Book review

From Lytton Strachey’s vigorous deconstruction in Eminent Victorians (1918) to 1980s cartoons of Margaret Thatcher as the “Lady with the Blowlamp”, Florence Nightingale has served generations of historians, critics and commentators as a synecdoche for our difficult relationship with the Victorian age. As Mark Bostridge notes in the final chapter of his masterly new biography, one of the deepest ironies of Nightingale’s life is the way in which the uncritical veneration she enjoyed (or suffered) towards the end of her life—expressed in a landslide of material culture, from prints, statuettes and “Nightingale cradles” to musichall songs and the imposing statue erected in London in 1915—proved central in creating the apolitical, religiose “straw woman” so easily torn apart by Strachey and his successors. Bostridge made his reputation with a series of literary biographies in the tradition of Peter Ackroyd and A N Wilson, and in Florence Nightingale he once again bridges popular and academic genres, offering a rigorous and highly readable study of Nightingale and her milieu. His stated aim is to “overturn many of our misconceptions about one of the greatest figures of the Victorian Age [sic]”, and in this sense his status as an independent scholar is a great advantage, enabling him to draw on the most inspiring recent work in the history of medicine—especially that of Michael Worboys—without allowing it to dominate his narrative. To take one example, his discussion of whether Nightingale’s five decades of illhealth can be explained as a case of chronic brucellosis is admirably understated, concerned less with reductive retrospective diagnosis than the meanings and uses she found in her experience of illness. Born in the first year of George IV’s reign and dying a few months after Edward VII (who initially refused to admit her to his all-male Order of Merit), Nightingale’s long life is reflected in a daunting mass of correspondence, memoranda, journals, reports, and a seemingly endless procession of Notes on . . . Bostridge guides his readers through this complex story with a lightness of touch and a portraitist’s eye for the many facets of his central character. He reveals the ways in which Nightingale’s family—rich, Dissenting, socially ambitious, politically engaged—shaped her practical piety, her headstrong, omnivorous spirit of enquiry and her ambiguous attitude towards the status and role of women in public life. Nightingale’s intense relationship with her elder sister Parthenope provides a platform from which to explore the tensions between her own aims and desires, drawn out through an unconventionally diverse education and a series of journeys around Europe and the Near East, and the expectations and strictures placed upon a good-looking, well-born Victorian daughter. But Nightingale’s popular reputation still largely rests upon her work at the Scutari Hospital during the Crimean War, and Bostridge offers a compelling account of the Scutari mission. One member of her parents’ social circle—Sidney Herbert, Secretary of War during the Crimean campaign—proved crucial in gaining official support for Nightingale and her party of nurses, and after the conflict Herbert became one of her closest and most trusted allies in the campaign to improve British military nursing. But he also reminds his readers that the Crimean mission occupied less than two years of Nightingale’s nine decades of life, and that the administrative and political experience she