Before Lady-with-the-Lamp: Florence Nightingale’s Grand Tour

Abstract

8 Victorians Journal Before Lady-with-the-Lamp: Florence Nightingale’s Grand Tour by Richard Bonfiglio The Lady with the Lamp Florence Nightingale arrived in Scutari on November 4, 1854, leading a contingent of nurses to aid the wounded in the Crimean War—thanks to the British press, she was already an international celebrity. While still en route to the Crimea, she earned fame through a series of newspaper articles introducing her to the British public as a well-educated lady who had forgone a luxurious life to serve her country. The almoner of The Times' fund for Crimean nurses, John Macdonald, helped to create Nightingale’s iconic image; in a dispatch to The Times, he reported: She is a “ministering angel” without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds, (qtd. Cook 1: 237) As the only woman in the nursing corps allowed in the wards at night, Nightingale became exclusively associated with the image of the Lady with the Lamp, a metaphor for the Victorian ideal of Victorians Journal 9 Christian womanhood bringing comfort and light to the world.1 The popular notion was ultimately seared into the public imagination following publication of her engraving in The Illustrated London News on February 24, 1855, in which she heroically wields a lamp at night amidst a roomful of suffering soldiers. Most studies of Nightingale, however, have focused primarily on liberating the historical person from the popular iconography which she herself actively shunned.1 2 While it is commonly accepted among scholars that she exhibited no interest in her popularity during and after the war,3 less known is how she actively shaped her future public image in the decade preceding the military conflict. Understanding how her popular representations emerged historically requires examining how the British media’s lionization of the war hero dovetailed with her own attempts to fashion an identity through extensive travels to the Continent and to Egypt between 1847 and 1856. Nightingale’s personal and professional development was very much influenced by these early travels, and her life can be clearly divided into two key periods of 1 Nightingale “did not allow her nurses in the ward after 8:30 p.m. She alone (with an occasional companion) was allowed to figure as the Lady with the Lamp” (Summers 51). See also Woodham-Smith (162-79) and Bostridge (251-77). 2 In 1913, Cook claimed her “character...was stronger, more spacious, and...more lovable than that of The Lady with the Lamp” (1: xxxi). Less reverently, Lytton Strachey separates the “real” Nightingale, a highly demanding woman driven by a “Demon [that] possessed her,” from the popular conception of a “saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high degree...the Lady with the Lamp” (97). Mary Poovey analyzes the “two faces” of this “mythic figure” as mother/saint and soldier/politician, replacing popular tropes with her own terminology to demonstrate how Nightingale transcended and strategically manipulated Victorian domestic ideology in her career as an imperial administrator (168). 3 After returning from Crimea, “she never made a public appearance, never attended a public function, never issued a public statement....Her post-bag was enormous, but she would barely glance at it....[her sister] Parthe wrote the acknowledgments. Miss Nightingale herself wrote no letters, signed no autographs, granted no interviews” (Woodham-Smith 183-84). Bostridge explains that the “essential precondition for this appropriation of Florence by different interests was that she herself, in line with the conventional expectations ofher sex, should observe a rule of silence” (264). 10 Victorians Journal mobility and retirement: a pre-1856 period full of travels and studies of other cultures, and a post-1856 period of sedentary life devoted to colonial reform conducted from her home. Although her work in the Crimea anticipates her future career as a colonial reformer, the transnational work of...