Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale - Hardcover

Gillian Gill, who holds a Ph.D. in modern French literature from Cambridge, has taught at Northeastern, Wellesley, Yale, and Harvard. She is the author of Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries and Mary Baker Eddy.
She lives in a suburb of Boston.

Chapter 1

Entails and Abolitionists

To 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.

Moving 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.

Finally, 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.

So 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.
Nightingale, “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.

Given 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.

The 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.

The 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.

Entail 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.

The 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.

One 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.
When 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.

The Shores, the family of WEN’s father, and the Evanses, the family of his maternal grandfather, made their homes...