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.

Olympia's Destination Wedding Locale

Greenwood Map of Kensington 1830. Red line is Olympia’s and Ripley’s route from Newland House (Campden House)

A previous post about A Duke in Shining Armor described my husband and my tracking Olympia’s escape route.

This time I thought it would be fun to take a closer look at the house she ran from, Newland House.

Seeking a wedding locale near but not in 1830s London, I discovered Campden House on a map of Kensington. It belongs to one of many areas that are now part of London but were rural retreats then. An online search turned up black and white engravings of a Jacobean mansion built more or less in the style of Holland House (more on that here, here, and here). That is to say, it had towers and turrets and lots of windows, and sprawled with a pleasing untidiness over a large estate. Because I intended to send my characters southwestward, its location was ideal: between Holland Park and Kensington Gardens, and a short distance from the Kensington High Street, where Olympia and Ripley would find a hackney stand.

Like other great houses, Campden House went through a series of transformations. These are described in Chapter IV of Kensington Picturesque and Historical, and explains my mentioning Queen Anne in my story. The chapter, which includes a rather poignant account of the queen’s one surviving son, describes the house’s interior, the 1862 fire*, and the rebuilding some years later. The second incarnation was demolished at the turn of the 20th century.

Campden House c. 1860, south-east view from the garden. Coloured litho by Edwin Smith.

But once again, though the book was completed, I still wanted to know more. Shortly after tracing Olympia’s route, my husband and I went to the Kensington Central Library, where Dave Walker, archivist/librarian/blogger, generously supplied mountains of material from the archives, and helped us—my husband, actually—scan and photograph dozens of images, including one describing the house’s location: “Old Campden House and its ground stood approximately within the square formed by the Sheffield Terrace (on the north) + Campden House Road (on the west) Gloucester Walk (on the south) and Church Street (on the east).” This helped us get our bearings.

“This photograph from the early 1900s shows the remains of tower that stood in the grounds of Campden House.“— Library Time Machine.

As many of you know, I have as much fun doing historical research as creating the story. One feeds the other. A Duke in Shining Armor inspired other investigations, as did my visit with Dave Walker. These in turn have inspired scenes in my work-in-slow-progress. You can expect more nerdy history material in the months to come.

Following are some of my sources, in case you’d like to delve more deeply into the history.

More about Campden House , with a detailed description of the Pitt estate, at British History online.

Description from The Old Court Suburbs: Kensington, in Old Kensington, in Old and New London: Volume 5.

Campden House after the fire.

Interiors are scarce. This is the schoolroom at Campden House, coloured lithograph by Charles Richardson.

You can find the house on this 1841 map of Kensington & Chelsea.

Here at Mapco is a Victorian era (some 30 years later) map segment you can enlarge considerably. By this time the area is considerably more populated.

*A better account of the fire begins here on page 773 of Chambers’s Journal, Sixth Series, Vol X December 1906 to November 1907.

The photographs, including those of materials from the Kensington Central Library, are the work of Walter M. Henritze III. Our thanks to Dave Walker and Isabel Hernandez for giving so generously of their time, for sharing so much fascinating material, and for their patience.