The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  ‘That’s of no importance, when I’m indifferent to it.’

  ‘No woman can remain indifferent to suddenly being called “My lady”. No more than her friends who are not can remain unenvious.’

  ‘I am indifferent. I have seen the real world, and it’s a squalid, sickly place, full of misery, agony and death. Its titles are ridiculous, they’re like decorating with gold leaf the tenement houses of Cholera Court in Soho.’

  ‘You mean only that you are indifferent to marriage.’

  ‘Oh, that accusation again!’ She fell wearily into an armchair. ‘You make it as often, and as falsely, as the Puritans against the witches of Salem. I do everything for you that a wife’s duty demands. Or would you prefer to burn me at the stake and get another?’

  ‘On the contrary, you do not perform the only duty that a wife must.’

  ‘Must?’

  ‘I could employ an extra housekeeper, and there are a hundred women in society eager to share my invitations to dinners and balls.’

  ‘Fill both vacancies. I shouldn’t mind.’

  ‘But I should. If we separate, people will talk.’

  ‘Why worse than of any other couple in London who can’t get on? Since going into society, I’ve learned that unhappy marriages are highly regarded, as providing lively conversation. Happy ones are mentioned as scathingly as a dull pudding.’

  ‘Everyone in London knows that Florence is a lover of women. They would laugh at me as her rival suitor. I don’t mind scandal, I live on it. But I cannot take ridicule.’

  She sat in her mourning silk, looking sulky, feet stuck out, arms ungainly. She had lost her habit of standing with hands clasped. She no longer flavoured her conversation with a bouquet garni of French phrases. But she was still the woman whose wrists I had bent back on the stairs at Scutari.

  ‘You shouldn’t have taken me away from her.’

  ‘That was apparent on our honeymoon.’

  ‘Oh, don’t start about that,’ she said crossly.

  ‘A man less considerate than myself would have left you in that hotel in Vichy.’

  ‘It isn’t my nature to play the woman. I can no more change my nature than a Mussulman the colour of his skin.’

  ‘You can play the woman with a woman. Perhaps you still do? You have a pretty lady’s maid.’

  ‘Stop! You are making me cry. And the servants will be in with the tea.’

  ‘Cry as much as you wish. It is appropriate this afternoon. They will think you more tender-hearted than you are. Why did you marry me?’ I often asked, though often less angrily. ‘Why did you leave Florence? Why did you choose to spoil my life, for no better reason than to spoil your own?’

  ‘Because I wanted to prove to myself that I was a normal woman, like all other women.’

  ‘You mean you wanted to prove it to Florence? Out of spite.’

  ‘Perhaps I did. We quarrelled a lot that summer at the Burlington. I thought because she suspected our secret meetings.’

  ‘You quarrelled because she was wearying of you as a partner in her miserable tribadism. Oh, I’ve read my Juvenal.’

  She was furious. ‘You will not understand this is not just a physical connection, like two animals in a field. I loved Florence, ever since she first took me to Harley Street. And she loved me. You know that perfectly well, from everything she wrote when you took me away from her. Pathetic, terrible letters. I can still hardly bear to read them, but I do. Other women have children, or someone inspiring to live for, but she lost her husband and children and all. She said I was killing her, and I nearly did. For weeks, her life hung by a thread.’

  ‘Miss Nightingale is a valetudinarian fraud.’

  The footmen brought the tea. The upper classes enjoy the pacifying advantage of servants, who are liable to interrupt any conversation, and usefully prevent our fury mounting until it bursts the thwarting restrictions of intellectual disputation into the satisfaction of assault. Were it not for their butlers, we should see more duchesses with black eyes.

  By the time they had infused the tea and served the buttered toast, our tempers had cooled above the steam of our cups.

  ‘I am travelling to Geneva this summer. Will you accompany me? It is only right that my mother should look upon the face of her daughter-inlaw, and she cannot show her own in London.’

  ‘It is my duty to accompany you,’ Jane said irritatingly.

  ‘I can offer the attraction of Count Arezzo’s cook, a disciple of the late, loved Monsieur Soyer.’

  Two summers before, Soyer had opened his model kitchen at Wellington Barracks, gone home, spat blood and died. Florence was employing him in the sanitation of barracks. I was employing him for cooking articles in Candour. He was buried with his beloved wife at Kensal Green, to be joined there within the decade by the faithful admirer of his bacon and beans, Thackeray. He left the Soyer stove, still to warm the soups and stews of the British army.

  ‘You know I am as indifferent to food as to titles. I would far sooner manage the dinners of a thousand hospital patients than eat a single rich one myself.’

  ‘Or would you prefer to go back and live with Florence?’

  ‘She wouldn’t have me. Remember, she never saw Mary Stanley again.’

  ‘Then I shall sleep every night beside cold chastity, until death parts me from it.’

  ‘You make too much of my one deficiency. In all other respects I do my duty as a wife, as I did it as a nurse in Scutari.’

  ‘Scutari and our marriage is hardly a flattering comparison.’

  I stood up. It was time to describe my uncle’s funeral so that it would interest a workman next morning in an omnibus.

  Miss Nightingale was then intent on becoming sanitary Empress of India. Having set the Army Medical Department in order, she would perform the same service for Indian dung-heaps. Her ambition and enthusiasm for salubrity were boundless. One of the many times she fancied herself dying during the sultry summer of the commission, she remarked to Sidney Herbert, ‘Perhaps He wants a “Sanitary Officer” now for my Crimeans, in some other world where they are gone.’

  She had published Notes on Nursing, a combination in style of Soyer’s practical cookery instruction and God’s word, which sold 15,000 copies at five shillings. She was preparing Notes on Nursing for the Labouring-Classes, at sevenpence. I was still secretary of the Nightingale Fund, though my lords had long ago withdrawn their interest, for more fashionably worthy affairs. There was still no promised nurses’ training school. There was nowhere to put it. All the great London hospitals had been built with accommodation for their nurses no more generous than a mattress in a corridor. I heard secretly that spring of 1860 about the South-Eastern Railway wanting to build a line through the middle of St Thomas’ Hospital. They would give £75,000 for the land. I wrote to Miss Nightingale, desiring an interview. I said nothing to my wife.

  She was still at the Burlington Hotel, almost in sight of my front door. She now had a suite in the annex, with a sitting-room downstairs, in which I found Sutherland, deafer than ever. He greeted me cordially, explaining that Miss Nightingale’s health still saw its good days and its bad ones.

  ‘There is more work for us in the legacy of the Royal Commission than in its birth or keeping it alive. Five sub-Commissions were founded, you will recall, Mr Darling – Oh! I do beg your pardon, Sir Tristram. One, to put the barracks in sanitary order,’ he enumerated. ‘Two, for founding a statistical department. Three, to institute an Army Medical School. Four, completely to reconstruct the Army Medical Department, revise the hospital regulations and prepare a new warrant for the promotion of medical officers.’ He gave an arch smile. ‘Miss Nightingale names the last her “Wiping Commission”, because she can wipe the wrongs of the past and draw anew. And not only in England. I have myself been invited to inspect the barracks in Malta and Gibraltar.’

  ‘An agreeable voyage at this time of the year.’

  His face fell. ‘Miss Nightingale will not let me go.�
� A servant’s bell on a spring, added to the sitting-room wall, gave a brief clang. Sutherland looked heavenwards. ‘Miss Nightingale is ready.”

  I did not ask after Clough, supposing he was on an errand in Mayfair. But he was dying in Italy.

  The room was light. She looked well. She was fatter. She lay in her usual black dress and lace cap on a brand-new couch. Blue Books, letters, and reports were as usual in tidy piles everywhere. There were cats.

  After greetings, condolences, congratulations, all exchanged without warmth, she said, ‘This couch was given to me by an East End upholsterer – everybody now knows I am too ill to stand on my own two feet – as a token of the esteem in which I am held by the working classes. His workmen made it without pay.’

  ‘Very civil of them.’ I took the indicated chair, dislodging a cat. ‘And how is Mr Sidney Herbert?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? A sad change has come over the spirit of my…not dreams, but too strong realities. Mr Herbert is said to have a fatal disease.’

  I started to say something gravely sympathetic, but she interrupted, ‘You know I don’t believe in fatal diseases. But fatal to his work I believe this will be. He was just here to see me, to discuss what part of his work had best be given up. I settled that he should abandon the House of Commons, but continue in office as Palmerston’s Secretary of War, at least until some of the things are done which want doing. He is particularly forbidden damp, so cannot see me at night, which is irritating.’

  ‘He is surely attended by the best physicians available?’ I would not accept her airy trivialization of Sidney Herbert’s health. ‘Supposing he really is ill? I heard of his long-lasting weakness in the kidneys.’

  ‘In London, almost all the doctors are charlatans,’ she dismissed them. ‘They sell articles called prescriptions or operations said to be good for the health. I know more about Mr Herbert’s illness than any medical man. I sorrow to see that he is weaker and thinner than he was, but he is not materially worse in his general health. He has many years of usefulness left in him. He cannot give up office now, when we have every card in our hand to reform the War Office –’

  ‘The War Office! You are surely not seeking to reform the entire War Office?’

  ‘Why not? The War Office is a very slow office, an enormously expensive office, and one in which the Minister’s intentions can be entirely negatived by all his subdepartments, and those of each of the subdepartments by every other.’

  I wondered if she would shirk reforming the Cabinet or the Court. One of the cats rubbed against my trouser-leg, and she ordered it away. It was called ‘Bart’s’. She had named her pets after London hospitals.

  ‘I am glad the railway particularly wished to bisect St Thomas’,’ she said, when I explained my plan for adding £75,000 to the original £44,000. ‘Mrs Sarah Wardroper is matron there. A gentlewoman and a doctor’s widow, who became a nurse at forty-two. Straightforward, true, upright, free from artificiality and self-interest, her whole life and strength in the work she has undertaken. She is the only matron of any who I would recommend to form a school of instruction.’

  I thought that Florence’s mind had drawn a replica of herself. ‘I shall write to her,’ she agreed, ‘though of course I have no secretary. Clough has deserted me, and Sutherland always has some pond to dig in his garden. I have interminable correspondence about Netley, which will be built with a single disadvantage, that it is utterly unsuitable for the housing of patients. It may be a strange principle to enunciate, but the first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.’

  We had reached the real reason for my visit. ‘I did not realize the pain my marriage would give you.’

  ‘You left me alone to this dreary, hopeless struggle,’ she said bitterly, her hand indicating a roomful of work. ‘To this desperate guerrilla warfare, ending too often in too little, which makes me impatient with life itself. I, who could once do so much.’ She had no self-pity in Scutari. But the Barrack Hospital was a gentler taskmaster than her own emotions. ‘I have felt these last three years the extreme weakness of not having one single person to give one inspiring word. I was glad to end a day which never can come back, gladder to end a night, gladder still to end a month.’

  ‘How could I know that Jane had such great value? Your affections are a strange currency to me.’

  ‘The currency wasn’t strange to Ben Johnson. Light Venus with thy tribade trine, invent news sports…’ Her eyes grew blank, as though she saw Jane in the room.

  ‘Would you have her back?’

  She said nothing for a moment. ‘The things that are deepest in our hearts are perhaps what is most difficult to express.’

  ‘Now the law is changed. I could let myself be divorced by her. Or have our marriage declared void through failure of consummation.’

  ‘So? She did not bring you the happiness which she took from me?’

  ‘People would laugh at me, but I suppose I am young enough for them to forget before I need cut a dignified figure.’

  ‘Console yourself with Swift – “Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.”’

  ‘Florence, I understand you better than do your other courtiers. I am a clever little devil, and you are a cleverer big one. We are both industrious and unscrupulous, and contemptuous of the unfortunate people on whom we bring these qualities to bear. Jane is a stupid girl. I married her because I thought her a quick and clever one. I ask you to take her back, because she would be exchanging a bad marriage for a good one. She is no wife to me. All her attributes are anyway superficial, stamped on the blank of her mind by yourself. It may be said – to stretch a point – that I married you.’

  She was now more kindly. ‘But you would have to oust a rival, Tristram. The Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford.’

  ‘What! Mr Benjamin Jowett? That erudite owl with the piping hoot? Oh, he’d never do!’

  ‘He has asked me. But he is a great Platonist, and perhaps it is an expression of amor platonicus.’

  ‘Platonic love is Platonic nonsense. It is usually an expression of maudlin sentiment between the sexes.’

  ‘I would not have him, in any event.’ She thought a moment. ‘He always talks to me as though I were someone else. Please ask Lady Darling to call for tea.’

  25

  Oxford was delightful at the end of that June. The undergraduates had scattered to a trimester of flirtation disguised as travel, the dons to one of idleness disguised as contemplation. The dozing spires beneath a soft blue sky housed the annual meeting of the thirty-year-old British Association for the Advancement of Science. Bishop ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce would be attending, ‘to smash Darwin’.

  I was comfortably lodged at All Souls, one of whose dons wrote secretly for Candour under a classical pseudonym. The wretched savant needed money, his other secret being marriage, which disgraceful state would have immediately lost him his fellowship. I was developing my gift for finding men with the golden link of big ideas and the ability to implant them into little minds. Mr Karl Marx, still living in Soho, still writing articles on the Crimean War and the Eastern Question for the New York Tribune at a guinea a time, was doing me weekly pieces on political economy in place of those on cookery by Monsieur Soyer.

  That summer, I printed in the Daily Pioneer selections from Mr Charles Darwin’s long book with the long title, On the Origin of Species by means of a Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. When published the previous November, its first edition of 1,250 had sold out in a day, which was even better going than Florence’s Notes on Nursing at 15,000 a month. Darwin, Marx and Florence Nightingale were a trio who never met, but I met all three. They were three fire-crackers which went off together and roused the middle of the last century. It was I who lit the touch-papers.

  The Oxford meeting started on June 28, a Thursday which was exceeded in soporific dullness by the Friday. Admiral Fitz Roy, Captain of the Beagle which had co
nveyed Mr Darwin for five years to the land of scientific speculation, read a paper – on British Storms. Mr Darwin was not there. He was ill, as usual.

  Saturday was Soapy Sam’s day. Everyone stranded in Oxford by the academic tide wanted to see the show. The meeting was hastily rehoused from a lecture-room to the New University Museum, by the Parks. An American professor was drearily concerned with The Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr Darwin and Others, when Wilberforce entered, dome-headed, wide-mouthed, black-browed, gaitered and aproned, surrounded by a bodyguard of equally fearsome black-suited consciences, bowing greetings with unctuous liberality. It was a performance often seen in the theatre, when a famous actress arrived in the auditorium deliberately late, to the distraction of the audience and fury of the actors.

  His speech was a Niagara of soapsuds, swamping the little Beagle from truck to keel with slippery ridicule. Mr Darwin had no proofs, only opinions. Whose did they accept, Mr Darwin’s word or the Word of God? Listening on the platform was a man I knew distantly, Thomas Henry Huxley. He was a lecturer on natural history at the Royal School of Mines, a doctor of medicine and a Fellow of the Royal Society. A dry, perky, snub-nosed, profusely dark-haired man of thirty-five, so unsusceptible to academic hysteria that he was giving the meeting a miss. I met him in the Broad, and dragged him along. Bishop Wilberforce slipped into his peroration, then turned. ‘Is it through Mr Huxley’s grandmother or grandfather,’ he inquired smoothly, ‘that he claims to be descended from the apes?’

  Huxley jumped up. He jammed on his intimidating pince-nez. ‘I should most certainly rather be descended from an ape than from a man who prostitutes his education and his eloquence to the worship of prejudice and falsehood.’

  For a respected man of science to insult a distinguished bishop in public in mid-nineteenth-century Oxford seemed at first like Lord Cardigan’s charge at Balaclava. The canons volley’d and thunder’d demands for an apology. Then the scientists cheered on their champion, while the ladies dabbed desperately with their handkerchiefs and the wife of the vice-chancellor of Edinburgh University fainted away, to be carried out by a pair of analytical chemists. I had unknowingly seen Huxley switch the points for the world’s train of thought. The home of lost causes was to house another. Mankind shed its terrified reverence of dogmatic religion. There would be a restless grave in the crypt of Chelsea Cathedral that night.