Pop 89: The Nightingalian Age

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

The press is caught up in royal-mania, on an upswing of its love-hate-love-the-monarchy pendulum. The latest symptom is the reference to Queen Elizabeth’s reign as the “Elizabethan era.” There’s a reverence in the voice of every commentator who uses the term as if they’ve finally found a worthy name for the past nearly four-score years we’ve been living in. And who doesn’t want their era granted regal status?

Well, me, for one. I suppose those who still consider themselves royal subjects quite fancy the term Elizabethan Age. As do, no doubt, those who feel our conflicted, uncivil and confused times could do with a sense of ancient historicity. But times have always been conflicted, uncivil and confused. And even when it was common to name the times after monarchs, the moniker failed to reflect the lives and examples of those who effected real positive change in the world.

The royals have never been about change but about maintaining status, upholding tradition. But tradition is meant to ground us, orient us and keep us connected to each other and our past, not uphold superstition and specialness, as does keeping six ravens captive in the Tower of London. Or baptizing royal children with holy water from the River Jordan because, though we are all precious in God’s eyes, some are, apparently, more precious than others.

I sound more sarcastic than usual. I think I’m just suffering from Queen’s Death overkill, I mean, overload. I’m not interested in the clips examining the minutiae of everything from “did you see that look Kate gave Meghan? Let’s look at it again,” to “And now the honour guard will give its salute.” Again?

My computer assails me in any way it can with the ranters and the sycophants. Death has become another commodity, thanks to technology. And when it’s the death of one of the world’s most-scrutinized humans, the barrel-scrapping is bottomless.

Death is clickbait. Once upon a time, “news” was about keeping us informed and up-to-date, but slowly tv networks began going for lurid stories that “bleed,” expose, undermine, and invade others’ lives to up their ratings. “News” postings online are about getting clicks and revenue. A sad case in point a dear musician friend of mine died suddenly in June. No one knew what happened. A recent posting on Youtube claimed to have the story behind his “tragic death.” But in fact, the video was just a series of clips from his concerts. Some soul-less lout used my friend’s death as a way to bait clicks.

But let’s get back to the whole era-naming business. I’m working on a novel that takes place between 1884-1894, during what’s commonly known as the Victorian era, which lasted from 1837-1901. I understand that we named the era after the lifespan of a monarch whose Empire colonized around 25% of the world’s land surface, including large swathes of North America, Australia, Africa and Asia. Twenty-three percent of the world’s population was under the Empire’s control, often through means of massacre, starvation and internment camps.

So yes, Victoria held a lot of sway. But if I had my way, I’d have named the era after someone else. Like, say, Florence Nightingale. Her influence was no of no small import. In 1844 she entered nursing school, in opposition to her parent’s wishes, and by 1854, while Her Highness was chastising her servants for arranging her royal teacup on the left side of the tray instead of the right, Florence was in Crimea, tending to soldiers, most dying not from wounds but from typhoid and cholera.

Nightingale was a non-nonsense, get ‘er done kind of woman. She set to scrubbing the hospital at Scutari from top to bottom, enlisting less sick patients to aid in the clean-up. Every other waking minute she spent caring for the soldiers. At night she went from bed to bed with her lamp, earning the name “the Lady with the Lamp.” Her work reduced the hospital’s death rate by two-thirds.

Nightingale established rules of sanitation for hospitals. She created “invalid’s kitchens,” institutionalized hospital laundries. (Before that, new patients were laid on the sheets covered in the dried blood of deceased patients.) She even created a library for the intellectual stimulation and entertainment of patients. She put all her recommendations and observations in an 830-page book which led to an entire restructuring of the War Office’s administration.

It’s true Victoria rewarded Florence’s work with a grant to continue in the field of nursing. But I can’t help wonder where she got the money. From the pilfered coffers of the colonies working hard to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, perhaps? And let us not forget that while Florence spent the rest of her life suffering under the effects of the fever she caught in Crimea, she still managed to help in the running of civilian hospitals and was consulted regularly by doctors during the American Civil War. She wrote and worked to improve hospital conditions until her dying day, which was in August of 1910.

Besides liking the idea of giving an age the name of a songbird, calling the Victorian era the Nightingalian Era is my way of pointing out that the naming of an era speaks to a people’s priorities and venerations. In a time when men’s and women’s roles became sharply and strictly defined, Florence followed her own truth. But we could also name the time after any prairie woman who, in a time when men and women were expected to live and work apart, ignored social etiquette to keep their kin alive. They hauled, planted, hunted and hammered alongside their husbands.

The Queen called women’s suffrage “a mad and wicked folly.” She too believed that the “true” woman was to be passive, best suited to simple tasks. But such a life was impossible for Florence. And downright incomprehensible to prairie women.