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1877 Diary T he small diary of 1877 affords an unusual glimpse into how Nightingale integrated her copious daily domestic responsibilities , appointments, and regular work on her ‘‘business,’’ with her devotions and reading notes, both devotional and professional . It also contains weekly entries for expenditures (bills received and paid) and, at the end of the year, a summary statement of her royalties for Notes on Hospitals (£5.8.5), not reproduced here; these are available in the electronic text. The material shows the considerable number of household tasks Nightingale had to perform at Lea Hurst (she spent much of the year there caring for her ill, widowed mother), calling the doctor for ill employees, seeing them and the doctor (and disinfecting the room of one who died), not letting the fire insurance expire, paying bills, all on top of overseeing her mother’s care. References to nurses and matrons are frequent, which might mean only that she was thinking/praying about them, not necessarily appointments with them. (She did see superintendents Wardroper and Pringle and met frequently with Henry Bonham Carter, secretary of the Nightingale Fund, concerning training schools.) There are frequent, though brief, observations about her own ill health and a few references to impending death, even that that would affect no one (15-16 September 1877). She made (another) will. The entries show visits of Mr Jowett for communion, ‘‘taking the sacrament,’’ eight in the year, usually a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. This infrequent, semi-public form of worship was, as earlier and later, complemented by extensive devotional reading. The diary entries simply state what she was reading, with scarcely any comment (the pages were small). Thus there are mentions of the Vie de Saint Jean de la Croix (a three-volume set), Farrar’s two-volume Life of Christ, a life of Père Besson, Dean Church’s Dante and Saint Anselm, Stanley’s Jewish Church and novels, some with a heavy religious theme (George MacDonald’s / 429 Robert Falconer, Maria Charlesworth’s Oliver of the Mill and five by Hesba Stretton published by the Religious Tracts Society). It is, however , not always clear that Nightingale read the book in question; especially where there is only a single mention she might simply have been noting its publication. Those with frequent mentions, indeed of chapters, were likely read. There is little secular reading (George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux, Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw and Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography and her Retrospect of Western Travel). By far the greatest part of Nightingale’s devotional reading was centred on the lives, letters, sermons and advice of two French priests: the young, much-loved and brilliant speaker Henri Perreyve and his spiritual father and the source of his political philosophy, the Dominican Henri-Dominique Lacordaire. Perreyve had his first brush with death at age eighteen, from consumption, after which he both treasured life more, as having ‘‘returned from death,’’ and also formed a philosophy of death, which included welcoming it (seeking it actively with overwork). Death, he said, was part of a priest’s sacerdoce, his priesthood . Nightingale would have identified with his desire for martyrdom , and with his request before ordination for the grace not only to be a humble priest but to ‘‘give his blood for Jesus Christ.’’1 Nightingale made much use of Perreyve’s Journée des malades, a popular book of spiritual advice for the sick. She evidently read Gratry’s biography of Perreyve, which appeared in English translation in 1872, citing specific chapters in her diary, and a separate edition of his last days (and philosophy of death), Les derniers jours de Henri Perreyve by his friend Eugène Bernard. She also read Perreyve’s biography of Lacordaire and Lacordaire’s letters, for which Perreyve wrote a preface , and his last sermons, published posthumously as Une station à la Sorbonne. Lacordaire and Perreyve were devout Catholics of decidedly more liberal politics than was usual at the time, when liberals and revolutionaries were anti-clerical if not atheist, and the church, especially its hierarchy , was notoriously reactionary. Like Nightingale they believed that ‘‘God wills justice and freedom in all,’’ meaning both individuals and countries. ‘‘One must convince this modern society that the gospel is the source of all social progress, of all legitimate effort to lessen the inequality of men’s lots, the book par excellence of the poor and lowly, 1 A. Gratry, Henri Perreyve 63. 430...

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