The Florence Nightingale Museum

I happened to find myself in London, looking up at a statue of Florence Nightingale on her birthday. At the time, I was on a tour of Ben Franklin’s life in London, of all things. But the Florence Nightingale Museum was on my list of Places to Visit, and two days later, I ventured into the precincts of St. Thomas’s Hospital and thence to the museum.

Like so many of my generation, I first heard of Florence Nightingale in elementary school. It took a few decades for me to realize her significance. Even so, the museum was an eye opener. You can read the Wikipedia article for a detailed account of her life and accomplishments. For now, I’ll simply share some of the museum experience.

Please be aware that I do not have my laptop, but am working with tablet and phone, neither of which is ideal for a blog post, it turns out, which means you may expect workarounds, and maybe not so many links as usual. But since everybody doesn’t get to spend a month in London and be all nerdy history all the time, I hope you’ll enjoy traveling with me, despite the glitches.

Below is a gallery of images from the museum. A couple of notes:

The photograph of Florence Nightingale was taken shortly after her return from the Crimea. She was ill, and had lost so much weight that her parents were horrified. She cut her hair while in the Crimea because it needed too much care—energy she wanted to reserve for her patients…and for dealing with the bureaucracy and the doctors.

By the way, she was quite tall for her time—5’8”—and I hope my metric system readers will be kind enough to translate that into understandable measurements.

The bed is the one she died in. (I may be mistaken, and it may be a reproduction, but I failed to make a note at the time.) Beside it is a phonograph, which allows you to hear a recording of her voice. You can access this recording on the Wikipedia page. The little box at the front of the photo contains a soap with her favorite scent.

I had heard of the chef Alexis Soyer. I hadn’t realized he was also in the Crimea, and made his own major contribution to saving lives.

Many of the placards are posted against what appear to be bandages or hospital dressings, and there is a sound effect meant to indicate rats scurrying through.

The courage of the women who went out to nurse under these nightmarish conditions is beyond my imagining. As to the men: War is hell, as, tragically, we continue to be reminded every day.

The Foundling Museum

Reporting from London:

Maybe this should start with a trigger warning, as the topic is abandoned infants, it starts in the early 1700s, and the picture isn’t pretty. Let me tell you that I wept. So, if you’re still with me, here goes.

Charles Dickens introduced me to Coram’s Foundling Hospital in Little Dorrit. In a time when there was, essentially, nothing in the way of birth control, a great many impoverished women ended up abandoning their babies on the streets of London. By the thousands. Thomas Coram, who’d made his fortune in the shipping trade in America, was horrified at what he saw. No doubt he wasn’t the only one, but he felt he had to do something about it. And so he campaigned for years, and eventually, with the help of a number of prominent people, and, finally, the King’s permission, in 1739 founded a hospital or home for these children.

The idea was, the babies would be left at the hospital with some sort of token identifying them, so that the parent could reclaim the child when/if able to support him or her. In reality, very few children were reclaimed. They were, however, cared for, and given some sort of training that would allow them to become apprenticed or go into domestic work when they were old enough. At the time, 14 was old enough.

No, it wasn’t an ideal situation. Conditions being what they were in the 18th and 19th centuries, many children did not survive. But the Foundling Hospital saved the lives of thousands of children, and in many cases allowed them to have a better adulthood than they might have otherwise expected. For the full story, you might want to look at the Wikipedia article here.

I visited the Foundling Museum on a beautiful, sunny day. Nearby, children played football (U.S. soccer) in a park, reminding us that life, while not perfect now, is better than it was.

The museum comprises three floors. The ground floor focuses on the collections of artifacts related to the children, from the earliest days of the organization to the 20th century, when the hospital was relocated to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. You can listen to audio accounts from some of these former residents.

The next floor contains reconstructions of some of the original rooms of the hospital, and includes many of its works of art. That collection is a story in itself. With art donated by the artists, it became the first public art gallery in the U.K., and a fashionable charity.

The topmost floor contains the Gerald Coke Handel Collection. There I sat for a while in one of the armchairs with built-in speakers and listened to Handel’s music to quiet my soul.

What they wear in "My Inconvenient Duke"

Margaret Sarah Carpenter, Portrait of Lady Harriet Georgiana Brudenell (1799-1836), married Richard William Penn Curzon-Howe, 2nd Viscount Curzon (later 1st Earl Howe) in 1820. Portrait date 1834.

I’ll be the first to admit that 1830s women’s fashions are baffling and not necessarily attractive to 21st century eyes. But for a writer, they offer solid gold material. The male characters marvel at what the women are wearing, although these men are mainly preoccupied with a strategy for getting the lady out of the clothing. And if a man gets lucky, and gets to test his strategy, the process makes for fun, because there are so many layers, and one must deal with tapes and buttons and hooks and eyes. Oh, and those sleeve puffs, too.

As I’ve mentioned more than once, I also like the way women made themselves so big with these ensembles—not simply the big sleeves and swelling skirts, but also their hair and their headwear. The 1700s had big hair, and so did the 1980s, but the knots and rolls and swirls of the 1830s are something else altogether. It’s amazing what they could do without our blow dryers and gels and pastes and lacquers. Instead, it’s pomatum (aka pomade, and made of grease of some kind and natural scents) and pins and various hairpieces. There’s nothing shy and retiring about these fashions. And none of the “less is more” way of thinking. It’s “more is more.” And I find it fascinating and stimulating.

Of course, when you read, you’ll picture the clothing in a way that’s appealing to you—and that’s as it should be. Reading let us use our imagination.

Even when I write descriptions, I usually keep details to a minimum. This is partly not to slow down the story but also to allow readers to make the mental image they want. For instance, in Chapter 2 of My Inconvenient Duke, Lady Alice wears “a redingote of deep onyx.” That’s it. Not that I’ve been able to discover where that came from. After searching my numerous books and the images on my hard drive, I’ve begun to suspect that I made it up or created one dress from a couple of fashion descriptions.

But a redingote is, basically, a close-fitting (from the waist up) dress that fastens all the way down the front, like a coat. And the color onyx is not mysterious, unlike so many other fashionable color names one encounters.

In the gallery below you’ll see most of the clothing mentioned in the book. Many of the images will be slightly distorted. This is because I photographed them from my copy of the 1832-33 The World of Fashion, in which the monthly magazine is bound. It’s very old, very thick, and I don’t have the right (i.e., expensive) kind of scanner for this kind of work.