Aug 29, 2004

Healing the Victorians

By Emily Gordon

NIGHTINGALES: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale, by Gillian Gill. Ballantine, 535 pp., $27.95.

Imagine a day when people will sweep the decades of your lifetime into a single catchphrase. History, by necessity, tends to blur nuance, make complex figures into icons and cram generations of people into a cartoon phone booth of generalization.

And so, to hold the official line, “the Victorians” were prissy, politically conservative and socially conventional. Indeed, the subjects of Gillian Gill’s extraordinary new memoir-history were often conventional.

Yet Florence Nightingale, the most famous member of the extended family Gill describes, was anything but prim. It’s true that she was a pioneer nurse, but, as Gill makes sure we understand, there wasn’t much that either doctors or nurses could do within a theory of medicine that relied on leeches, amputation, bloodletting, purges, opiates and medications based on heavy metals and alcohol and was as likely to kill its patients as cure them.

Nightingale (1820-1910) was a pioneer of far more than nursing. She revolutionized scholarship, teaching (her best-known book, “Notes on Nursing,” is still in print in 11 languages), sanitation, statistics, political activism and institutional organization.

She took a democratic approach to medical treatment that was almost unheard of and changed the definition of what women were fit to do: When Nightingale set out on her career, nursing was considered — especially by the upper classes — to be the occupation of drunks, slatterns and whores. And while she believed that a Christian God had called her to serve the sick instead of marrying, she lived among, touched and comforted humans at their most disgusting and desperate, regardless of their birth or religion, and despised those who let class or religious prejudices interfere with their duty to try to save as many lives as they could.

Neither is the rest of Nightingale’s family so easily tagged. “In some ways, of course, to be odd was to be typically Victorian,” Gill remarks in her introduction. One might guess, for instance, that it was the adventurous young Florence who, on long family expeditions abroad, negotiated muddy roads and highwaymen and clambered down mines. But no - that was Florence’s mother, Fanny Smith Nightingale, who later became one of the forces working hardest against her daughter’s urgent independence.

Similarly, what kind of caddish degenerate would assemble the definitive collection of sadomasochistic pornography for all his friends to sample when they visited? Why, Florence’s spurned gentleman suitor (and cousin), Richard Monckton Milnes.

And weren’t Victorian fathers supposed to more or less ignore their children, especially privileged daughters who were raised primarily to be good wives and producers of male heirs? William Edward Nightingale, Florence’s father (known as WEN), took the time to give them Oxford-worthy educations himself.

Then, which of the two sisters — Florence or her older, frequently sickly sister, Parthenope - retreated to bed at the age of 37 and stayed there for decades in a depressed and painful slump, refusing family visitors and barely venturing outside? That would be Florence, who had spent nearly a year on a death-defying trip down the Nile and 21 months staging her justly famous turnaround of the Barrack Hospital in Constantinople amid the hell of the Crimean War.

The whole family was rife with contradictions. Despite a seemingly infinite tolerance for dying patients, perpetually ill neighbors and “hospital” rooms crawling with rats and lice, Florence could also be pigheaded, fussy, selfish and thoughtless with the far less fortunate Parthenope. She was prone to red-hot friendships that sometimes ended with a cold guillotine, and she occasionally made illogical judgments out of pride or resentment. In short, she was human.

But why document an entire family — indeed, an entire society? There are other biographies of Florence Nightingale (not least of which is the ambivalent chapter in Bloomsbury critic Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians”). Here, Gill stresses “the degree to which [the family] identified themselves as members of a group rather than as isolated individuals.” Equally important, progressive ideas dated back generations through the family’s Dissenting Protestant and Unitarian roots. As Gill underscores, “Family traits and traditions do not die, even if they go unexpressed for a generation.”

Florence’s own radicalism (and feminism, of a kind) emerged in her reformation of Britain’s entire medical system and fighting the closed and, of course, all-male structure of the English army in doing so. In due course, she won honors and the trust of that ultimate female power broker, Queen Victoria, who exclaimed, “I wish we had her at the War Office!” It might have made a considerable difference.

There’s plenty of juicy material here, and Gill omits no details. Remarkably, in a book so long, she misses few opportunities for making connections and — when appropriate — guesses at what might have been going on under the surface. Admirers of Anthony Trollope will find similar qualities here: meticulous detail in describing both public and private life, a steady hand when people or events get ugly and a genteelly wicked wit throughout.

In the end, of course, for all this careful documentation of this voraciously communicative person’s life, there are many mysteries that the reader will be left to puzzle over even after nearly 600 pages of dense biography and probing by Gill into every ambiguity, often in an engaging first person.

The biographer herself is the first to admit the paradoxical limitation of so much material. What was Florence’s religious calling exactly? How did she reconcile the amorous feelings she must have experienced with her decision to remain alone? (Some biographers make the stretch that she was a lesbian, but Gill rejects the idea after careful consideration.)

What accounts for her harsh rejection of her family in her many years of bedridden illness? What can explain her extreme emotional self-flagellation — what Strachey describes as her mind’s “singular revulsions, its mysterious moods of mysticism and of doubt … [her] self-examination, self-criticism, self-surrender”? And what, exactly, was she ill with for all those years?

In the present, when nothing seems hidden from the public eye, it’s probably useful to remember that self-revelation doesn’t necessarily make for understanding — from either without or within. Decidedly not a suffragist, or quite a New Woman, Florence Nightingale was a curious anomaly in her own time — or, perhaps, the collective ambitions and rebellion of all the women (and quite a few men) of her age in one dazzling figure.

“Through the facts she always saw lives,” Gill writes of Nightingale. The same can be said of the author, who does more than ample justice both to the individual and to that collective striving upward and outward, and in the process achieves an elegant masterwork of her own.