key: cord-0060921-qkqlxksd
authors: Crawford, Paul; Greenwood, Anna; Bates, Richard; Memel, Jonathan
title: Afterlife
date: 2020-11-13
journal: Florence Nightingale at Home
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-46534-6_9
sha: 552ca70b4df045169f569ee35df77259306c61da
doc_id: 60921
cord_uid: qkqlxksd

There are few contenders to a more enduring cultural afterlife than Florence Nightingale. The process of her commemoration began long before her death, originating in the abundant images and descriptions that appeared in the new media era of the Crimean War. After Nightingale died, her commemoration expanded into the emerging media forms of the early twentieth century. The first film of Nightingale’s life appeared in 1915, and many plays, other films, and television programmes followed. Full-size statues, busts, and memorial plaques appeared in, on, or near buildings and places connected with her life and work. Nightingale’s image has featured on coins, banknotes, plates, cups, T-shirts, bath toys, and, from 2020, a barbie doll. Amid the spread of a new coronavirus in spring 2020, her legacy took on a new aspect with the naming of seven emergency NHS Nightingale Hospitals across England. Such ongoing shifts in the patterns of Nightingale commemoration are strikingly appropriate for a figure whose own actions and ideas were neither conventional nor static.

my charge' (Chapter 6). In the years after the war, she quickly learnt to draw on the power of the newspapers to raise support for her other campaigns. Frustrated at the low profile of the organisation that later became the British Red Cross, in 1870 she recommended that they 'advertise! advertise! advertise!' 4 As such, while the media's incessant focus on her personal image over and above her work made her uncomfortable, Nightingale was no stranger to the advantages of publicity. Her reluctance to appear publicly in the years around the Crimean War was such that journalists, photographers, and artists petitioned her friends and family to satisfy the public demand. 'I hope Mr Sidney Herbert and others of Miss Nightingale's friends will prevail upon her to sit for her portrait', the artist Charles William Knyvett wrote to Nightingale's sister Parthenope in late 1856. While recognising that 'in shrinking from public manifestations she does only what comforts with the dignity of her character', Knyvett pleaded not to be deprived, along with 'thousands of others, who can never see her in the flesh, from the comfort of looking at her likeness'. 5 Nightingale's parents received similar letters and in one case were told that despite the unwillingness on the part of Miss Florence Nightingale to allow her portrait to be taken in any way for publication … thousands of [her] countrymen and countrywomen are desirous of possessing an authentic portrait of her, and I hope she may be induced to alter her determination. 6 Such were the demands that Nightingale and her family faced during her lifetime. As Lytton Strachey put it in his iconic account of 1918, '[t]he name of Florence Nightingale lives in the memory of the world by virtue of the lurid and heroic adventure of the Crimea'. 7 In writing on the 'cultural afterlife' of the Crimean War, Rachel Bates identifies the growing range of relics and shrines that this Nightingale hagiography brought into being-including an orange purportedly given by Nightingale to a Crimean soldier and displayed today at Claydon House. 8 Photographs, oil paintings, engravings, and drawings of Nightingale graced the walls of homes and galleries. 9 An audio recording of 1890 even captured Nightingale's voice for posterity with a statement that itself contributed to her enduring myth: 'When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life'. 10 After Nightingale's death, her commemoration expanded into the emerging media forms of the early twentieth century. The first film of Nightingale's life appeared in 1915, and many plays, films, and television programmes followedperhaps most famously the 1951 film The Lady with a Lamp starring Anna Neagle. Full-size statues, busts, and memorial plaques appeared in, on, or near buildings and places connected with her life and work, with Arthur George Walker's bronze statue (1915) in Waterloo Place, London, being the best known. Nightingale's image has since featured on coins, banknotes, plates, cups, T-shirts, bath toys, and, from 2020, a barbie doll. A whole genre of Nightingale-themed 'educational manga' has developed in Japan. 11 In short, Nightingale became a commodity. This is a form of immortality: as Chris Rojek argues, 'once the public face of the celebrity has been elevated and internalized in popular culture, it indeed possesses an immortal quality that permits it to be recycled'. 12 According to Rojek, the posthumous commodification of celebrities is evident in efforts to preserve their homes as tourist attractions that become like shrines. 13 While neither of the Nightingale family homes in Hampshire and Derbyshire are permanent heritage sites, global visitors nonetheless regularly seek permission to visit them. The Florence Nightingale Museum in London (founded in 1989) receives tens of thousands of visitors each year, most from outside the UK. In addition, the Florence Nightingale Foundation, which traces its origins back to the 1855 Nightingale Fund, continues to promote and sponsor nursing education.

Amid this active and wide-ranging cultural afterlife, the question of Nightingale's saintliness has never quite gone away. Terms such as 'angel', 'mystic', 'light', and 'inspiration' characterised her initial representation in October 1854 and have been associated with her image ever since. 14 In 2000, the American Episcopal Church added Nightingale to its list of 'lesser saints', though not without a degree of controversy and objection. 15 Nightingale's importance to the history of nursing combines with her popular association with faith to prompt questions about the ongoing role of religion and spirituality within the profession. Much of the public commemoration of Nightingale now takes place in religious houses, whether at the annual Nightingale memorial service held at Westminster Abbey since 1965, the regular commemorative services in Derbyshire at St Peter's Church and Derby Cathedral, or at similar memorial events at the Church of St Margaret at East Wellow in Hampshire. Yet while Nightingale's career had always intertwined with the British political and social establishment, and, from 1854, the British army, she did not wed herself to these. As noted in the previous chapter, Nightingale deliberately stipulated that Westminster Abbey should not be her place of final rest, and often sought out progressive ways of challenging the norms associated with powerful institutions.

As we completed the manuscript of this book in spring 2020, Britain's relationship both to Nightingale commemoration and to the idea of home took a sudden and unexpected turn. The spread of a new coronavirus around the globe led to billions of people finding themselves in lockdown. People had to adjust rapidly to social isolation and the unsettling sense of being prisoners in their own homes or in temporary accommodation. They had to find creative ways to live their lives; the household and the family took centre stage, rooms were transformed into places of work, exercise, and learning; and the Archbishop of Canterbury even led an Easter Sunday service from his kitchen. 16 Nightingale's life and work, and many of the ideas about home addressed in this book, began to seem like topics to which more people than ever could intimately relate. Not only had Nightingale lived through epidemics, promoted hand washing and healthy home environments, and worked from her bed in seclusion from her family, the celebration of her and her nursing colleagues as militarystyle heroes anticipated the public applause from members of the public for 'NHS frontline' workers each Thursday evening. 17 The virus forced the cancellation of various planned Nightingale commemoration events in May 2020. London's ExCeL centre, the site of a large-scale nursing conference in Nightingale's honour planned for the autumn, became instead the first of seven NHS Nightingale Hospitals in repurposed spaces, dedicated to providing critical care to victims of the pandemic in England. Its kilometre-long exhibition hall was due to be filled with some 4000 patients laid out in rows, bringing to mind the 'miles of prostrate sick' that Nightingale attended to in the Scutari hospital, itself repurposed to meet the medical emergency of 1854. 18 Although, at the time of writing, these temporary hospitals had admitted far fewer patients than expectedin part due to a lack of nurses trained in critical care-the choice to remember Nightingale in this way demonstrated her continuing presence in the public imagination as a familiar, reassuring figure. The Nightingale name conferred an instant sense of legitimacy and implied that these were not simply improvised field hospitals, but solid institutions in which everything was going to be under control. In the face of the pandemic, the Chief Nursing Officer, Ruth May, spoke of Nightingale as the 'iconic nursing leader of her time', while other nurses echoed the language that she used about the profession by publicly referring to their colleagues as 'work family'. 19 One also suspects that Nightingale might have found these developments to be apposite in her bicentenary year, given that her legacy was to now not only be honoured by a series of academic discussions, but by the prospect of nurses, doctors, and other NHS staff working to save lives in truly exceptional circumstances.

Such ongoing shifts in the patterns of Nightingale commemoration are strikingly appropriate for a figure whose own actions and ideas were neither conventional nor static. Finding Nightingale at home, as this book as has sought to do, has meant following her life and thought to places far less settled than the houses and the institutions into which she was born. Her early life marked a battle to escape the confines and limitations of domesticity, to escape the restrictions forced on her by the conventions of polite society, to act in the world, and to use her intellect for good. However, the same traditions of privilege that frustrated her also offered her a practice of charitable visiting that was to prove formative. Seeing poverty in working-class dwellings drove her lifelong work to bring health and comfort into the mass of homes across Britain and its empire. Yet from an early age, Nightingale realised that she would only ever truly feel at home while engaged in meaningful work. This insight led her to value communities and institutions that could serve as surrogate homes and facilitate women's involvement in the public sphere. She wanted her nurses to belong to a family larger than that contained in a household. Home was not just the bricks and mortar of the places she resided in and visited. For Nightingale, home was a mission: an expansive concept and reality that lay at the heart of her life and thought.

Celebrity and Community: The Poetics of the Carte-de-Visite

Biographies of Florence Nightingale for Girls

Greg Jenner considers Nightingale in his recent popular history of celebrity, Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020). For Nightingale's resistance to her fame, see Bostridge

LMA (FNM) H1/ST/NC3/SU193

Florence Nightingale on Wars and the War Office

Eminent Victorians

Curating the Crimea: The Cultural Afterlife of a Conflict

For an authoritative list of such images, see Carol Blackett-Ord

min., 31 sec.; held by the British Library

Romancing the Role Model: Florence Nightingale, Shōjo Manga, and the Literature of Self-Improvement

Who Is Mrs Nightingale?', The Examiner

The Practice of Religion

A Pioneer of Hand Washing and Hygiene for Health

Comes at a Cost', The Times

The Times

Chief Nursing Officer), speech upon the opening of the NHS Nightingale London

Nurse Aimee O'Rourke Dies After Covid-19 Diagnosis