{"product_id":"nightingales-isbn-9780345451880","title":"Nightingales","description":"Florence Nightingale was for a time the most famous woman in Britain–if not the world. We know her today primarily as a saintly character, perhaps as a heroic reformer of Britain’s health-care system. The reality is more involved and far more fascinating. In an utterly beguiling narrative that reads like the best Victorian fiction, acclaimed author Gillian Gill tells the story of this richly complex woman and her extraordinary family.\u003cbr\u003eBorn to an adoring wealthy, cultivated father and a mother whose conventional facade concealed a surprisingly unfettered intelligence, Florence was connected by kinship or friendship to the cream of Victorian England’s intellectual aristocracy. Though moving in a world of ease and privilege, the Nightingales came from solidly middle-class stock with deep traditions of hard work, natural curiosity, and moral clarity. So it should have come as no surprise to William Edward and Fanny Nightingale when their younger daughter, Florence, showed an early passion for helping others combined with a precocious bent for power. \u003cbr\u003eFar more problematic was Florence’s inexplicable refusal to marry the well-connected Richard Monckton Milnes. As Gill so brilliantly shows, this matrimonial refusal was at once an act of religious dedication and a cry for her freedom–as a woman and as a leader. Florence’s later insistence on traveling to the Crimea at the height of war to tend to wounded soldiers was all but incendiary–especially for her older sister, Parthenope, whose frustration at being in the shade of her more charismatic sibling often led to illness. \u003cbr\u003eFlorence succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. But at the height of her celebrity, at the age of thirty-seven, she retired to her bedroom and remained there for most of the rest of her life, allowing visitors only by appointment.\u003cbr\u003eCombining biography, politics, social history, and consummate storytelling, \u003ci\u003eNightingales\u003c\/i\u003e is a dazzling portrait of an amazing woman, her difficult but loving family, and the high Victorian era they so perfectly epitomized. Beautifully written, witty, and irresistible, \u003ci\u003eNightingales\u003c\/i\u003e is truly a tour de force.“A dynamic and absorbing account, written in a lively and captivating manner, of a remarkable family and its even more remarkable scion, Florence Nightingale. Gill has used her sources to maximum effect, engaging the reader in a pacy narrative that brings that far distant ‘other country,’ the Victorian age, so vividly to life. I highly recommend it!”\u003cbr\u003e–ALISON WEIR, author of \u003ci\u003eEleanor of Aquitaine\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eNightingales\u003c\/i\u003e is wonderful. I will certainly never again dare to think of Florence Nightingale as ‘a lifelong spinster’ with an invalid’s need for noble self-sacrifice, but as a powerful woman who changed the course of the British government toward their own wounded forever.”   \u003cbr\u003e–NANCY MILFORD, author of \u003ci\u003eSavage Beauty\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eZelda\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Imaginatively conceived and elegantly written, \u003ci\u003eNightingales\u003c\/i\u003e tells the compelling story of a family and an era with great style and flair. Even minor characters are wonderfully drawn and the tone is both intimate and erudite.”\u003cbr\u003e–DIANE JACOBS, author of \u003ci\u003eHer Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A beautifully written and nuanced portrait . . . Gill infuses her subject with rare vitality and untangles the strands of historical, social, and personal forces that determine the course of female life. This multifaceted approach challenges the myths surrounding Nightingale’s struggle for fulfillment, giving us a fascinating window into one Victorian woman that becomes a lens through which we can view ourselves.”\u003cbr\u003e–SUSAN HERTOG, author of \u003ci\u003eAnne Morrow Lindbergh\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“\u003ci\u003eNightingales \u003c\/i\u003ebrilliantly captures the unique intensity both of individuals and an age. Gill vividly evokes the complex and fascinating interrelations of an exceptional family. She engages her reader at every step as we travel with the fiercely intelligent and charismatic Florence Nightingale on her remarkable life journey.”\u003cbr\u003e–ANNA BEER, author of \u003ci\u003eMy Just Desire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eGillian Gill\u003c\/b\u003e, who holds a Ph.D. in modern French literature from Cambridge, has taught at Northeastern, Wellesley, Yale, and Harvard.  She is the author of \u003ci\u003eAgatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eMary Baker Eddy\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cbr\u003eShe lives in a suburb of Boston.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Entails and Abolitionists\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo get the measure of our four Nightingales, we need to go back to the  time before Victoria became Regina and find the source of their wealth,  their class identity, their social confidence, their philanthropic  energy, their political influence, and their neuroses. Let us see them  first as part of an expansive, tumultuous, brilliant clan that in the  course of the nineteenth century included, most prominently, Smiths,  Shores, Nicholsons, Bonham Carters, Leigh Smiths, Cloughs, and Verneys.  This clan in turn formed part of the “intellectual aristocracy”  chronicled by Noel Annan, members, in Virginia Woolf’s words, of the  “very communicative, literate, letter-writing, visiting, articulate,  late nineteenth century world.” This small, closely knit group provided  Britain with many of its scientists, theologians, philosophers,  sociologists, journalists, university teachers, and writers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMoving farther out in the circles, both Fanny and WEN’s families were  by tradition Unitarian, or “Rationalist Christian,” and thereby hooked  into an international network of believers, small in number but of  great influence, especially in New England. Long after most clan  members had ceased to attend Unitarian services, this Unitarian  heritage was to shape the lives of male and female descendants. Then  the Nightingales and their expanding clan were conspicuous members of  that larger rising middle class in Britain that stood beneath the  “dignified” classes of monarchy, aristocracy, and gentry and above the  agricultural and industrial laborers. This was the “efficient” class,  which, according to Walter Bagehot, who belonged to it, in fact ruled  England and made it work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFinally, this clan, living in the years when all the world accepted  that Britannia ruled the waves, was deeply, self-consciously,  triumphantly, but not narrowly, English.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo our story begins in the late eighteenth century in the Midlands, the  industrial heartland of England, more specifically in the county of  Derbyshire, where Nightingales began the move up the social ladder that  in three generations brought them from mere local prominence to  international fame.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNightingale, “singer of the night,” began in Middle English as the name  of a small, inconspicuous, and not uncommon bird with a singularly  sweet song. Greek filomela, Persian bulbul, just plain American thrush,  the nightingale has become the bird of poetry par excellence. Across  cultures the nightingale is female, a brutally ravished heroine, a  caged companion to a lonely Chinese emperor, the Philomel of melody  whom Shakespeare summoned to lull Titania in the magic wood. The  soldiers who met Florence Nightingale in the Crimea knew her  affectionately as “the Bird,” and the romantic associations of her  surname had their own small part to play in the legend crafted around  the woman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGiven the traditional femaleness of nightingales, it seems fitting that  WEN, Fanny, Parthenope, and Florence, our four protagonists, came to be  Nightingales through the distaff side. In fact, Florence would have  been plain, unromantic Miss Shore, whose mother was—oh horrors!—a Smith  were it not for a piece of legal sleight of hand. In 1803, the  eight-year-old William Edward Shore inherited the lands and estate of  his great-uncle Peter Nightingale, squire of Lea Hall in Derbyshire.  Peter Nightingale was the brother of young William Edward’s maternal  grandmother, Anne Nightingale Evans, and the uncle of his mother, Mary  Evans Shore. William Edward—the man variously known for sixty years to  friends and family as Nightingale, Night, Uncle Night, and WEN (as I  shall generally refer to him for convenience)—took the name of  Nightingale only in 1815, when he turned twenty-one.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe boy inherited the estate through an entail. Entail provisions were  ancient and complex strategies worked into English law whereby the  capacity to sell or bequeath real property was restricted so that the  family of the original owner kept control. The theory was that a piece  of land belonged to a family and that a specific individual might hold  it and enjoy its profits during his lifetime but could not sell it or  control its disposition after his death. One common entail on the  “heirs of the body” sought to ensure that, if an heiress died, her  family property would pass to her own children or revert to her own  family if she had no children, not to any subsequent wives and children  her husband might have.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe primary purpose of land tenure law was to keep a property intact  across the generations, and the time-honored way to do this was to give  preference to a single male heir. If a man had six daughters and then a  son, his real property must by law pass intact to the youngest child.  If a man had several sons, the eldest inherited the property. In the  worst-case scenario of a man with only daughters, however, his property  was equally divided between the daughters. Entails on an heir-male  prevented such divisions by dispossessing all the daughters in favor of  some distant male relative. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen  dramatized the dark shadow cast over the lives of Mrs. Bennet and her  daughters by an entail on the heir-male that governed the Bennet  estate. In the event of Mr. Bennet’s death, his wife and children would  be cast into penury since his house and fortune would inexorably pass  to his male cousin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEntail provisions were often eccentric, and according to one  contemporary witness, this was true of the Nightingale entail. That  redoubtable lady Frances Coape Smith, together with her husband William  Smith, M.P., visited her old friends the Shores in their Tapton home in  1804 and recorded the following entry in her travel journal: “William  Shore, a lad of about ten years of age, has had 100,000 pounds left him  by a Mr. Nightingale, with the whimsical prohibition of neither  benefiting himself when under age, nor suffering his daughters to  inherit. Should he not have a son, it goes to his sister.” Mrs. Smith  had no way of knowing it in 1804, but the Nightingale entail would turn  out to be of immediate importance to her own family. Not only would her  daughter Fanny eventually marry the lucky William (Shore) Nightingale,  but her son Sam would marry William’s sister and heir presumptive, Mary  (Mai) Shore.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe medieval law of entail was one of the most arcane of legal  specialties, and the further one ventures into the question of the  Nightingale entail, the murkier things become. Frances Smith obviously  did not understand it since she says the boy WEN inherited a hundred  thousand pounds. An entail governs real property, not personal  property, so presumably what Frances meant was that WEN inherited real  property worth some one hundred thousand pounds. She says that WEN  would be unable to benefit from the Nightingale money during his  minority, but thereafter she implies that he could do anything he liked  with it except leave it to his female children. But things were much  more complicated than this. Much of the land surrounding the new house  of Lea Hurst and all the Embley Park property were purchased by WEN,  and yet they were subject to the Nightingale entail, and so passed on  his death to his sister, Mai, and his brother-in-law, Sam Smith. On the  other hand, the Nightingale land in Derbyshire proved to have valuable  coal deposits, generating revenue that WEN was able to invest. Such  investments were not real property, and it was increasingly unclear  whether their profits fell under the terms of the Nightingale entail or  formed part of WEN’s personal estate and could thus pass to his  daughters. And so, because he failed to produce a son, WEN was  throughout his life accountable to Sam Smith, as husband to Mai, heir  under the entail but not a legal entity under the doctrine of “feme  covert,” and father and trustee to Shore, who, as the only male child,  would inherit from his mother.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne thing is clear. Fanny Nightingale and her two daughters were in  rather the same position as Jane Austen’s fictional Bennet women. They  lived in the shadow of an entail, and this created stresses. Most  specifically, they all three knew that on WEN’s death they would lose  their home. The large, expensive, and greatly beloved estates of Embley  and Lea Hurst would pass to the Sam Smiths. Property issues smaller  than this have been the bane of families throughout history. As we  shall see, the Shore-Smith-Nightingale family showed some greatness of  spirit in the considerate and civilized way they handled the problems  of the Nightingale entail.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen William Edward inherited from great-uncle Peter Nightingale in  1803, his grandmother Anne Nightingale Evans was still alive—she died  only in 1815—as was his mother, Mary Evans Shore. If my own small son  were to inherit a fortune from my uncle, I should probably harbor some  bitterness at being passed over. But married women in England around  1800 were obliged to accept the fact that the law hated to trust women  with money, so Mrs. Shore is unlikely to have felt any resentment about  her son’s windfall. In fact, she had the satisfaction of knowing that  the Nightingale money would come to her son if she should die young and  her husband start a new family. Furthermore, with his only son rich in  his own right, William Shore the elder, himself a wealthy man from a  wealthy family, would be able to leave his widow more than comfortably  off and find a large dowry for his daughter. Mai, as she was always  called to distinguish her from her mother, would have excellent  marriage prospects. That was about as much as a woman could rationally  hope for in England at the turn of the nineteenth century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Shores, the family of WEN’s father, and the Evanses, the family of  his maternal grandfather, made their homes and their livings in the  Midlands. This region is only a couple of hundred miles from London and  yet, in the view of England’s oligarchy from the days of Chaucer well  into the nineteenth century, a barbarous place, though not, of course,  quite as bad as Scotland. Like many northerners, the Shores and their  kin engaged in what the Victorians liked to disparage as “trade”—that  is to say, commerce, industrial production, and finance. Their moral  tone was high, their thrift and diligence exemplary; they made and  mined and banked and became rich. But in custom, and in that crucial  class marker in England, language, to an educated English southerner,  they were at best provincial, at worst uncouth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginally, the Nightingales came out of the same class as the Shores  since the origin of the Nightingale fortune was lead. In Derbyshire,  the mining of that traditionally ignoble metal goes back many  centuries, and a certain Peter Nightingale first came to local  prominence as the owner of a lead mine in Wirksworth, Derbyshire.  Records of the Nightingales’ commercial transactions apparently go back  to the seventeenth century, and in the early eighteenth century, they  managed to move up the social ladder when the first Peter purchased the  Manor of Lea, across the valley from Wirksworth, and became master of  Lea Hall. Peter Nightingale had only two children, a daughter, Anne,  and a son, Peter, and the son of course inherited all the real  property. The second Peter, who never married and thus produced no  children who could inherit his real property, moved the family up  several more notches. He was born in 1736 and earned the epithet “Mad  Peter.” Local legend has it that the second Peter was a squire straight  out of the novels of Fielding and Sterne, a hard-riding, hard-drinking  bachelor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePeter Nightingale Jr.’s madness did not extend to money. When he was  not taking stone walls head-on or falling down dead drunk, Mad Peter  seems to have had his wits about him. Far from dissipating his father’s  fortune, he established a lead-smelting plant on his Lea property,  built a mill for cotton spinning on the Lea Brook, and found the money  to acquire the adjacent manors of Cromford and Wakebridge. He also  modernized Lea Hall, giving it a pillared façade in the new Georgian  style. This was more in keeping with the social status of a man who  served for a time as high sheriff of Derbyshire. The cotton mill in Lea  did not prosper and so, in what proved to be a canny decision,  Nightingale turned it over to John Smedley, who changed the Lea mill  from cotton to wool and soon began to make a profit. Smedley’s factory  is still in business today, the oldest mill in continuous production in  England. The imposing mill buildings still crowd the narrow sidewalks  of Lea. A bridge bearing the company’s arms extends over the road like  an industrial Bridge of Sighs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1776 Peter Nightingale sold his Cromford property to Richard  Arkwright, and this was to prove a most significant deal, not only for  the fortunes of the Nightingale family but for the history of  Derbyshire. Arkwright, a pioneer in the installation and exploitation  of machines for spinning thread, harnessed the Bonsall Brook and the  Cromford Sough, a local lead mine drain, and started spinning. Cotton  imported from America’s slave South was spun and woven into cloth,  priced to appeal to ordinary citizens all over the world, then shipped  by Britain’s merchant navy, and marketed by British merchants. England  became rich and slavery, far from withering away as the American  founding fathers had piously assumed, brought the slave-owning states  not only prosperity but also international legitimacy. All of this  intense industrial activity was occurring in what amounted to Peter  Nightingale’s backyard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eArkwright was a competent engineer, but his real claim to fame was as  an industrial organizer. He pioneered the factory system that not only  revolutionized textile manufacture all over the world well into the  twentieth century but offered a general model for concentrated,  large-scale mass production units. In Cromford, Arkwright and his son  built accommodation for their growing workforce on the site and houses  for weavers in the village, with a third story to accommodate the  looms. Cromford, hitherto a small community of sheep-farming and  lead-mining families strung out along a rocky, narrow mountain valley,  developed into the prototype of the factory complex. Versions of  Cromford were established in Germany and the United States, and  Americans from small textile towns in the South would feel at home in  the village even today. By 1800 the Lea Brook was harnessed and  polluted, the air in the deep valleys was thick with particulates from  the lead smelting, and lead had made the ground bare in  patches—“bellanded,” in the local term.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Arkwright mills still dominate Cromford today. They are at the  heart of the Peak District, one of the wildest and most beautiful parts  of England, a mecca for hikers, rock climbers, and mountain bikers. But  when Parthe and Flo Nightingale spent their summers at their father’s  new house, Lea Hurst, the local industry was not tourism. “Dark satanic  mills,” in the words of William Blake’s famous diatribe “Jerusalem,”  had in all truth spread over the “green and pleasant land” of  Derbyshire. The lead mines and smelters, the coal mines, Smedley’s  woolen mill at Lea, and Arkwright’s great cotton mills in Cromford were  the source of the Nightingales’ wealth and social prominence.[quote] --San Francisco Chronicle","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300775743717,"sku":"NP9780345451880","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345451880.jpg?v=1767733733","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/nightingales-isbn-9780345451880","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}