“By dint of remaining here for 13 months to dog the Minister I have got a little (not tart, but) Department all to myself, called ‘Of Public Health, Civil and Military, for India,’ with Sir B. Frere at the head of it. And I had the immense satisfaction 3 or 4 months ago of seeing ‘Printed Despatch No. 1’ of said Department. (I never, in all my life before, saw any Despatch, Paper or Minute under at least No. 77,981). Still you know this is not the meat, but only the smell of the meat. What we want is an Executive out there to do it, and a Department here to see that it is being done. The latter we now have; the former must still rest with the Viceroy and Council out there.” Thus did Miss Nightingale, in a letter to M. Mohl (Feb. 16, 1868), sum up the results of the campaign described in the last chapter. Her life, for some years to come, was now largely occupied with the affairs of the “little Department all to herself.” The Department may have been little, but she interpreted her duties, as we shall see, in a large sense. Her work in connection with the War Office, though it did not entirely cease, was no longer absorbing. She had ceased to have direct communications with the Secretaries for War. In 1868 there was one of the periodical reorganizations of the War Office, followed in the succeeding year by the retirement of Captain Galton.[100] She had thus no longer a confidential intimate in the Department. She could have made one, perhaps, if she had so desired; for her Scutari friend, Sir Henry Storks, had now been appointed to the newly organized post of Controller-in-Chief, and presently became Surveyor-General of Ordnance. But her Indian preoccupations, coupled with the never-ceasing strain of work as Adviser-in-General on Hospitals and Nursing, used all her strength. In the present chapter we shall follow the course of her life during the years 1868–72, with special reference to Indian work; in the next, we shall follow the development of her work in connection with hospitals and nursing.
The long strain, mentioned in the letter to M. Mohl, had told severely upon Miss Nightingale's strength, and at the end of December 1867 she went, leaving no address behind (except with Dr. Sutherland), for a month's rest-cure under Dr. Walter Johnson at Malvern. Upon her return to London she was busily engaged in the preparation of the Indian “Memorandum” described in the last chapter. The death of Miss Agnes Jones and the anxieties which it entailed (chap. i.) told greatly upon her health and spirits. Mr. Jowett, after seeing her early in July, was seriously alarmed at her state of physical weakness and mental despondency. She had half promised him that she would go for rest and change to Lea Hurst; but only if the rest were accompanied by a duty of affection. If her mother were at Lea Hurst, she would go; if not, she would not. So Mr. Jowett wrote privately to Mrs. Nightingale, who arranged her plans accordingly, and begged her daughter to come and be with her. They were together at the old home for three months (July 7–Oct. 3), and for a week of the time Mr. Jowett was with them. The mother and the daughter had seldom been on such affectionate and understanding terms as now. “Mama,” wrote Miss Nightingale to Madame Mohl (July 20), “is more cheerful, more gentle than I ever remember her.” The daughter's note of conversations shows that they talked of misunderstandings in the past, and that the mother was ready to blame herself: “You would have done nothing in life, if you had not resisted me.” For many years to come, Miss Nightingale repeated such visits to the country homes of her parents. They were now old; her father was 74 in 1868, her mother 80. The daughter desired to be with them so far as her work allowed. Perhaps something was due also to the persistent counsels of Mr. Jowett. Continuous drudgery in London was not good, he pleaded, either for her body or for her soul. They were supposed to have entered into a compact not to overwork. He avowed that he was faithfully keeping his side of the bargain, and put her upon her honour to do her part in return. It was an unhealthy life, he pleaded, to be shut up all the year in a London room. There was still much for her to do, and she would do it all the better for some relaxation of daily effort. Perhaps he persuaded her. At any rate, from 1868 for some years onwards there was more of the country in Miss Nightingale's life—less of incessant drudgery, more leisure for reading, more marge for meditation. In 1869 she was at Embley for three months in the summer; in 1870, at Embley for one month, and at Lea Hurst for three; in 1871, there was a similar division of time; in 1872 she was at Embley for eight months.
II
Mr. Jowett was often a visitor on these occasions for a few days at a time. He continued in frequent letters to urge her to attempt some sustained writing. She had a talent for it, he insisted, and she was possessed of great influence. He suggested as a subject suitable to her a Treatise on the Reform of the Poor Law, and he sent her a memorandum of his own ideas on the subject. There are one or two of Mr. Jowett's ideas, and occasionally a phrase of his, in what she ultimately wrote. She endeavoured to take his advice, and a resolve is recorded in her diary for 1868 to devote an hour a day to writing. The projected work went to no further length than that of a magazine article entitled “A Note on Pauperism.” Nothing that she ever wrote—with one exception[101]—cost her so much worry and trouble. She did what is always trying to an author's equanimity and often prejudicial to the effect of his work: she admitted collaboration. Dr. Sutherland had a hand in it—that goes without saying, and his assistance was always useful: he knew exactly within what limits he could really help his friend. But her brother-in-law was an authority on the subject and Lady Verney claimed (and not without justice) to be an authority on the style appropriate to magazine articles. She took much well-meant trouble, and transcribed her sister's first draft in her own hand, with corrections of her own also. The authoress was in despair, and sent again for Dr. Sutherland: “I have adopted all your corrections, and all Parthe's, and all Sir Harry's; and they have taken out all my bons mots and left unfinished sentences on every page; and this kind of work really takes a year's strength out of me; and now you must help me.” So, Dr. Sutherland patched up the broken sentences and harmonized the corrections, and the article was ready. Miss Nightingale was as timid and perplexed as any literary beginner about placing her paper. After much consultation she decided to submit it to Mr. Froude, with whom as yet she had no acquaintance. She was as pleased as any literary beginner when the editor replied immediately that he would be delighted to print the paper in his next number. In Fraser for March 1869 it appeared accordingly—the first of several contributions which she made to that magazine. The “Note” is somewhat disconnected in style and slight in treatment, but is full of far-reaching suggestions. She begins by insisting on a reform of which we have heard much in a previous chapter: the separation of the sick and incapable from the workhouse. Then she goes on to argue that the thing to do is “not to punish the hungry for being hungry, but to teach the hungry to feed themselves.” She attacks the laisser faire school of economists, “which being interpreted means Let bad alone.” Political economy speaks of labour as mobile, and she quotes a leading article in the Times which had talked about “the convenience in the possession of a vast industrial army, ready for any work, and chargeable on the public when its work is no longer wanted.” She stigmatizes such talk as false, in the first case, and wicked, in the second. The State should endeavour to facilitate the organization of labour. “Where work is in one place, and labour in another, it should bring them together.” Education should be more manual, and less literary. Pauper children should be boarded out and sent to industrial schools. The condition of the dwellings of the poor is at the root of much pauperism, and the State should remedy it. There should be State-aided colonization, so as to bring the landless man to the manless lands. Some of all this was not so familiar in 1869 as it is to-day, and Miss Nightingale's “Note” attracted much attention. Among those who read it with hearty approval was Carlyle. “Last night,” wrote Mr. Rawlinson (March 11), “I spent several hours with Mr. Carlyle, and amongst talk about Lancashire Public Works, modern modes of government, modern Political Economy and Social Morality, he brought to my notice your ‘Note on Pauperism’ as in his opinion the best, because the most practical, paper he had read of late on the question. I wish you could have been present to have listened to the great man alternately pouring forth a living stream of information, and then bursting into a rhapsody of passionate denunciation of some thick-headed blundering statesmanship or indignant tirade against commercial rascality.” Dr. Sutherland called to express his pleasure that the article had gone off so well. “Well!” she said; “it's not well at all. The whole of London is calling here to tell me they have got a depauperizing experiment, including that horrid woman.” A large bundle of correspondence testifies to the interest which her paper aroused. Some of it was not disinterested. All the emigration societies read the paper with the gratitude which looks to subscriptions. The article was very expensive to her; for she gave away the editor's fee many times over in such contributions. For some years following, she took great interest in schemes for emigration, and nothing angered her more in the politics of the day than the absence of any Colonial Policy in the schemes and speeches of Liberal Ministers.
Miss Nightingale had sent some of her correspondence on colonization to an old friend at the Colonial Office—Sir Frederick Rogers (Lord Blachford). “See what a thing,” he replied (July 26, 1869), “is a bad conscience! You, conscious of a life spent in bullying harmless Government offices, think that I must read your (beautiful) handwriting with horror. Whereas I, conscious of rectitude, have sincere pleasure in receiving your assaults.” This was a preface to an essay in which the Under-Secretary demonstrated, in the manner habitual to the Colonial Office in those days, the utter undesirability, impropriety, and impossibility of doing anything at all. Lord Houghton raised a conversation on the subject in the House of Lords, but confessed to Miss Nightingale that he was half-hearted, and nothing came of it. She formed a large heap of newspaper cuttings, collected facts from foreign countries, made many notes, and intended to follow up the suggestions, thrown out in her paper, into greater detail, and then perhaps to publish a book. She gave much time during 1869 to the subject, and in December Mr. Goschen, the President of the Poor Law Board, came to see her. They had a long discussion, and her note of it begins with an aperçu of the Minister—a little severe, perhaps, but not undiscriminating. “He is a man of considerable mind, great power of getting up statistical information and political economy, but with no practical insight or strength of character. It is an awkward mind—like a pudding in lumps. He is like a man who has been senior wrangler and never anything afterwards.” He seemed to Miss Nightingale to see so many objections to any course as to make him likely to do nothing; and his economic doctrines paid too little regard, she thought, to the actual facts. “You must sometimes trample on the toes of Political Economists,” she said,[102] “just to make them feel whether they are standing on firm ground.” That she was deeply interested in the whole subject is shown by a testamentary document, dated September 19, 1869, in which she earnestly begged Dr. Sutherland to edit and publish her further “Notes on Pauperism.”[103] She lived in full possession of her faculties for at least a quarter of a century after this date, but she never put the Notes into printable shape. As I have said before, she lacked inclination to sustained literary composition. Besides, her hands were full of other things.
III
Miss Nightingale's main work during these years may be described as that of a Health Missionary for India. She carried on her mission in three ways. She endeavoured by personal interviews and correspondence to incense with a desire for sanitary improvement all Indian officials, from Governors-General to local officers of health, whom she could contrive to influence. She made acquaintance with natives of India and strove to spread her gospel among them in their own country. And through her “own little Department” in co-operation with Sir Bartle Frere she did a large amount of official work in the same direction.
On her return to London at the beginning of October 1868, she found work awaiting her under the first of the foregoing heads. Sir John Lawrence's term of office of Governor-General was coming to an end, and Disraeli had appointed Lord Mayo to succeed him. On October 22 he wrote asking to be allowed to see Miss Nightingale before he sailed for India:—
(Sir Bartle Frere to Miss Nightingale.) India Office, Oct. 23 [1868]. I think you will hear from Lord Mayo, who I know is anxious to see you, if you can grant him an interview next week. Could you in the meantime note down for him, as you did (when describing what the folk in India should now do) in a note to me a few weeks ago, the points to which he should give attention? I think you will like him very much. In appearance he is a refined likeness of what I remember of O'Connell when I went as a boy (with a proper horror of his principles) to hear him before he got into Parliament. Lord Mayo is very pleasing in manner, with no assumption of “knowing all about[168] it,” and evidently better informed on many subjects connected with sanitary reform than many men of greater pretension. He has a great sense of humour, too, which is a great help. I wish, when you see him, you would ask to see Lady Mayo.