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.

Author event on 3 April with Elizabeth Everett, Caroline Linden, & me

The time has come for another in-person historical romance author event. This time, Caroline Linden and I will join Elizabeth Everett, in celebration of Elizabeth’s latest release, The Lady Sparks a Flame.

If you haven’t yet met Elizabeth’s brainy and brave, rule-breaking women, it’s time for an introduction. We’ll be talking about Sam & Phoebe’s story and women who break rules and a great deal more.

Here’s the where and when:

Thursday 3 April⁠ 7 - 9pm EDT⁠

Lovestruck Books⁠ 44 Brattle Street ⁠Cambridge MA 02138⁠

Tickets here.

Elizabeth will donate $1 per book for all pre-orders and books sold at the event to Guttmacher Institute.

The Great Equestrienne Louisa Woolford

Print depicting Mr Ducrow and Miss Woolford in their circus duet as the ‘Tyrolean Sheppard [sic] and Swiss Milkmaid’ as performed at Astley's Theatre (print published 26 July 1831). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

“In ‘The Tyrolean Shepherd and Swiss Milkmaid,’ for example, [Ducrow] was joined by his wife, Louisa Woolford; while standing on the backs of their circling horses, the two performed the pursuit and wooing of a ‘fair peasant,’ complete with a lovers’ quarrel and reconciliation scene, followed by an exquisite pas de deux.” —Britannica

An article about equestriennes that I shared some months ago on Facebook reminded me of one of my favorite early 19th century London locales, Astley’s Amphitheatre, and its equestrienne star, Louisa Woolford. Since she wasn’t a Belle Epoque figure—she was born about 1815, in the Regency era—she didn’t get much attention in the Paris Review piece on equestriennes. Or elsewhere.

Miss Woolford makes a brief appearance in Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, in the piece, “Astley’s.” Not enough about her, but a fine and funny verbal picture of the place, worth reading, I think.

She was the most famous circus performer of the time—but information about her is scarce. Here’s what I’ve pieced together, with the aid of a descendant.

Louisa was the seventh of nine children, one of two born in Ireland (the others were born in England). Her father was a horse breeder and trainer who worked with the famous equestrian circus performer Andrew Ducrow, of Astley’s fame, and she began performing at Astley’s at an early age.

According to a quote from an Andrew Ducrow obituary in a London Dead Blog post: “ ... Miss Woolford ... before she became Mrs Ducrow was for a long time the chief attraction of his theatre, and drew crowds by the accustomed gracefulness of her action, and the skilful management of her steed. The deceased has two children* by her. Miss Woolford was very early a debutante at Astley’s, and many theatrical people of about thirty years standing will remember her at the Amphitheatre under Astley’s management as a little girl with a long crop, and of intelligent and pretty manners. She had two brothers also at the same time with her on the stage, who have since died in America; she bears an amiable and good character; her age is about twenty seven, and she had been married to Mr Ducrow about four years.”

The trouble is, she tends to take second place to her famous husband. She put him in first place as well, with an extravagant epitaph on his magnificently over-the-top mausoleum in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery. I took a detailed look when I visited London a few years ago. On one side of the tomb is the epitaph Louisa wrote, which you can read in full in my blog post at Two Nerdy History Girls.

His funeral, as described in The Gentleman’s Magazine, was in keeping with the grand tomb.

We learn from the Gentleman’s Magazine obituary that Louisa is pregnant (with their third child): “The situation of Mrs. Ducrow renders it probable that her accouchement will take place in June. It is understood to be her intention not to resume her professional exertions.” This pregnancy produced the son who earned his own blog post on the London Dead blog.

Had she resumed her professional exertions, it’s possible that her fame would have equaled her first husband’s. But she married again, about two years after Ducrow’s demise, a gentleman named John Hay. He died in 1873, and she lived on comfortably it seems, having two live-in servants as of the census of 1891. She died at Paddington, London, on 25 January 1900, leaving her daughter something over £ 700.

For the information about her life after Ducrow and for most of the images here I am indebted to Eden Pelletier, a descendant, who got in touch with me after reading my 2NHG blog post about Andrew Ducrow’s mausoleum.

We have not yet found Louisa’s burial place, and we continue to search for further information. For now, she seems to be one of those women who, after the early years of fame, “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs,” as George Eliot said of Dorothea in Middlemarch.

*Peter Andrew and Louisa.