget that the purpose of the book, like the dinner for the troops in Royal Surrey Gardens, was financial. It was intended to excite the admir
ation and support of the public, who might be in danger of forgetting her role in the Crimea. There was therefore no harm in reminding her British readers what good and unprejudiced chaps they were—unlike those slave-driving Yankees.

  Mary was being generous to her British readership, but she also gloried genuinely in the name of Briton. She was a proud child of the empire, and in both Panama and the Crimea she called her establishment the “British Hotel.”

  She spoke of her instinct to cure and help English soldiers; and it was with a mixture of patriotism and commercial opportunism that she decided to offer up all her energies to the service of the British army in the Crimea.

  She was bitterly disappointed by the response. In the autumn of 1854 both Nightingale and Seacole were in London. Nightingale was preparing to set out, aged only thirty-four, as Superintendent of the Female Nursing Establishment of the English General Hospital in Turkey. In spite of the clamour for nurses, in spite of the golden stream of public donations for Crimean medical care, Mary Seacole experienced a series of rebuffs.

  She went to the War Office, and tried in vain to see Sidney Herbert—he who had despatched Nightingale. She was fobbed off by a series of amused young men; so she applied to the quartermaster-general’s department, where another man listened to her with polite enjoyment, before she went to the medical department; and when that failed, she decided to apply directly to be one of Nightingale’s nurses.

  She began to stalk Sidney Herbert, sitting in his hall while scores of people passed in and out, the flunkeys smirking at this “yellow woman whom no excuses could get rid of nor impertinence dismay.” At length she gave up this route and went to see one of Florence Nightingale’s companions. “She gave me the same reply, and I read in her face the fact that had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it.”