The Crimean War by Hugh Small

Author:Hugh Small
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

The three bracketed words are missing because someone has torn off a corner of the letter, perhaps to remove an indiscreet note about its contents. Inserting them makes the letter seem lucid, but still not rational. Mr Bracebridge (who was the husband of her best friend and who performed her financial transactions as only a man could do at the time) would never have claimed that he had authority to spend what was a preposterously large sum in those days. We know from Bracebridge that she did send for him in her delirium and accuse him of this fraud.23 It is also known that Nightingale was not friendly to Bracebridge, and tolerated him only for the sake of his wife.

The strangest thing in the letter is the reference to a ‘Persian adventurer’ who unmasked Bracebridge’s alleged fraud. How, we may ask, would she have recognised a person in her dream as a Persian adventurer? Would Sir John McNeill scratch his head over this part of the letter as we might? No, he would not, because it would immediately be obvious to him that ‘Persian adventurer’ was a coded reference to himself based on the anecdotes he had told her of his experiences in Teheran. McNeill’s Persian reputation was subject of open discussion, as Bracebridge himself reveals when writing about McNeill’s concern for Nightingale’s illness, ‘I met Sir John McNeill there. He was questioning Mrs. Roberts [who was nursing Nightingale] about her with as much interest as he ever did the Shah’s ministers.’ Far from being the most obscure part of Nightingale’s letter, this was a clear-headed statement that she had seen McNeill in a dream or vision in which he acted as her protector. Furthermore, her use of code shows that she wanted to keep confidential the fact that she had dreamed of him.

It is pointless to speculate here whether Nightingale was having an affair with this Persian adventurer, whom she then regarded as the saviour of the army. So little is known about how the Victorians conducted their love affairs that the likelihood of a physical relationship cannot be estimated. McNeill was married, and at sixty old enough to be her father; in fact he had all the qualities that her unworldly father (to whom she was very close) lacked in her eyes. He was also very handsome, or at least a photograph taken eight years before shows that he was then very handsome indeed: slim, with long hair, aquiline features, and piercing eyes.24 Whatever the nature of the relationship with McNeill she was sensitive enough about it to write in code about her dreams of him in what could be seen as slightly incoherent love letter. And there is some evidence that her family may have been uneasy about the relationship. After the war she decided to stay at his house in Scotland on her way to meet the Queen. In his letter to her arranging this visit, McNeill used the highly unusual salutation ‘Dear Miss Florence’. No man other than close family members ever addressed her by her first name.

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