[PART VII]
WORK OF LATER YEARS
(1872–1910)
I ask no heaven till earth be Thine,
Nor glory-crown, while work of mine
Remaineth here. When earth shall shine
Among the stars,
Her sins wiped out, her captives free,
Her voice a music unto Thee,
For crown, New Work give Thou to me.
Lord here am I.
I found this in an intensely evangelical Baptist American's work—a lecture he had delivered upon me. Now these lines appear to me exactly true, and an extraordinary advance in the way of truth on English Evangelicalism which banishes work, like sin, from heaven, and has no idea that heaven is to be made out of earth by us.—Florence Nightingale (from a letter to her father, 1869).
CHAPTER I
“OUT OF OFFICE”—LITERARY WORK
(1872–1874)
I am glad that you have given up drudgery for public offices.… The position which you held was always a precarious one, because dependent on “temples of friendship” and the goodwill of the Minister. I am glad that you have a straightforward work to do now in which you are dependent on yourself.… I want you to have a new life and interest. The way of influencing mankind by ideas is the more excellent way.—Benjamin Jowett (Letters to Miss Nightingale, 1871, 1872).
“Something which you said to me on Sunday has rather disquieted me, 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 that a matter of no moment; but I would live independently. (5) Do you mean really 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.” So Mr. Jowett wrote to Miss Nightingale on June 22, 1872. “I am flattered to hear,” he wrote a little later (July 11), “that you have disregarded duty and conscience for my sake. I hope that you will never in future obey a conscience which tells you to kill yourself. Will you try to hope and be at peace; and just ask of God time to complete your work? You who have done so much for others ought sometimes to reflect that you have had a great blessing and happiness.”
The intention which Miss Nightingale had formed and from which Mr. Jowett dissuaded her was not a passing fancy. It was in accord with a deep-seated conviction, as may be seen from a document already quoted (p. [103]). Nor, though she listened to Mr. Jowett's advice, did she entirely abandon her purpose. Later in the year, she still thought of giving up her pleasant house in South Street, and she set various friends to report upon furnished apartments in the immediate neighbourhood of St. Thomas's Hospital. They could not find anything that seemed suitable, and she gave up the idea; but as she could not go to St. Thomas's, she contrived, as we shall hear in a later chapter, that St. Thomas's should come to her. She devoted herself from this time more largely than heretofore to the detailed supervision of the Nightingale School. Both in what she did, and in what she now left undone, the year 1872 marks a new departure in her life. It is explained by a summary entry in her diary: “This year I go out of office.”
Miss Nightingale had been “in office,” as she called it, continuously since her departure for Scutari in October 1854. She had been closely employed, that is to say, sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially, upon the administrative work of various Departments in matters pertaining to her special interests. With the advent of Mr. Gladstone to power in 1868, her work in this sort had much diminished. Her friend, Captain Galton, had gone from the War Office. She occasionally intervened in minor matters, as on one occasion when her friend, Mr. Lowe, agreed with Mr. Cardwell to accept her view about a certain pension to the widow of an officer, and there were other cases of the kind: as when she obtained an attentive hearing from Mr. Bruce (Home Secretary) for a memorandum which she submitted on the working of the Contagious Diseases Act. But her constant employment in connection with the War Office was over. She had argued with herself, in some meditations during 1871, whether she ought to make a bid, as it were, for “office” again. She could still exercise a certain official influence, she thought, if she chose to seek out Ministers and ask them to call upon her. But the political times were out of joint, she argued on the other side, so far as her special aptitudes were concerned. The strength of Mr. Gladstone's Government was thrown into political reform, not into administration; the administration of the departments, as she was not alone in thinking, was defective. There are many letters of this period in which she contrasts the days of Peel and Sidney Herbert with those of Gladstone or Disraeli. “But I must stop,” she says in one of them, “or you will say that I am aping Southey who said, you know, that the last Ministry was so bad that nothing could be worse except the present; but Coleridge differed from him, for he thought the present Ministry so bad that nothing could be worse except the last.”[129] At any rate what Miss Nightingale cared for and was fitted for, she said to herself, was only administration; in the years when she was “in office” she had not only written Reports, she had been able to organize the mechanism for carrying them out. Now that administration was going, as she thought, to the dogs, it was time for her to be out of office. That such was the lot appointed to her, was borne in by something that happened early in 1872. In February Lord Mayo was assassinated—a personal grief to Miss Nightingale and “a great blow,” she said, to her cause; and Lord Northbrook was appointed to succeed him as Governor-General. Miss Nightingale was personally acquainted with Lord Northbrook, who had been a friend (as also for a time a colleague) of Sidney Herbert, but he left for India without coming to see her. “You have worked for eternity,” wrote Mr. Jowett (April 3), to whom she had reported the new Viceroy's neglect; “why should you be troubled at the Governor-General not coming to see you (as he most certainly ought to have done)? Put not your trust in princes or in princesses or in the War Office or in the India Office; all that sort of thing necessarily rests on a sandy foundation. I wonder that you have been able to carry on so long with them.” Lord Northbrook was friendly nevertheless, as appears from his reply when she wrote and asked him to see Mr. Clark, the sanitary and civil engineer:—
(Lord Northbrook to Miss Nightingale.) Calcutta, Jan. 3 [1873]. I had great pleasure in seeing Mr. Clark, for I had seen his works at Barrachpore and knew of the great results which, so far as the statistics up to the present time can be said to prove them, have followed from the supply of pure water to Calcutta. I hope soon to see his drainage works at the Salt Lakes, and I have got the particulars of his plan for catch-water roofs for military buildings, which I will look at carefully as soon as I can. At present I am a little overwhelmed with business which has been accumulating during my tour. You may be assured of two things, that I fully understand the importance of pure water for the soldiers, and that I shall always receive with pleasure and consider with attention any suggestions, which you may kindly give me, both on your own account and because you were so much associated on these matters with my old master, Lord Herbert. Yours very sincerely, Northbrook.