Florence Nightingale: A Biography

by Annie Matheson

Florence Nightingale: her home, her birthplace, and her family.

In the heart of Derbyshire there is a quaint old church, once a private chapel, and possessing, instead of a churchyard, a bit of quiet greenness, of which the chief ornament, besides the old yew tree at the church door, is a kind of lovers’ bower made by two ancient elder trees which have so intertwined their branches as to form an arbour, where in summer-time sweethearts can gossip and the children play. It belonged to a world far away from the world of to-day, when, in the high-backed pews reserved for the “quality,” little Florence Nightingale, in her Sunday attire that was completed by Leghorn hat and sandal shoes, made, Sunday after Sunday, a pretty vision for the villagers, in whose cottages she was early a welcome visitor. It was just such a church as we read of in George Eliot’s stories, clerk and parson dividing the service between them, and the rustic bareness of the stone walls matched by the visible bell-ropes and the benches for the labouring people. But the special story that has come down from those days suggests that the parson was more satirical than Mr. Gilfil or Mr. Tryan, and it is to be feared that when he remarked that “a lie is a very useful thing in trade,” the people who quoted him in Derby market-place merely used his “Devil’s text” as a convenience and saw no satire in it at all. Have we really travelled a little way towards honesty since those days, or have we grown more hypocritical?

The little girl in the squire’s pew grew up in a home where religious shams were not likely to be taken at their face value.

Her father, who was one of the chief supporters of the cheap schools of the neighbourhood, had his own ways of helping the poor folk on his estate, but used to reply to some of the beseeching people who wanted money from him for local charities that he was “not born generous.” Generous or not, he had very decided views about the education of his two children, Florence and Parthe. They enjoyed nearly a hundred years ago (Florence was born in 1820) as liberal a course of study as any High School girl of to-day, and no doubt it is true that the orderliness of mind and character, at which his methods aimed, proved of countless value to Florence in those later days, when her marvellous power in providing for minutest details without unnecessary fuss or friction banished the filth and chaos of the first Crimean hospitals, and transformed them into abodes of healing and of order. She grew up to be a beautiful and charming woman, for whom men would gladly have laid down their lives; yet her beauty and her charm alone could not have secured for our wounded soldiers in the Crimea, tortured by dirt and neglect, the swift change to cleanness and comfort and good nursing which her masterly and unbending methods aided her commanding personal influence to win.

But this is leaping too far ahead. As yet she is only Parthenope’s little playfellow and schoolfellow in the room devoted to “lessons” at Lea Hall, the small maiden who climbs the hill on Sundays to the church where the yew tree guards the door, and on week-days is busy or at play in the house that has been the home of her father’s family through many generations, and in the grounds of the manor that surround it.

Lea Hall is in that part of the country which Father Benson has described in his novel, “Come Rack, come Rope,” and the Nightingale children were within easy reach of Dethick Hall, where young Anthony Babington had lived. It must have added zest to their history lessons and their girlish romancings to hear of the secret passage, which was supposed to lead right into Wingfield Manor, from the underground cellar close to the old wall that showed still where Dethick had once reared its stately buildings. The fact that the farm bailiff now kept his potatoes there and could not find the opening, would only make it a constant new ground for adventure and imagination. For they would be told of course—these children—how Mary Stuart had once been a prisoner at Dethick, and Anthony had vowed to be her servant in life or death and never cease from the struggle to set her free so long as life was in him. Nor did he; for he died before her, and it was not at Wingfield, but at Fotheringay, as these little students very well knew, no doubt, that her lovely head soon afterwards was laid upon the block.

Enviable children to have such a playground of imagination at their doors! But, indeed, all children have that, and a bare room in a slum, or a little patch of desert ground, may for them be danced over by Queen Mab and all her fairies, or guarded by the very angel who led St. Peter out of prison. Still, it is very exciting to have history written beside the doorstep where you live, and if you grow up in a home where lesson books are an important part of the day’s duties, it is pleasant to find them making adventures for you on your father’s own estate. It mattered nothing that the story would all be told by those contending against Anthony’s particular form of religion, who would be ready to paint him with as black an ink as their regard for justice would allow. To a child, that would rather enhance the vividness of it all. And there was the actual kitchen still standing, with its little harmless-looking trapdoor in the roof that leads into the secret chamber, where the persecuted priests used to hide when they came to celebrate a secret Mass. No wonder the two children delighted in Dethick, and wove many a tale about it. For had they not seen with their very own eyes the great open fireplace in that kitchen, where venison used to be roasted, and the very roasting-jack hanging from its central beam where all the roof-beams were black with age and dark with many tragic memories?

Dethick is but one of the three villages included in the ancient manor, the other two are Lea and Holloway; and in the days of King John, long before it came to the Nightingales, the De Alveleys had built a chapel there. Those who have read Mr. Skipton’s life of Nicholas Ferrar and know their John Inglesant, will be interested to hear that half this manor had passed through the hands of the Ferrars among others, and another portion had belonged to families whose names suggest a French origin. But the two inheritances had now met in the hands of the Nightingales.

It is a very enchanting part of the Midlands. The silvery Derwent winds through the valleys, keeping fresh the fields of buttercups and meadowsweet and clover, and in the tall hedges wild roses mingle their sweetness with the more powerful fragrance of the honeysuckle, until both yield to the strange and overwhelming perfume of the elder tree. The limestone hills, with their bold and mountainlike outline, their tiny rills, and exquisite ferns, had been less spoiled in those days by the tramp of tourists; and the purity of the air, the peacefulness of the upland solitudes, would have a wholesome share in the “grace that can mould the maiden’s form by silent sympathy.”