Florence Nightingale's reading list

[kev67]

I am reading a biography of Florence Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, who reformed British nursing during the 19th century. It is quite interesting to read of some of the books that influenced her. These include:

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens. This book contains a character called Mrs Gamp, who was representative of the type of nurse that was commonplace then: drunk, inattentive, slovenly and poorly trained.
Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. In this book Jane complains about the lact of worthwhile opportunities for women. Nightingale was very frustrated herself as a young woman.
Lélia by George Sand. I am not familiar with this book or author. Despite the name, I gather the author was a French woman. The book is about another frustrated female.

[Eiseabhal]

That is interesting. What we read does influence us even if we are unaware of it and even if it is neither very great nor in quite the way that the author may have hoped for. Some Stalinist commie or other once told Koestler that reading Darkness at Noon made him a more convinced communist. FN's reading probably fed her nascent desire to make her mark in a noticeable way. It sounds like an interesting biography. Have you ever read Emminent Victorians?

[kev67]

That is interesting. What we read does influence us even if we are unaware of it and even if it is neither very great nor in quite the way that the author may have hoped for. Some Stalinist commie or other once told Koestler that reading Darkness at Noon made him a more convinced communist. FN's reading probably fed her nascent desire to make her mark in a noticeable way. It sounds like an interesting biography. Have you ever read Emminent Victorians?

I read the first two parts of Emminent Victorians. I started reading it because I had watched the film, Carrington, in which Lytton Strachey was portrayed. Strachey was so funny, I thought his book would be, but it wasn't. It was a bit dry, although obviously well researched. The first two emminent Victorians he discussed were Cardinal Newman and, I think, Tom Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby public school, or it might have been General Gordon. Stracchey's method was to build his subject up in the first half of the chapter, then skewer them in the second half. For example, with Cardinal Newman, he implied that a major motivation for his conversion to Catholicism was that his path to becoming Archbishop of Canterbury was blocked. General Gordon was a ripe figure for skewering, but I did not think Florence Nightingale deserved that treatment, and as I was tired of the writing style, I stopped reading it.

[kev67]

I visited the the Florence Nightingale Museum today, which was good but still did not do full credit to her work. She was from the political class. I think if she had been male, she would have been the greatest British statesman of her age, greater than Gladstone, Disraeli, Peel, Palmerstone, everybody. She achieved plenty as it was, but had she been male she would have changed history.