Florence Nightingale: A Biography

by Annie Matheson

Florence Nightingale’s Father.

It was a very youthful little maiden as yet who had been transplanted into these English wilds from the glory and the sunshine of the Italy where she was born. After the valley of the Arno and the splendours of Florence, it may have seemed somewhat cold and bracing at times. Rightly or wrongly, the father of the little girls—for our heroine’s sister, named after another Italian city, shared all her life at this time—seems to a mere outsider a little cold and bracing too. He came of a very old family, and we hear of his “pride of birth.” His wife, on the other hand, whom Florence Nightingale resembled, lives before us in more warm and glowing colours, as one who did much to break down the barriers of caste and, with a heart of overflowing love, “went about doing good.” Both were people of real cultivation—good breeding being theirs by a happy inheritance—and each seems to have had a strong and distinctive personality. It might not be easy to say to which of the two the little daughter, who grew to such world-wide fame, owed most; but probably the equipment for her life-work was fairly divided between the two. There is no magnet so powerful as force of character, and it is clear that her father possessed moral and intellectual force of a notable sort. Love, in the sense of enthusiasm for humanity, will always be the heaven-born gift of one in whom religion is such a reality as it was with Florence Nightingale, but religious ardour may be sadly ineffective if defeated by the slack habits of a lifetime, or even by a moral and mental vagueness that befogs holy intentions. Mr. Edward Nightingale’s daughters were disciplined in a schoolroom where slackness and disorder were not permitted, and a somewhat severe training in the classics was supplemented by the example of Mrs. Nightingale’s excellent housewifery, and by that fine self-control in manners and behaviour which in the old-fashioned days used to be named “deportment.” Sports and outdoor exercises were a part—and a delightful part—of the day’s routine.

But let us go back a few years and give a few pages to the place of Florence Nightingale’s birth and the history of her family. Her name, like that of another social reformer among Englishwomen, was linked with Italy, and she took it from the famous old Italian town in whose neighbourhood she was born. I have tried in vain to trace the authorship[1]—was it Ruskin or some less known writer?—who said of that town, “if you wish to see it to perfection, fix upon such a day as Florence owes the sun, and, climbing the hill of Bellosguardo, or past the stages of the Via Crucis to the church of San Miniato, look forth upon the scene before you. You trace the course of the Arno from the distant mountains on the right, through the heart of the city, winding along the fruitful valley toward Pisa. The city is beneath you, like a pearl set in emerald. All colours are in the landscape, and all sounds are in the air. The hills look almost heathery. The sombre olive and funereal cypress blend with the graceful acacia and the clasping vine. The hum of the insect and the carol of bird chime with the blithe voices of men; while dome, tower, mountains, the yellow river, the quaint bridges, spires, palaces, gardens, and the cloudless heavens overhanging, make up a panorama on which to gaze in trance of rapture until the spirit wearies from the exceeding beauty of the vision.”

When on May 12, 1820, Florence Nightingale was born, her parents were staying at the Villa Colombaia, near to this beautiful City of Flowers; and when the question of a name for her arose, they were of one mind about it—she must be called after the city itself. They had no sons, and this child’s elder sister, their only other daughter, having been born at Naples, had taken its ancient and classical name of Parthenope.[2]

Their own family name had changed. Mr. Nightingale, who was first known as William Edward Shore, was the only son of Mr. William Shore of Tapton, in Derbyshire, and the child who was to reform England’s benighted views of nursing, and do so much for the health, not only of our British troops, but also of our Indian Army, was related through that family to John Shore, a famous physician in Derby in the reign of Charles the Second, as well as to the Governor-General of India who, twenty-three years before her birth, took the title of Baron Teignmouth. It was through her father’s mother, the only daughter of Mr. Evans of Cromford, that she was linked with the family of the Nightingales, whose name her father afterwards took. Mary Evans, her paternal grandmother, was the niece of “Old Peter,” a rich and roystering squire, who was well liked in his own neighbourhood, in spite of his nickname of “Madman Peter” and the rages that now and then overtook him. Florence Nightingale was, however, no descendant of his, for he never married, and all his possessions, except those which he sold to Sir Richard Arkwright, the famous cotton-spinner, came to his niece, who was the mother of Miss Nightingale’s father. When all this landed property came into the hands of Mr. Edward Shore, three years before his marriage and five years before Florence was born, his name was changed under the Prince Regent’s sign manual from Shore to Nightingale, in accordance with Peter Nightingale’s will. But he continued to live in Italy for a great part of every year until Florence was nearly five years old, though the change of ownership on the English estate was at once felt under the new squire, who was in most ways the very opposite of that “Old Peter,” of whom we read that when he had been drinking, as was then the fashion, he would frighten away the servant-maids by rushing into the kitchen and throwing the puddings on the dust-heap.

Mr. Edward Nightingale, our heroine’s father, bore a character without fear or reproach. Educated at Edinburgh and at Trinity, Cambridge, he had afterwards travelled a good deal, at a time when travel was by no means the commonplace that it is now.

He is described as “tall and slim,” and from the descriptions we have of him it is clear that no one, even at a glance, could have missed the note of distinction in his bearing, or mistaken him for other than that which he was proud to be, the cultivated and enlightened son of a fine old family.

When we read that the lady he married was daughter of a strong Abolitionist, Mr. William Smith of Parndon, in Essex, we feel that the very name of Abolitionist belongs to a bygone past.

In those days the American Civil War was still to come, but the horizon was already beginning to blacken for it, just as in Europe, while two happy little girls were playing hide-and-seek in the gardens of Lea Hall and racing with their dogs across the meadows to Dethick, the hush before the tempest did not blind wise statesmen to those dangers in the Near East which were to overwhelm us in so terrible a war.

Mr. Smith, in desiring ardently the abolition of slavery, was ahead of many Englishmen of his day. He was an eager philanthropist, who for half a century represented Norwich in Parliament, and had therefore real power in urging any good cause he had at heart. His daughter Frances, when she became Mrs. Nightingale, did not cease to labour among the poor in the spirit of her father and of her own benevolent heart. She was a beautiful and impressive woman, and in her untiring service of others seems to have been just the wife for Mr. Nightingale, who was ready to further every good work in his own neighbourhood. He, in his artistic and scholarly tastes, was as humane and enlightened as was the woman of his choice in her own skill of hand and charm of household guidance.