HER FIRST THOUGHT WAS to live again for hospitals. One of the most painful sacrifices of her life had been the renunciation of hospital work for administration after her return from the Crimea. She had declared repeatedly that of all people she was least suited to the writing of regulations, that pen-and-ink employment drove her mad, that she starved without human contacts. "My life now is as unlike my Hospital life when I was concerned with the souls and bodies of men as reading a cookery book is unlike a good dinner," she wrote to Rev. Mother Bermondsey in 1864.
She had already arranged that, when she could work no more, she should be taken to a hospital. In January, 1864 she wrote to Mrs. Bracebridge: "You know that I always believed it to be God's will for me that I should live and die in Hospitals. When this call He has made upon me for other work stops, and I am no longer able to work, I should wish to be taken to St. Thomas's Hospital and to be placed in a general ward (which is what I should have desired had I come to my end as a Hospital Matron)."
She was not prepared for her present situation. She had assumed that only death would release her from the obligation laid on her by God to do administrative work. She had assumed that she would leave the work ---instead the work had left her. She was "out of office," but she was not dying. Indeed, though she was fifty-two and an invalid, her expectation of death was more remote than it had been for sixteen years; she determined, however, to apply to St. Thomas's to enter a general ward as an ordinary patient; the cost of her establishment at 10 South Street was large and W. E. N.'s financial affairs were not prosperous. While she was "in office," while she was toiling at the work God had called her to do, the expense had been justified; now she was out of office the expense should end.
She determined to leave the world. She. the most famous woman in two continents, the friend of queens, the adviser of governments and ministers, would end her days lying side by side with poor working women subject to the discipline and the rigors of a hospital general ward. It was a scheme which appealed to her sense of drama, but when she confided it to Jowett he was alarmed. "Something which you said to me on Sunday has rather disquieted me," he wrote on June 22, 1872, "and I hope that you will allow me to remonstrate with you about it. You said that you were going to ask admission as a patient to St. Thomas's Hospital. Do not do this. (1) Because it is eccentric and we cannot strengthen our lives by eccentricity. (2) Because you will not be a patient but a kind of Directress to the Institution, viewed with great alarm by the doctors. (3) When a person is engaged in a great work I do not think the expense of living is much to be considered; the only thing is that you should live in such a way that you can do your work best. (4) I would not oppose you living at less expense if you wish, though I think it a matter of no moment; but I would live independently. (5) Do you really mean to live as a patient? It will kill you. I do not add the annoyance to your father of a step which he can never be made to understand; I look at the matter solely from the point of view of your own work. I have cared about you for many years; and though I have little hope of prevailing with you, I would ask you not to set aside these reasons without consideration."
She yielded. Her affection for Jowett triumphed and she told him she would set aside duty and conscience for his sake and abandon her plan of entering St. Thomas's. On July 11 he wrote that he was flattered he had prevailed and now would she not allow herself a little happiness?
A new period in her life was beginning---"will you try to hope and be at peace?" He urged her to be calm, to tranquilize herself, to achieve a philosophical attitude.
But it was impossible, for a great gap yawned in her life. She was out of office; the press of departmental work no longer made every day a fever---and how was she to occupy herself? In a private note of 1872 she wrote: "Never has God let me feel weariness of active life, but only anxiety to get on. Now in old age I never wish to be relieved from new work, but only to have it to do."
Though she had planned to live a life of austerity, poverty, and discipline in a general ward at St. Thomas's, she had never intended to retire from participation in the affairs of the hospital, and a new chapter in its history had just opened. In 1871 it moved from its temporary quarters in Surrey Gardens to the new buildings in Lambeth with which she had been closely concerned. The plans embodied her ideas, and every detail of equipment had received her meticulous attention. On the subject of hospital floors alone she had exchanged almost a hundred letters with Dr. Sutherland, Douglas Galton, manufacturers, matrons, doctors, architects.
The Nightingale Training School had also reached a crisis. Miss Nightingale's attention had been distracted from it by the demands of Poor Law reform and India. Now she found that it had fallen away from its original standards. In the spring of 1872 she began an investigation into the teaching and organization of the Nightingale School. In the new St. Thomas's the school had larger quarters and would train more probationers. Finding an urgent need for reorganization and reform, she made a new plan for herself: she would live near St. Thomas's and devote her life to the training school and the hospital. Mrs. Sutherland was set to work to find suitable lodgings in the district.
But in the summer of 1872 a drastic change took place in her life, and she was forced to return home. For the past three or four years Fanny and W. E. N. had been an increasing anxiety. They were old and ailing; in 1872 W. E. N. was seventy-seven and Fanny eighty-three, and the management of their property and their two establishments at Embley and Lea Hurst had become unsatisfactory. The position was peculiarly difficult. Since W. E. N. had no son, by his uncle's will the properties of Embley and Lea Hurst passed on his death to Aunt Mai and next to her son, Shore. Uncle Sam had become an exacting invalid, and the close ties of blood (in addition to Aunt Mai being W. E. N.'s sister, Uncle Sam was Fanny's brother) made criticism easy and businesslike arrangements difficult.
As soon as Miss Nightingale visited her family again she found herself elected into being the man of business of the family, though most unwilling to accept the position. "People who have carriages and butlers and housekeepers and who drive out every day for their pleasure and dress and go out every day, ask me, who have none of these things and am always in bed---and am chained, to the oar---ask ME to pay their bills and do their business," she wrote to Clarkey in the summer of 1868: the gibes were at Parthe. Parthe was "always, as she always had been, the spoilt child," Parthe fussed over her health and if she had an aching foot "made a tohu-bohu and would not put it to the ground." In fact her sister was suffering from the first symptoms of the arthritis which in a few years turned her into a helpless cripple.
In the summer of 1872, unable to see things go wrong without trying to put them right, she was forced to leave London and spend eight months with her parents at Embley. In June Fanny's old housekeeper, Mrs. Watson, died: she had been in the Nightingales' service for twenty-five years and had been the first person to welcome Miss Nightingale on her return from the Crimea. Her death was followed by confusion. The discipline of the household had become slack. The servants, wrote Miss Nightingale, did what they liked; not one of them was doing his or her proper work and to put the household of Embley into order was as difficult as organizing the Barrack Hospital at Scutari.
Month followed month, and it was impossible for Miss Nightingale to leave Embley. Life was filled with the misdeeds and complaints of housemaids, kitchen maids, footmen, cooks, and with unwelcome discoveries in household and estate accounts. "I am so stifled by dirty anxious cares and sordid defensive business," she wrote in a private note of August, 1872. "Like the maid of all work who has to wipe her dirty hands on her dirtier apron before she can touch clean people."
She was imprisoned again. Her father and mother clung to her; they were old and helpless, and her heart forbade her to abandon them. Miss Nightingale was fifty-two, but she had lost none of her capacity to suffer. "Oh to be turned back to this petty stagnant stifling life at Embley," she wrote in a private note of the late summer 1872. "I should hate myself (I do hate myself) but I should LOATHE myself, oh my God, if I could like it, find 'rest' in it. Fortunately there is no rest in it, but ever increasing anxieties. Il faut que la victime soit mise en pieces. Oh my God! "
The thought of work piling up in London, of the reform and reorganization of the Nightingale School crying out to be done, while she was held prisoner at Embley was agony to Miss Nightingale. All through the winter of 1872 she chafed. In the spring of 1873 she could bear it no longer. She must be in London; Parthe was ill and could not help---Fanny must come to London. The drawing-room floor at South Street was fitted up as a bedroom and sitting-room, and Fanny came to London in the spring of 1873.
Once in London Miss Nightingale threw herself with desperate haste into the reconstruction of the Nightingale School. The first task was to tighten up the technical side of the training. Soon after she arrived back, her friend Mr. Whitfield, the Resident Medical Officer of St. Thomas's, who had supervised the medical training of the Nightingale probationers since the foundation of the school, gave up the post owing to the extra work involved in the new enlarged hospital. His place was taken by Mr. Croft, one of the honorary surgeons. In April and May Miss Nightingale and Mr. Croft drew up a new plan of instruction.
The standard of examination was raised; probationers were required to undertake a course of reading planned by Mr. Croft and Miss Nightingale and were also at intervals to submit their notebooks for her inspection. Within a few months he reported that the work was improving and "the answers collectively are much better than they have been for years."
Miss Nightingale held that the training and education of a nurse, or indeed any education or training, was made up of two aspects of equal importance. First, the acquisition of knowledge which was properly tested by the passing of an examination; second, the development of character which could not be tested by the passing of an examination.
To improve the development of character, she created a new post. Mrs. Wardroper, the matron of St. Thomas's, who supervised the probationers, now found, like Mr. Whitfield, that the new hospital made greater demands on her time. An Assistant Superintendent was appointed with the title of Home Sister; the Home Sister was to make herself the girls' friend; she was to encourage them to read poetry, to listen to music, to go regularly to church. She was to inculcate a standard which would keep the Nightingale nurses "above the mere scramble for a remunerative place."
All influences, however, were secondary to the influence of Miss Nightingale herself. She dominated the school. From 1872 onward she determined to make herself personally acquainted with every probationer, and as soon as a girl had completed a trial period she was interviewed by Miss Nightingale, who wrote a character sketch which formed the first item in a dossier composed of examination results, notes of further interviews, letters, and comments. Miss Nightingale invited the probationers' criticisms and comments on the treatment they received from the sisters and the value of their medical lectures; she invited comments from the sisters on the character and conduct of the probationers. When she received a complaint or a suggestion which seemed to her to be worthy of notice, she wrote a memorandum to the persons concerned.
It was work with human beings again, the work for which she had longed. After the long dry years of toiling at administration, her life was rich once more. "I am over whelmed," she wrote to M. Mohl on June 21, 1873, "in a torrent of my Trained Matrons and Nurses, going and coming, to and fro, Edinburgh and Dublin, to and from Watering Places for their health, dining, tea-ing, sleeping---sleeping by day as well as by night."
Her stay in London had to be cut short when Fanny became unwell. By the end of June Miss Nightingale was back at Embley chafing at being separated from her work, miserable, frustrated. The solution, Jowett told her, was to resign herself to dropping active work and to concentrate on writing. He greatly admired the powers of her mind, he was convinced she had a message to give the world, and he believed she could spread her message more widely with more happiness to herself if she expressed herself by writing.
In October, 1872 he suggested that she should write some essays for the reviews on the Idea of God. "During the ten years and more that I have known you," he wrote, "you have repeated to me the expression 'Character of God' about 1000 times, but I can't say I have any clear idea what you mean." The suggestion attracted her all her life in periods of unhappiness, she had found relief in exercising her mind on philosophical ideas. She wrote three essays on the Laws of the Moral World which repeated the ideas she had earlier treated at length in Suggestions for Thought. Two of the essays were published by Froude in Fraser's Magazine for May and July, 1873 under the titles "A Note of Interrogation" and "A Sub-Note of Interrogation: What will our Religion be in 1999?"
Jowett also invited her to help him in revising his translations of the Dialogues of Plato---she still had considerable facility in Greek---and he placed a high value on her interpretations. "You are the best critic I ever had," he told her in 1872. He used her suggestions in his introduction to the Republic and wrote, "I am always stealing from you." In July, 1873 she sent him a letter on the Phaedrus and he told her that he had "put in most of what you suggested."
At the end of 1872 he asked her to make a selection of Bible stories for a Children's Bible. Enclosing her selection she wrote: "The story of Achilles and his horses is far more fit for children than that of Balaam and his ass, which is only fit to be told to asses. The stories of Samson and of Jephthah are only fit to be told to bull dogs; and the story of Bathsheba to be told to Bathshebas. Yet we give all these stories to children as 'Holy Writ." She summarized the book of Samuel and the books of Kings as "Witches. Harlots. Talking Asses. Asses Talking. Young Gentlemen caught by the Hair. Savage Tricks. Priests' Tales." Jowett was delighted, and on February 10, 1873, told her that she would find her suggestions had been adopted almost entirely and that he blessed her every time he took up the book.
And now she discovered there was a message she wished to convey to the world. Its nature was surprising. It had nothing to do with sanitary reform. She had turned away from practical affairs to the life of the soul.
Miss Nightingale was a mystic. She was not a contemplative. Like St. Elizabeth of Hungary, she was an administrator. The union of a busy and active life with the practice of mysticism was normal. Yet mysticism had come to be regarded as apart from ordinary life, a practice confined to saints enclosed in convents and hermits in their cells. In the autumn of 1872 Jowett suggested she should compile a book of extracts from the medieval mystics translated by herself showing the application of mysticism to present-day life. "You win do a good work," he wrote on October 3, "if you point out the kind of mysticism which is needed at the present day." She began to work on a book and drew up a title-page, "Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages. Collected, Chosen and freely translated by Florence Nightingale."
As she worked she sent her extracts to Jowett, who became interested in her comments. On April 18, 1873, he wrote suggesting that she should add a preface to the book, formulating her conception of mysticism and giving guidance as to how mystical books should be used. "I think it is clear," he wrote, "that this mystic state ought to be an occasional and not a permanent feeling---a taste of heaven in daily life. Do you think it would be possible to write a mystical book which would also be the essence of Common Sense?"
Through the summer and autumn of 1873 work on the book and the preface was her chief solace. She needed a "taste of heaven in daily life"; her own had become a round of coaxing servants, humoring her parents, struggling to persuade them to allow her to straighten their neglected affairs. By December she wrote to M. Mohl that she was "completely broken."
Worse, however, was to follow. In January, 1874 she escaped for a few weeks. Parthe was a little better, and as she and Sir Harry Verney were able to come to Embley Miss Nightingale hurried to London. On January 10 she heard that her father was dead. He had gone upstairs before breakfast to fetch his watch, slipped on the stairs, and died instantly.
The affection between them had been very deep. "His reverent love for you," wrote Richard Monckton Milnes on January 13, 1874, "was inexpressibly touching." But grief only too soon took second place as she became overwhelmed by the painful anxieties, the innumerable difficulties which arose out of his death.
She went down to Embley to be with her mother. All the painful wearing business, she wrote, was left to her, and in a few weeks she was reduced to misery. She asked Aunt Mai to offer Fanny a home at Embley, but Aunt Mai refused---she was seventy-six, was crippled with arthritis, and had the responsibility of an invalid husband. The only solution was for Miss Nightingale to give up her work and take her mother to Lea Hurst, which the Smiths did not require and after which Fanny "craved and longed ... .. I am utterly exhausted," Miss Nightingale wrote. "Not a day passes without the most acute anxiety and care. Oh the cruel waste of time, of all real work. If our family could neither read nor write, if they had only a limited number of Serb words at their disposal and if postage were 5/- an ounce, how happy life would be. How happy it was in the Crimea on account of these things; that was living in spite of misery." Her sole comfort was the consideration and good sense of Aunt Mai's son, the heir to the property, "my boy Shore." The affection she had lavished on him was, she wrote, a thousandfold repaid.
Once more there was no escape. Old, feeble, and unwanted, Fanny had a claim which to Miss Nightingale it was impossible to reject. The weary business of clearing up at Embley dragged on. "Everything has gone from my life except pain," she told Clarkey on June 8, 1874. In July Embley was given up, and she took Fanny to Lea Hurst.
Fanny's mind had almost failed, and she was blind. Surrounded by familiar objects, though she could not see them, hearing familiar voices, though she did not recognize them, she was at peace. But when she was taken to strange places, heard strange voices, she became agitated and unhappy, and wept. In her lucid moments she returned to the past. "Where is Flo?" she asked one day. "Is she still in her hospital?" Then she gave a sigh, "I suppose she will never marry now," she said. So very dim were her apprehensions that Parthe and Clarkey thought Miss Nightingale was making an unnecessary sacrifice: but she could not leave her mother to strangers. The tenderness which helplessness and suffering evoked in her were on Fanny's side now.
Many times in her life she was desperately unhappy, but never unhappier than during the summer and autumn of 1874 at Lea Hurst. It was, she wrote, "utter ship wreck." Writing had been a solace; now writing was impossible, and her book on the mystics was laid aside never to be resumed. Every minute which could be snatched from struggling with domestic problems was devoted to trying to preserve some part of her work. She habitually rose before dawn---her letters are headed "5 A.M.," "6 A.M.," "4-8 A.M. ," "Before it is light." An enormous amount of writing was required. "Because I am not in London I have to write 100 letters to get one thing done," she wrote. Weariness grew on her. She implored Dr. Sutherland not to crease her drafts "because I have no strength to re-write." She doubted herself---"I am afraid I am dreadfully prolix," "I have put in far too much detail," she told him in 1874.
One night, she recorded in a private note, the shadow cast by the night-light on the wall reminded her of Scutari. "Am I she who once stood on that Crimean height? 'The Lady with a Lamp shall stand.' The lamp shows me only my utter ship wreck."
Despair alternated with passionate self-reproach. She reminded herself that if failure were God's will then to rebel was the worst failure of all. She must force herself to believe that her present sufferings were not useless but part of God's scheme for the world. "I must believe in the plan of Almighty Perfection to make us all perfect." She must not snatch the management of the world out of God's hands. In practical details she found herself apt to give the Divine Will directions. "I MUST remember God is not my private secretary," she wrote on an odd scrap of paper.
It had never been her habit to live in the past, but now circumstances forced her thoughts backward. A succession of deaths removed figure after figure who had played an important part in her early life, and as she pined at Lea Hurst not only her present but her past seemed slowly dying. "My friends drop off one by one," she wrote to M. Mohl in May, 1873. "Every individual who formed my committee in 1857, many of them hardly older than myself, is dead. And I hang on." In August, 1872 Mr. Bracebridge died. A host of memories rushed in on her. Her stay in Rome---"I never enjoyed any time in my fife so much as my time at Rome"---his sympathy in her early struggles, his work for her at Scutari. When he died, she was at Embley and miserably unhappy. Mrs. Bracebridge's overwhelming grief provoked her to bitterness. In a private note she wrote: "Sometimes I think that I am glad that when I go there will be no such heart rending grief felt for me as when two are parted, who had lived for nearly half a century with each other and for each other---or as I felt when Sidney Herbert died and feel every day more and more. On Friday he will have been dead 11 years." She added, "There are things worse than death."
In May, 1873 John Stuart Mill died suddenly at Avignon. His death, she told M. Mohl, was a great shock to her. On January 31, 1874, a week or two after W. E. N., Mrs. Bracebridge (S), died after a long and painful illness. "A dreary end for her who had been all warmth and radiance," Miss Nightingale wrote. Mrs. Bracebridge had been Sidney Herbert's close friend and for years had spent the anniversary of his death with Miss Nightingale. "This is to me like the last parting with my past," she wrote in a private note.
In July, 1874 another familiar figure vanished---Lord Dalhousie formerly Lord Panmure. "I felt the death of Panmure, my old enemy, tho' I was always friends with him," wrote Miss Nightingale to M. Mohl on August 11, 1874, ". . . it was the last breaking up of old associations, of strife and struggle for noble aims and objects; the last ghost disappearing of my Sidney Herbert life. . . . He used to call me 'a turbulent fellow.'"
Chapter after chapter was closing; figure after figure left the stage. She alone survived---but for what?
Shore and his wife Louisa tried to help her, Shore suggesting that he and his wife should have Fanny at their house in London for some months between October and July when it was most urgent for Miss Nightingale to be in London for her work. Parthe could do nothing---her health was worse, and it was evident that she was seriously ill. In addition to Shore Miss Nightingale had a new helper, Miss Paulina Irby.
Paulina Irby had cherished a passionate admiration for Miss Nightingale since girlhood, and, inspired by her example, had gone to Kaiserswerth to be trained as a nurse. She was a Greek scholar and a woman of great nobility of character who had devoted her life to the relief of the sufferings of the Christian populations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, struggling to emancipate themselves from Turkish rule. She had stayed constantly at Embley, and now looked after Fanny and took some of the domestic burden off Miss Nightingale's shoulders.
It seemed that here were arrangements by which she might have been relieved, but they did not work smoothly. In the summer of 1875 Fanny went to stay with Shore and his wife, but became so ill and unhappy that she had to he taken away. South Street was deserted at a critical juncture, and Miss Nightingale found herself in a villa at Norwood. On June 18 she wrote to Clarkey: "I am 'out of humanity's reach' in a red villa, like a Monster Lobster in charge of my mother by doctor's orders, as her only chance of recovering strength enough to see her old home (Lea Hurst) after which she cruelly craved. . . . It is the only time for 22 years that my work has not been the first reason for deciding where I should live and how I should live. Here it is the last. It is the caricature of a life."
Miss Nightingale's conscience deprived her of Paulina Irby's help. Paulina was becoming absorbed by the Nightingale family troubles, but she was in England to collect funds for her work in Bosnia, not to look after Fanny. In a private note written in the summer of 1875, Miss Nightingale sternly reminded herself that, however great the temptation to keep Paulina, the decision to send her away must be right. The world, as she had so often told Hilary Bonham Carter, was divided into devourers and the devoured. Was she, F. N., now to become a devourer and allow Paulina to sacrifice herself and her work to "my poor mother's state and the family affairs?" At the beginning of 1876 Paulina was sent back to Bosnia.
In January Miss Nightingale sustained another great bereavement---M. Mohl died of "a peritonitis." She was heartbroken: she had cared deeply for M. Mohl, and he had been devotedly attached to her. No shadow had fallen on their friendship for nearly forty years. "It seems," she wrote, "as if a great light had gone out of the world."
By the autumn she was on the edge of breaking down. On November 28 she wrote to Clarkey from Lea Hurst: "The good Shores have taken my mother back. But I am so worn out---not having had one day's nor one hour's rest since my Father's death 3 years ago come January, that I am staying on here for a few days silence. An eternity of silence seems too short to rest me." Difficult as 1876 had been, 1877 was more difficult still. "O my darling," she wrote to Clarkey in June, 1877, "how impatient you are when your sister does but propose to you a companion---think of me---not proposed but obliged---and this is the fourth year and such companions---obliged to take charge of poor Mother, companion and a pack of new and strange servants." In July she told Douglas Galton: "I don't know when I shall be able to work again." The summer of 1877 was disastrous. One of the servants developed smallpox; there was a scandal, and defamatory articles appeared in the local paper. This unpleasant business forced her to stay on in the country, and in October she wrote to Douglas Galton that there was no chance whatever of her being able to do anything in London during the autumn.
And yet she managed to keep control of the Nightingale School. When she could get to London, she saw her nurses and probationers constantly; every girl who trained at the school was still personally known to her; and, above all, she wrote: to probationers, to nurses, to matrons, to those who were still in the school and those who had left it. Once a girl had become a Nightingale nurse, she did not slip out of Miss Nightingale's hands when her training was completed. Miss Nightingale did not approve of her nurses taking posts which had not been arranged by her. A nurse who had trained under her close supervision went to a post arranged and approved by her and continued to receive letters of advice. When Miss Torrance was appointed matron of the Highgate Infirmary Miss Nightingale sent her more than 100 letters in the first year, and had about the same number of replies. "It takes a great deal out of me," Miss Nightingale wrote to Clarkey in 1875. "1 have never been used to influence people except by leading in WORK; and to have to influence them by talking and writing is hard. A more dreadful thing than being cut short by death is being cut short by life in a paralysed state."
Miss Nightingale insisted that her school should perform the dual function which was her conception of education: it must not only teach the mind, but it must form the character. "It must be," she wrote in August, 1875, "a Home---a place of moral religious and practical training---a place of training of character, habits and intelligence, as well as of acquiring knowledge." In this conception she held the place, if not of a mother, then certainly of a favorite aunt. She was Fanny's daughter in hospitality and generosity, in the pleasure she took in seeing people comfortable and well fed. Fruit, game, jellies, creams, country eggs, and butter flowed from her to the Nightingale Home; she had sheaves of flowers sent up from Claydon for the Home and the hospital wards. When a nurse went to a new post, Miss Nightingale sent flowers to welcome her. Nurses who were ill had special dishes cooked for them by her cook. Nurses who were traveling found her manservant waiting at the train with a luncheon basket. Nurses who were run down were fed up at her expense. "Get the things out of my money," she wrote enclosing a detailed diet sheet. If a nurse were prescribed a change or a rest, she came forward. Sometimes the nurse would be sent to the seaside at her expense, sometimes asked to stay at Lea Hurst or Claydon. When Miss Nightingale was in London, she invited hard-worked nurses for what she called "a Saturday to Monday in bed" at South Street. Her girls were encouraged to feel that she was always behind them. "Should there be anything in which I can be of the least use, here I am," was a favorite ending to her letters. To be of use included the practical and the spiritual. She never ceased in countless letters, in numberless interviews, to hold up before her nurses' eyes the spiritual nature of their vocation, to instill into them not only the high standard of efficiency on which she was adamant but a sense of the presence of God.
She was repaid. Her nurses constantly sought her advice. From all over the world they wrote to her, addressing her as "Dear Mistress," "Beloved Chief," "Dearest Friend." In spite of her exile she made the Nightingale School as much an expression of her own personality as if she had presided over it in the flesh.
She found great pleasure in the company of young women. She liked young people, and young people liked her. The specter of a solitary old age, of "horrible loneliness," haunted her, and in the "torrent of nurses," dining, sleeping, tea-ing, coming to her for advice, confiding their difficulties to her, young, enthusiastic, affectionate, she enjoyed the human warmth of which she had been starved. All her life she had expressed personal feelings in terms of hyperbole; exaggeration was the custom of the age and set in which she had been brought up. Her old friend Lady Ashburton wrote of "the deep joy of communion with my beloved" after spending a day with Miss Nightingale when she was nearly sixty, and repeatedly addressed her as "Guiding Star of my life."
Miss Nightingale wrote and talked to the young women to whom she became attached in these terms, and her attachments, like all her emotions, verged on the inordinate. Two young women in particular won her affection. Miss Pringle, whom she christened "the Pearl," and Miss Rachel Williams, called the "Goddess Baby." Both were excellent nurses, both became matrons of important hospitals, and both were extremely good looking. Rachel Williams in particular was strikingly beautiful. ". . . It was quite a pleasure to my bodily eyes to look at her," Miss Nightingale wrote when Rachel paid her first visit as a Nightingale probationer. "She is like a queen; and all her postures are so beautiful without being in the least theatrical." The letters she wrote to Rachel Williams and to Miss Pringle were highly colored. The ups and downs of hospital life, the minor crises inseparable from taking a new post or deciding to go for a holiday, became dramas. In January, 1874 Miss Nightingale wrote: ". . . I am well aware that my dear Goddess-baby has---well a baby side, I shall not be surprised at any outburst, though I know full well that in the dear Pearl's terrible distress you will do everything and more than everything possible to drag her through. . . . Only don't break yourself down dear child." In December, 1874 she urged Rachel to come and see her in London. ". . . Telegraph to me any day and come up by the next express. . . . And I will turn out India, my Mother and all the Queen's horses and all the Queen's men, together with one sixth of the human race and lay my energies (not many left) at the Goddess's feet."
Miss Pringle, the Pearl, was addressed as "Dearest little Sister," "Extraordinary little Villainess," "Dearest ever Dearest." Miss Nightingale reproached her tenderly for not having eaten her dinner, and sent it after her in a cab. She implored her to take a much needed holiday. "Dearest very dearest. Very precious to me is your note. Make up your mind to a long holiday; that's what you have to do now. God bless you. We shall have time to talk." When Rachel Williams or Miss Pringle lunched or dined, she took pains to tempt them. "Dishes for Miss Williams," runs a note to her cook in 1879: "Rissoles, or fillets of sole a la Maître d'hôtel, or oyster patties, or omelette aux fines herbes, or chicken à la mayonnaise with aspic jelly, or cutlets à la Béchamelle." She delighted in beauty and charm, and the friendship of these lovely and intelligent girls filled an important place in her life. The friendship had also its practical side. The work was furthered; they were the ablest young women she had ever trained.
With enormous effort the Nightingale School could be controlled by correspondence, but there was other nursing work which could not, and in 1874 Miss Nightingale had to turn her back on an important opportunity. She was fully alive to the importance of district nursing, but when in 1874 William Rathbone asked her to help him in organizing a district-nursing scheme for London she had to refuse---family difficulties prevented her from undertaking anything which required her to be in London. She could not personally organize, but she did everything that could be done from a distance. In 1874 she wrote a pamphlet, Suggestions for Improving the Nursing Service for the Sick Poor, and, in accordance with her suggestions, William Rathbone founded the Metropolitan Nursing Association. In April, 1876 she wrote and signed a letter to The Times which was reprinted as a pamphlet under the title Metropolitan and National Association for providing Nurses for the Sick Poor. On trained nursing for the Sick Poor, by Florence Nightingale. It went into two editions. Finally, the first Superintendent of the District Nursing Scheme for London, appointed in 1876, was Miss Florence Lees, one of her ablest nurses, who had served with distinction during the War of 1870.
It was frightful to Miss Nightingale to turn her back on work, frightful not to attempt to do something which ought to be done---and she did not turn her back often enough. In her nursing work she had the Nightingale School to give her direction, but in her Indian work she became confused.
She had fully intended to go out of office in India as well as in England, but she received appeals she could not ignore. The state of India was sufficient to produce frenzy. There was so much to be done; the problems were so enormous, so urgent, so innumerable. As soon as investigation was made in any direction, fresh abuses emerged. In her mental state she was incapable of crying halt. At this period a letter from her was described at the India Office as "another shriek from Miss Nightingale." Irrigation led her to the land question, to rights of tenure, to usury, to taxation, to education, to communication. She toiled not at one issue but at twenty.
In 1874 she met Sir Arthur Cotton, the great master of irrigation. His record was impressive. He had irrigated Trichinopoly and South Arcot in Southern India by building, with immense success, two dams across the river Coleroon. There was not an individual in the province, it was said, who did not consider the damming of the Coleroon the greatest blessing that had ever been conferred on it. The financial returns were, respectively, 69 and 100 per cent. He had dammed the Godavery river and irrigated the Godavery district. The Godavery district was in a desperate state after a severe famine, and the district was almost depopulated. After the irrigation works were completed, the district became one of the most prosperous in India, and the population doubled. Was it not clear that the answer to the problem of India was irrigation? But Sir Arthur Cotton failed to persuade the Government to undertake large-scale irrigation works, and it was a favorite catch phrase to say that he had water on the brain.
Miss Nightingale sent Lord Salisbury schemes prepared by Sir Arthur Cotton, she demanded a commission on irrigation, she asked that the Government should collect statistics on the cost of irrigation works and their return.
In 1877 famine ravaged the Presidencies of Bombay and Madras, four million people perished, and irrigation became a burning issue. In 1878 a committee of the House of Commons was appointed to inquire into the possibility And desirability of preventing such famines in future by constructing public works, especially irrigation works, with money raised on loan. Sir Arthur Cotton was summoned to give evidence. Losses in the famine had been enormous, but the districts irrigated under Sir Arthur Cotton's schemes had not suffered. Nevertheless, the committee was hostile to Sir Arthur Cotton, and the recommendations contained in its report were in contradiction of his views.
It was a major defeat, and it brought Miss Nightingale into conflict with the India Office, which did not wish to admit the seriousness of the famine. When early in 1878 she applied for figures relating to the famine, she received a snub. On February 7 an official minute was addressed to her: "The Revenue Committee is of opinion that an intimation should be made to Miss Nightingale to the following effect. The various objects of high interest to which she refers are engaging the earnest attention of the Govt. of India . . . in addition to this a special enquiry is about to be made by a carefully selected Commission on the subject of Famines. . . . While then the Secretary of State would on public grounds deprecate the researches which Miss Nightingale wishes to make, as possibly interfering with and embarrassing the comprehensive enquiry of a Commission appointed by the Govt. of India under the orders of H.M. Government, he would as a matter of official propriety, point out to Miss Nightingale, whose active and intelligent philanthropy is universally recognised, that to open the Records of a Public Office to the free inspection of a private individual, however distinguished for character and ability, would constitute a very inconvenient precedent."
She was in disgrace. And while she became unpopular at the India Office, at the same time she lost more of her influence in India itself. Lord Northbrook was succeeded by Lord Lytton. She did not sympathize with Lord Lytton, he did not call on her and they never corresponded.
Seldom had Miss Nightingale sunk lower in misery than now. Her life with Fanny continued to present difficulty after difficulty, and Clarkey begged her to come back to London. Fanny was completely childish; it was very doubtful if she realized where she was. Why did Flo persist in burying herself in "that absurd place Lea Hurst?" "Why do you abuse me for being here?" wrote Miss Nightingale on September 13, 1879. "Do you think I am here for my own pleasure? Do you think any part of my life is as I please? Do you know what have been the hardest years of my life? Not the Crimean War. Not the 5 years with Sidney Herbert at the War Office when I sometimes worked 22 hours a day. But the last 5 years and three quarters since my father's death." The autumn dragged on. She had never in her life done anything she did not feel was morally justified, and she did not feel morally justified in leaving her mother now. But release was near. On February 2, 1880, Fanny died peacefully at the age of ninety-two, after regaining consciousness for a few hours, during which she listened to her favorite hymns.
THE CONFLICT WHICH had embittered Miss Nightingale's life for more than forty years was over. At sixty years of age she was free. Not because Fanny was dead, but because she had become reconciled with Fanny and with Parthe as well. All her life resentment against Fanny and Parthe had been a poison working within her. During these last difficult years, before Fanny's childishness, helplessness, and blindness, before Parthe's suffering, resentment had melted away.
A change came over her, and the bonté, the pervading benevolence, which had been her chief characteristic as a young woman, returned. She became gentler, calmer, even tolerant. In 1881 Uncle Sam died; she became reconciled to Aunt Mai, and they began to correspond affectionately again. With Parthe, for the first time since their childhood, she became intimate. She began to visit Claydon, where a room was set aside for her and called "Miss Nightingale's room." As Parthe's illness increased, Sir Harry leaned on her. "You are our Family Solicitor," Sir Harry wrote to her in January, 1881, "to whom we all turn when we get into a scrape."
Failure began to weigh less heavily on her. Had she achieved nothing, need she reproach herself quite so desperately? On New Year's Eve, 1879, Jowett had written to her: "There was a great deal of romantic feeling about you 23 years ago when you came home from the Crimea. (I really believe that you might have been a Duchess if you had played your cards better!) And now you work on in silence, and nobody knows how many lives are saved by your nurses in hospitals (you have introduced a new era in nursing): how many thousand soldiers who would have fallen victims to bad air, bad drainage and ventilation, are now alive owing to your forethought and diligence; how many natives of India (they might be counted probably by hundreds of thousands) in this generation and in generations to come have been preserved from famine, oppression and the load of debt by the energy of a sick lady who can scarcely rise from her bed. The world does not know all this, or think about it. But I know it and often think about it, and I want you to, so that in the later years of your course you may see (with a side of sorrow) what a blessed life yours is and has been. . . . I think that the romance too . . . did a great deal of good. Like Dr. Pusey you are a Myth in your own lifetime. Do you know that there are thousands of girls about the ages of 18 to 23 named after you? Everyone has heard of you and has a sweet association with your name."
Could Jowett be right? Ordinary happiness she had never wanted. ". . . miserable as I am," she had written in 1867, "I had rather be as I am than as I see the mass of London Ladies." In 1872 when on her way to Embley, she had caught a glimpse of Lord Stanley, now happily married and absorbed in his country estates, his wife and his library. "I saw them both at the station," she wrote to Clarkey, "they did not see me. (They were going to see the Queen.) I did not want to speak to him. I wanted to observe him. I saw it all at a glance. I should not have known him, so complacent, so obese, so happy---so bustling. All the great visions dropt away. (I was glad I had not to speak to him.) All quite forgotten, what once he was, or might have been. O happiness---like the Bread Fruit Tree, what a corrupter of human nature thou art!"
She could look back without regret, and now she found she could do more---she could look forward. On June 30, 1881, she wrote to Clarkey: "I cannot remember the time when I have not longed for death. After Sidney Herbert's death and Clough's death in 1861, 20 years ago, for years and years I used to watch for death as no sick man ever watched for the morning. It is strange that now I am bereft of all, I crave for it less. I want to do a little work, a little better, before I die."
Opportunity was on its way. At the moment she became free, opportunities for work for India, for nursing, even for the army, presented themselves once more. The political scene had just been transformed by the unexpected triumph of the Liberals in the General Election of April 1880. When Lord Lytton's term of office ended in May, her old friend and close ally, Lord de Grey, now Lord Ripon, was appointed Viceroy of India. Once more official doors were thrown open to her, and as Lord Ripon's Indian policy unfolded she was enthusiastic.
Two main measures of reform were proposed by Lord Ripon, both highly controversial. The storm center was the Ilbert Bill, introduced by Sir Courtenay Ilbert, which gave Indian magistrates, under certain conditions, power to try and sentence Europeans. An absurd situation had arisen. Since 1858, Indians had been allowed to enter the Civil Service, and, in spite of the fact that promotion was by no means made easy, certain of them reached the rank of District Magistrate; yet because Englishmen could be tried only by English magistrates, an Indian District Magistrate could find himself without authority to try cases which were within the authority of his subordinates.
Hostility to the Ilbert Bill, in fact a carefully guarded and by no means revolutionary measure, was based on racial grounds. Hysteria swept the country. Englishwomen wrote that it was an insult to subject English womanhood to native judges; atrocities committed during the Mutiny were recalled; Indian papers joined in with violence; insults and recriminations were freely exchanged, and India blazed from end to end with hatred.
Almost equally detestable, not only to Europeans but also to a large number of commercially successful Indians, were the proposals for land reform in Bengal and Oudh which endeavored to protect the ryot, the Indian peasant, from oppression and exploitation by placing authority and responsibility in the hands of the head man of each village, thus laying the first foundations of a degree of local government.
Behind the frantic opposition to Lord Ripon's reforms lay the grim shadow of the Mutiny. The Mutiny had done irreparable damage. The atrocities committed by Indians on Europeans on lonely stations, the equal atrocities committed by Europeans on Indians as, against the advice of such men as John Lawrence and Lord Napier of Magdala, the European victors avenged themselves in rivers of blood, left a wound which has never yet healed. In 1882 the wound was fresh.
Miss Nightingale had received her Indian education in a different school. The great Indian administrators who taught her---John Lawrence, Bartle Frere, Lord Napier of Magdala---were men to whom racial hatred was unknown. It had been their creed that the future of India must lie in giving ever-increasing authority to Indians. In this spirit the Queen's Proclamation of 1858 had been drawn up, in which the Crown, assuming the government of India, declared it to be the Sovereign's intention that ". . . our subjects of whatever race or creed be impartially admitted to our service, the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability and integrity, duly to discharge."
Through Lord Ripon, Miss Nightingale believed, light was coming to India at last. After the interminable delays, the endless disappointments-it was twenty years since she had written the "Sanitary Suggestions" for John Lawrence---a new age was dawning. "At last," she wrote to Lord Ripon in June, 1883, "we have a government of India which steadfastly sets its face to carry out . . . the spirit of the Queen's Proclamation." In private notes she called Lord Ripon "the saviour of India." She described his term of office as the beginning of a golden age. "It is the Millennium!" She acted as a reference library for Lord Ripon, and he used her encyclopaedic knowledge of Indian administration, reaching back for over twenty-five years, to guide him through the tangled jungle of Indian affairs.
She was drawn back into army work when in April, 1880, she received a letter from General Gordon asking her to help his cousin Mrs. Hawthorn, wife of a colonel in the Royal Engineers, in putting before the War Office facts concerning the neglect and ill-treatment of patients in military hospitals by orderlies. Miss Nightingale wrote a memorandum which was submitted to the Secretary for War. She was not successful. In his reply the Secretary for War stated that he "failed to be convinced." "I have seen such answers in the Crimean War time," she wrote to Douglas Galton in August, 1880. "The patient died of neglect and want of proper attendance; but by regulations should not have died, therefore the allegation that he is dead is disposed of." Out of the failure, however, came friendship with General Gordon.
She was instinctively in sympathy with him. His intense Evangelical religiousness did not grate on her; she cared only for saintliness, nothing for the form in which it was expressed, and his attitude toward his soldiers and the people of India exactly corresponded with her own. "I gained the hearts of my soldiers (who would do anything for me) not by my justice, etc., but by looking after them when sick and continually visiting the Hospitals," he wrote to her on April 22, 1880. He came to see her repeatedly, and they discussed religious experiences. Both were aiming at the same end---a life of union with God producing practical good works. The bond became closer when in May he was appointed private secretary to Lord Ripon, an appointment greeted by universal astonishment. Before he sailed he presented Miss Nightingale with one of the religious writings which he described as "little books of comfort." On his way out he wrote to her, on May 30: "On board this vessel nothing but discontent with their lot from Indian officers. . . . The element of all government is absent, i.e. the putting of the governors into the skin of the governed. The old Indian was obliged to do so, he was bound in some way to consider the sympathies of the native."
Gordon's understanding of Oriental races was indisputable. He had already a brilliant record of success both in India and China, but a large section of the official world detested him, and he was evidently unsuited to the post of private secretary to the Viceroy, involving official contacts and requiring the tact and social dexterity he lacked. As soon as he reached India he resigned, and after successfully executing a short mission in China he came home.
A period of vacillation followed, but his want of direction did not irritate Miss Nightingale. His difficulty was to find an employment which would satisfy his conscience. The fact that he felt he must exercise his own moral judgment, that he could not undertake to carry out any order he felt to be unethical, closed almost all avenues of official employment to him. As an additional difficulty he had no money on which to live. He spoke of going to work among the sick poor in Syria because Syria was cheap. She entreated him to go to India where there was so much to be done. But India was closed to him. "I would have gone to the Cape, I would have gone to India as you suggest," he wrote in January, 1881, "but I would never do so if I had to accept the shibboleth of the Indian or Colonial middle classes. To me they are utterly wrong in the government of the subject races, they know nothing of the hearts of these people, and oil and water would as soon mix as the two races. Men may argue as they like, our tenure of India is very little greater than it was 100 years ago. The people's interests not having been involved or interested in our prosperity or disasters are equally indifferent to either, in fact they hope more from our disaster than from our prosperity." The Government would not allow him to enter India. "I consider my life's work done, that I can never aspire to, or seek employment where one's voice must be stilled to one particular note---therefore I say it is done. . . . I cannot visit the sick in London; it is too expensive. I can do so in Syria and where the sick are there is our Lord. My dear Miss Nightingale what am I to do? My life truly is to me a straw, but I must live. I would do anything I could for India but I am sure my advent there would not be allowed. The door is shut."
Eventually, to assist a friend, he accepted an appointment in Mauritius, and from Mauritius he was called to Basutoland to negotiate with a rebellious chief. In spite of another success the Cape Government refused to renew his appointment, and he found himself back in England in November, 1882 once more unemployed. After wandering in Palestine for a year, he accepted a mission to the Belgian Congo at the request of the King of the Belgians, and went to Brussels, but the Belgian Government refused to sanction his employment. While in Brussels he received a telegram on January 15, 1884, from the British War Office. The victories of the Mahdi in the Sudan made instant action necessary, and Gordon was asked to go out as Governor-General. On January 18 he went to the War Office, and so great was the urgency that he left for Egypt the same night. He was not able to see Miss Nightingale, but he wrote to Sir Harry Verney, on January 17, 1884, "I daily come and see you in spirit, you and Miss Nightingale." A year later, on Monday, January 26, 1885, Khartoum, which Gordon had defended brilliantly against overwhelming odds for 317 days, fell and he was murdered.
A tremendous outburst of indignation against the British Government followed. Miss Nightingale did not share it. Whether Gordon had succeeded in his mission or not, whether he had been betrayed by the British Government or not, was unimportant. On February 7, in a letter to Mrs. Hawthorn, she spoke of the creed which she and Gordon shared. Suffering, disappointment, lack of success are the tribute which it is the soul's greatest privilege to present to God. In Gordon's death he had shown "the triumph of failure, the triumph of the Cross." "With him," she wrote, "all is well."
She took an active interest in the Gordon Home for Destitute Boys, founded in his memory. In 1887, sending the yearly report to a friend, she scribbled: "Ask them to tea. The roughest boys first."
However Mrs. Hawthorn's allegations were substantiated by independent evidence, Miss Nightingale persisted, and a Committee of Enquiry was set up in January, 1882 under the chairmanship of her old Crimean acquaintance, Sir Evelyn Wood. The first results were disappointing, the committee merely reporting that "improvements in the system of nursing are both practical and desirable." A member of the committee commented to Miss Nightingale: "This seems rather a mild opinion considering that all the independent evidence went to show that the orderlies were often drunk and riotous, that they ate the rations of the sick and left the nursing of the patients to the convalescents." Before the report could be issued, the Egyptian campaign of 1882 had begun under the command of Lord Wolseley, and much more serious defects became apparent. Miss Nightingale was asked for nurses, and a party of twenty-four, under the charge of a Nightingale-trained matron, went out. Reading their reports, she exclaimed: "It is the Crimea over again." The proportion of sick was unduly high, and only the small number of troops involved and the short duration of the campaign prevented disaster. In October, 1882 the Committee of Inquiry was reconstituted under the chairmanship of Earl Morley with instructions to inquire into the organization of the Army Hospital Corps and army hospital supply, organization, and efficiency in the field generally, including nursing.
She played a leading part in the second Committee of Inquiry, suggested witnesses, sent briefs for their examination, and outlined the facts to be elicited. As a result of this work she regained some influence at the War Office and became close friends with the Director-General of the Medical Department, Dr. Crawford. "We have not had a man of such unflagging energy since Alexander," she wrote to Douglas Galton on November, 1883.
She was working in administration again; she had influence at the War Office again, but how strange was the road by which she had returned! Nursing had brought her back to the War Office. The sacrifice of her personal life, the long bitter years of administrative toil, the thankless labor, the perpetual struggle with exhaustion had come to nothing. "How little is left of all the good work of 1856 and that five years until 1861 for the Army," she wrote to Sir John McNeill in February, 1881. But out of the forty unsatisfactory tiresome creatures she had landed at Scutari, out of the drunkenness, the scandals, the back-biting had grown an immense work.
In 1884, when the Gordon Relief Expedition was sent to Egypt, female nurses were officially requested by the Government. Miss Nightingale selected and engaged the party. Some were sent up the Nile to Wady Halfa. In 1850, during her Egyptian travels, Miss Nightingale had been at Wady Halfa, miserably unhappy. "How little could I ever have thought there would be trained nurses there now!" she wrote to Miss Pringle, the Pearl, on October 11, 1884. The nurses proved unquestionably successful. There were difficulties with orderlies; there was a shortage of medical supplies; there was a shortage of experienced sisters, but there was good-will on the part of the authorities. "Government are now doing all they can," Miss Nightingale wrote to Rachel Williams in the autumn of 1884. "In my day they were hopeless."
Her health improved. She visited Claydon; she stayed in a hotel at Seaford during the spring of 1881; she made a habit in fine weather of taking drives in the London parks with Sir Harry Verney. In 1882 she made her first personal visit to the Nightingale Training School; in November she went with Sir Harry Verney to Victoria station to see the return of the Guards from the first Egyptian campaign; a few days later she attended a review, sitting on the platform next to Mrs. Gladstone; and on December 4 she was present at the opening of the Law Courts, where Queen Victoria spoke to her and expressed herself pleased to note that Miss Nightingale was looking well.
But the structure of her life was still rigorously laid out for work, and she still refused to see anyone without an appointment. She still wrote into the small hours, still sent letters dated "Before it is light," still attempted more than any human being could accomplish, still continued to speak of herself as being on the verge of the grave; yet one by one the figures who had filled her life were steadily disappearing, and she remained, helpless, almost bedridden, but still alive.
Clarkey began to fail, and her indomitable gaiety---at the age of eighty-six she had been seen dancing to a German band---faded. Through the winter of 1882 she became feebler, and in May, 1883 she died. The enormous series of letters in which Miss Nightingale had poured out her inmost thoughts and feelings for more than forty years ceased, and a curtain fell on her private life.
In 1882 her very old friend Dr. Farr, the statistician, died. In 1883 Sir John McNeill died, her constant friend and counselor; "always so kind and fatherly," Aunt Mai had written in 1858. In 1884 Sir Bartle Frere died, and in 1885 Richard Monckton Milnes, now Lord Houghton, the man she had once adored.
But in her old age she no longer raged; she no longer resented what had not been accomplished; now she looked forward. On Christmas Day, 1885, when she was sixty-five, she wrote: "Today, Oh Lord, let me dedicate this crumbling old woman to Thee."Nihil actum si quid agendum was no longer her motto. How much she had changed was proved when, during the next few years, the tide turned against her again.
Unexpectedly Lord Ripon resigned. So great was the personal animosity against him that he considered his best course was to secure a suitable successor and go home. Lord Dufferin was appointed and on November 6, called on Miss Nightingale, the fifth Viceroy of India to receive his Indian education at her hands. Unfortunately a series of what Miss Nightingale described as "political earthquakes" followed. Lord Salisbury's Government was defeated in the general election of December, 1885. Mr. Gladstone came into power, only to be defeated on the Home Rule Bill. Another general election took place in 1886, and Lord Salisbury returned to power once more. In the excitements of these changes it was hopeless to expect any general interest in Indian reform. She wrote that it was "excruciating," but she resigned herself.
In 1886 she was introduced by Lord Salisbury to Mr. W. H. Smith, Secretary of State for War. He wished to begin a program of welfare work for the troops and asked for her assistance. A scheme was drawn up, and its accomplishment seemed certain when once more Fate stepped in.
Lord Randolph Churchill, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, unexpectedly resigned. The Government was reconstructed, Cabinet offices were redistributed, Mr. W. H. Smith left the War Office and went to the Treasury, and the Army Welfare scheme was shelved. "We are unlucky," she wrote to Douglas Galton on December 23, 1886.
In 1887 Queen Victoria celebrated her jubilee, and Miss Nightingale, too, considered 1887 her Jubilee year: her "voices" had called her first in February, 1837, and she had now completed fifty years of service. Retrospection was universal, and Miss Nightingale retraced her own long and eventful past.
On August 5, 1887, she wrote to Aunt Mai, now completely crippled with arthritis: "Dearest Aunt Mai---Thinking of you always, grieved for your sufferings, hoping you have still to enjoy. In this month 34 years ago you lodged me in Harley Street (Aug. 12) and in this Month 31 years ago you returned me to England from Scutari (Aug. 7th). And in this month 30 years ago the first Royal Commission was finished (Aug: 7). And since then 30 years of work often cut to pieces but never destroyed, God bless you! In this month 26 years ago Sidney Herbert died, after five years of work for us (Aug. 2). And in this month 24 years ago the work of the second Royal Commission (India) was finished. And in this month, this year, my powers seem all to have failed and old age set in."
Old age had come, and she accepted it. The storms had passed, and tolerance had replaced the uncompromising desire for perfection. She was entering on her last period of active work, and she enjoyed an Indian summer. Her health had improved, her mind was at rest, and her work in all directions bore a late harvest.
In India Lord Dufferin succeeded in passing with some amendments Lord Ripon's Land Tenure Bills and pressed for irrigation. In 1888 the Government of India set up a Sanitary Board in every province which possessed independent and executive authority. It was partial fulfillment at last of the scheme for an independent public health service which she had so urgently pressed on John Lawrence twenty-four years before.
Scheme after scheme came, if not to perfection, at least to partial fulfillment. The drainage of the great Indian cities, especially Madras, progressed at last. The drainage of Black Town, the worst quarter of Madras, was begun in 1882 and the work extended in 1887. For twenty years she had been preaching the importance of the Indian village, with its traditional community life, as the unit through which any educative scheme must be developed. In 1889 her efforts were to some extent rewarded by the Bombay Village Sanitation Act, which aimed at educating each village as a self-contained community, the channel of communication being the head man.
In 1891 she managed to focus attention on the progress of Indian Sanitation by arranging that the International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, to be held in London, should include an Indian section. Indian gentlemen were sent as delegates and were entertained at Claydon. "Sir Harry Verney renews his invitations to Claydon to the native Indian delegates . . . " she wrote to Douglas Galton on August 1, 1891. "Do you remember it is thirty years tomorrow since Sidney Herbert died?"
Lord Dufferin's term of office came to an end. On board ship on his way home he wrote to Miss Nightingale: "Among the first persons whose hands I hope to come and kiss will be yours." He was succeeded by Lord Lansdowne, a close friend of Jowett. Lord Lansdowne came to see her to receive his Indian education before he sailed, and he corresponded regularly with her. "He did much for us in every way," she wrote.
She was over seventy-one when she embarked on a complicated undertaking which proved her final crusade for the people of India, a scheme to make urgent sanitation a first charge on taxation. The method of taxation was complicated. Very broadly, a certain amount of taxation was fixed, while another amount, known as "cesses," varied from time to time and was devoted to various purposes. She proposed that when a village lacked a pure water supply, lacked drainage, lacked any means of disposing of its refuse, and when it was suffering from cholera or typhoid, its cesses should be applied to remedying these conditions before being applied to any other purpose. She prepared a memorandum setting out the scheme in detail; it was signed by Douglas Galton and other sanitary experts and forwarded to the Viceroy in April, 1892.
The familiar history of delay followed. There was a party which thought the cesses should first of all be applied to the making of roads: sanitary works were important, but increased means of communication were the right way to create the prosperity which would enable sanitary works to be paid for. Another party, while agreeing that a pure water supply and "simple latrine arrangements" were more than desirable, considered they should be made a charge on the revenues of the provincial government. Years passed by. Miss Nightingale argued, urged, reminded, interviewed. An enormous quantity of correspondence accumulated. Not until 1894 did she receive an official answer. The Government of India could not see its way to accept her suggestion, but would press the claim of sanitation upon local governments and administrations as opportunity offered.
It was her last campaign. She was still to do an immense amount of work for India, but in an advisory capacity; her vast knowledge, her long experience, and the weight of her prestige were called on again and again, but controversy was at an end.
In 1887, the year of Miss Nightingale's jubilee, the following hospitals, institutions, and organizations had matrons or superintendents who had been trained at the Nightingale School: the Westminster Hospital, St. Mary's, Paddington, the Marylebone Infirmary, the Highgate Infirmary, the Metropolitan and National Nursing Association, the North London District Association, the Cumberland Infirmary, the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, the Huntingdon County Hospital, the Leeds Infirmary, the Lincoln County Hospital, the Royal Infirmary, Liverpool, the Workhouse Infirmary, Liverpool, and the Southern Infirmary, Liverpool, the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley, the Royal Hospital for Incurables, Putney, and the Salisbury Infirmary. Parties of nurses under a Nightingale-trained superintendent had also gone to the United States of America, Sydney, Montreal, India, Ceylon, Germany, and Sweden. Training schools modeled on the Nightingale Training School and supervised and directed by Nightingale superintendents had been established at Edinburgh, at the Westminster Hospital, at the Marylebone Infirmary, at St. Mary's, Paddington. The school in connection with the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary was under the direction of Miss Pringle, and that at St. Mary's, Paddington, of Rachel Williams.
Though she had expressed regret that she could not give herself to district nursing, Miss Nightingale held the threads of the movement in her hands. William Rathbone consulted her on every point. "In any matter of nursing Miss Nightingale is my Pope and I believe in her infallibility," he wrote. During the years following 1880, she formed the movement. Somehow, "by hook or by crook," she managed to meet nearly all the trained nurses who took up district nursing and to keep up a correspondence with them. The function of the district nurse was established and defined by her. The district nurse must be a sanitary missionary, not an almsgiver, and to be a sanitary missionary she must be trained.
Finance was a constant difficulty. In 1884 Miss Nightingale wrote to Sir Harry's daughter-in-law, Margaret Verney, that ladies were ready enough to give money to pauperize the patients but not so ready to give money to train and pay nurses. The nurses were kept paupers in order that the patients might be pauperized. In 1887 Queen Victoria decided to devote the major part of the money which had been presented by the women of England as the "Women's Jubilee Gift" to the cause of "nursing the sick poor in their own homes by means of trained nurses," and the Jubilee Institute for Nurses was founded.
Results were beginning to exceed her highest hopes. In private notes during 1887 and 1888 she recalled the first beginnings of the work, her attempt in 1845 to train at Salisbury when her parents behaved as if she had wished to be a kitchenmaid, the difficulty of finding nurses to go to the Crimea, and Agnes Jones's experiences in the old infirmaries, when the police were regularly called in to establish order in the wards.
Yet though Miss Nightingale's influence in nursing was dominant, there was opposition to her. It was never contested that her results were not superior, but it was held that the form of training she demanded, the close supervision, and the exactions of her school, could not produce nurses in the numbers which were now necessary.
In 1886 a proposal was made which aimed at giving the trained nurse official recognition and at placing her qualifications on a standard basis. A committee of the Hospitals' Association proposed that an independent body of examiners, not connected with the training schools, should be created. This body would set an examination, and when a nurse had passed it she would be entitled to have her name placed on a register of nurses. Thus a standard of technical excellence in nursing would be established, and the public would be protected against employing nurses who were incompetent or disreputable.
It was the beginning of a battle which split the nursing world in two. Miss Nightingale opposed the proposal for two reasons. First, she did not think the time was ripe for the step. In forty years' time, she wrote, the nursing profession might be ready, but at the moment nursing was still too young, still too unorganized, and contained divergences too great for a single standard to be applied.
The second ground on which Miss Nightingale opposed the scheme was of greater importance. The scheme as put forward was a contradiction of what she believed the training of a nurse should be. She was not necessarily against registration, but she was passionately opposed to the kind of registration proposed. The qualifying of a nurse by examination only took no account of the character training which she held to be as important as the acquisition of technical skill. A nurse, she said repeatedly, could not be tested by public examination as if she were an engineer. Nursing was a vocation as well as a profession, and the two must be united. When a nurse received a certificate from her training by the Council of the Nightingale Fund, admittedly the pioneers of the training of nurses, and the other by many thousands of matrons, lady superintendents and principal assistants, doctors and nursing sisters, as well as by superintendents and principals of training schools. The list was headed by the signature of Miss Nightingale. In addition, a letter from her was read to the Committee of the Privy Council by William Rathbone. Eminent barristers appeared on both sides, and two Law Lords sat on the committee.
The hearing took a week and was completed by the end of November, but the decision was not announced until six months later---in May, 1893. The result was victory for no one. True, the Royal British Nurses' Association was granted a Royal Charter, but not in the terms it had sought. The word "register" was removed, and the Charter conferred only the right to the "maintenance of a list of persons who may have applied to have their names entered thereon as nurses."
The battle was over, and Miss Nightingale put it behind her. In 1894 she talked and corresponded with Princess Christian regarding a scheme for the formation of a war reserve of nurses by the Royal British Nurses' Association. "We should, I think," she wrote, "be earnestly anxious to do what we can for Princess Christian as she holds out the flag of truce, in order to put an end, as far as we can, to all this bickering which does such harm to the cause." In 1893 she dedicated a lecture on Sick Nursing and Health Nursing, which was read at the Chicago Exhibition of Women's Work, to Princess Christian.
It was a tranquil end to her last great battle. She was an old lady now, and though her mind was still keen and her energy still remarkable, another change was taking place. Her horizons were narrowing; the world was receding; for the first time personal relationships were becoming of paramount importance in her life.