Almost two-thirds of Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon biography summarizes a change in the perception of several family members towards the idolized and once-respected relative. Based on Aunt Mai’s account, people who spent long time periods with Nightingale felt continuously compelled to consider what she said, and to differentiate what was exaggerated, and what was totally fanciful (Bostridge, 2008). Audience of the numerous posthumous biographies of Florence after her death in 1910 may be said to confront the same difficulty, contending as usual with a character as likely to be painted as a sinner or saint, as an enemy to her sex or protofeminist.
Was Florence the domineering hypocrite scandalously derided by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians (1918)? Or was she alternatively the imperious prototype of the earnest Victorian? Mark Bostridge embarks on a mission to unravel these questions in Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon through meticulous research and delightfully entertaining biography. Bostridge exposes exaggerations in the bi-extremists characterization of Nightingale. Part Five of the book “Icon” contains a brief 23 pages chapter of prologue of Nightingale’s biography. However, the development of Nightingale’s character that encompasses a multifaceted combination of her personal self-fashioning and the reactions of her friends, family and colleagues starts early, roughly with her birth into the Nightingale tribe in 1820.
As famously corroborated, Nightingale derided the prison which is known as family. However, Bostridge paints a far much detailed and somehow phantasmagoric image of Nightingale’s lifetime relationship with her mother, her sister Parthenope, and Fanny, a relationship that confounds the lifetime relationship of Fanny and Parthenope with Nightingale’s profound sense of the family as overly tyrannical, conventional, and repressive. Nightingale’s rapport with her father Pop is similarly interesting. As the author concludes, there can’t be any shred of doubt that Nightingale loved her father with a passion unparalleled by her sense for any other person.
Even as an elderly woman, Nightingale would remember and miss his father’s caress. However, as time passed, that love would be lightened by the loss of respect, disappointment, and latterly by a degree of disdain. The readers derive and welcome a wealth of meticulous focus on the multitudinous aunts, complex networks of uncles and the extended clan of cousins who played a critical part in the life of Nightingale. Particularly fascinating are Nightingale’s relationship with those she characterizes as kinsman spirits which are a disposition she carried to specific relationships beyond the family lineage. Nightingale’s father was definitely within her kindred spirit, but her aunt Mai Shore was also well within the kindred spirit circle. Nuanced details such as the fact that Nightingale called her aunt Julia Smith as “Stormy Ju”, which vividly betrays as a scenario of the pot calling the kettle black, add to the wealth of Bostridge’s continuous illustration of Nightingale’s family ties.
All Nightingale’s biographers should be equally preoccupied with her troubled identity as “the Lady with the Lamp”. While the author appreciates the stupidity of trying to find the seeds of prominence in an icon character childhood, he still dutifully addresses the different accounts of Nightingale’s early stint in healthcare and health underscoring the moment she cared for maimed animals or nursed sick dolls. Bostridge also observes that at a tender age of nine years, Nightingale developed a habit of writing down details of the state of sick individuals or those requiring care (Bostridge, 2008). Nightingale’s career that begun at the Deaconess Institution at Kaiserwerth is equally framed by an in-depth illustration of the religious beliefs that would critically contribute to her life. The author practically separates the analytical mind and the rationalistic perspective that informed Nightingale’s lifetime pursuit of divine law in day-to-day life and the running of the universe, and her more individual, frequently passionate emotional pursuit for God’s evidence in her.
Like the majority of Victorians, Nightingale was at most an insignificant Anglican, and her progressively unorthodox belief system presents quite as much challenge to the book’s summary and contents as does her pronounced feeling of being summoned to God’s service at seventeen years of age. Nightingale faced a lifetime conflict between love of God and love of self with the conflict going far back before her national fame was consolidated by bringing cleanliness and order to the barrack hospital in her one and a half year at Scutari.
The bedroom where Nightingale largely resigned to after the war was over was less of a sanctuary than pulpit or platform, where she assiduously worked for the sake of a range of main issues including workhouse infirmaries, the Army medical services, the professional training of nurses, sanitation in India, and the national health system. Nightingale published work came in many forms like the sixteen volumes of The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2001). The book uses other sources besides Nightingale’s own publications including letters from archives to, from, or about her together with her numerous memoranda, drafts, notes, and diaries that interestingly shows Nightingale’s life without a pen (Bostridge, 2008). The sources also paint Nightingale as a lonely person who lived an unfulfilled life.
The ordinary savior of soldiers, the standard-bearer of contemporary nursing, a founding social reformer, Florence Nightingale belongs to the cadre of historical characters who are promptly identifiable. Home-schooled, destined for the life of a learned Victorian woman, Nightingale disgusted her family when she recognized her calling as a nurse, a totally unfitting career for a lass of her social class. As the famous “Lady with the Lamp”, attending to the dying and wounded in the Crimean War, she offers a lasting legacy of emotional appeal. Only a few people have gained the adulation and fame achieved by Nightingale due to her efforts. The book offers a remarkable account of a half-century life of Nightingale drawn from a wealth of unpublished sources.
