WRITING AS FEMALE NATIONAL AND IMPERIAL RESPONSIBILITY: FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE'S SCHEME FOR SOCIAL AND CULTURAL REFORMS IN ENGLAND AND INDIA

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chieko Ichikawa
Keyword(s):  
Crimean War ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Florence Nightingale ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
Popular Subject ◽  
The Ideal

Florence Nightingale, who becamea national heroine after the Crimean War, was the most popular subject in hagiographical collective biographies of women during the mid- and late-1850s. However, her life can be regarded as a resolute resistance to conformity with the ideal of womanhood in the Victorian era. She recognised the chasm between her popularity and reality:Good public! It knew nothing of what I was really doing in the Crimea.Good public! It has known nothing of what I wanted to do & have done since I came home. (Private note from 1857; Nightingale,Ever Yours177–78)This statement implies the resistance to the misrepresentation of her, which is indicative of her inner struggle to search for a means to express her vision.

NORTH AND SOUTH, EAST AND WEST

2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEFANIE MARKOVITS
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Thin Red Line ◽  
Florence Nightingale ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
North And South

Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South was composed from the Nightingale family residence even as the war being fought in the Crimea (from 1854 to 1856) was making Florence Nightingale into a national heroine. Reading the novel in the context of the Crimean War and of Gaskell's involvement with Nightingale helps both to historicize the book more precisely and to illuminate the moment of its production. North and South occludes the foreign con�ict even as it takes advantage of aspects of that con�ict in order to tell its story of the "civil wars" at home: those between North and South, masters and men, past and present, and men and women. The reading culminates in an analysis of the relationship between Margaret Hale and Florence Nightingale. To consider the "thread of dark-red blood" that trickles down Margaret's face in the climactic riot scene of North and South as a replacement for the "thin red line" made famous as a symbol of heroism at Balaclava is to recognize the Crimean War as a part of the Condition of England.

Of Doubtful Antiquity

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Ancient World ◽  
Doctor Who ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Crimea

This chapter examines the ways in which Britain's campaigns in the Crimean War (1854–56) became entangled in the ancient world. During the conflict, British officers in the Crimea went in search of ancient sites to excavate — while newspapers in London reported avidly on their finds. The chapter centres around Duncan McPherson, a military doctor who carried out several strikingly ambitious Crimean excavations in collaboration with Robert Westmacott, son of the neoclassical sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott. It explores how difficult and frustrating the search for the ancient world became, for Britain's soldier-archaeologists — and how frequently their pursuit of the past was thwarted.

The Crimean War in the Far East

1969 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Stephan
Keyword(s):  
North Pacific Ocean ◽  
Far East ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Amur River Basin ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Great Loss ◽  
The North ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The Crimea

The Crimean War (1854—56), as its name suggests, was fought mainly on and around a peninsula jutting out from the northern shores of the Black Sea. Names such as the Alma River, Balaclava, and Inkerman are generally conjured up at the mention of this costly conflict. Strategic planning and operations on both sides, however, were not confined to the Crimea and the Caucasus. Far from Sebastopol, hostilities between Russia and the allied powers of Britain and France erupted in the seas of Japan and Okhotsk, and in the North Pacific Ocean. Accorded relatively little attention at the time, almost forgotten today, this Far Eastern1 theatre of the war offers insights into the growing role of Europe in East Asia. Whereas in the Crimea, the Allies achieved a victory of sorts while making immense human sacrifices, in the Far East they failed in many of their objectives but without incurring a great loss of life. The tragi-comic nature of tactical operations in the Far East should not obscure the war's broader implications: (1) the advance of Russia into the Amur River basin and Maritime Provinces then part of the Chinese Empire; (2) the intensification of British anxieties regarding Russian penetration into Manchuria and Korea; (3) the growing role of Japan in international relations; and (4) the progress of cartographical knowledge through surveys conducted in response to the demands of war.

Russian Sisters of Mercy in the Crimea, 1854-1855

Slavic Review ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Shelton Curtiss
Keyword(s):  
Crimean War ◽  
French Army ◽  
Military Hospitals ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
Sisters Of Mercy ◽  
The Times

While the presence of women—chiefly disreputable camp followers—in military hospitals was not new, during the Crimean War women of a different sort undertook to care for the patients, with the French army the first to provide this service. When the horrors of the British hospital at Scutari (Uskudar) became known, British wrath was aroused. In The Times of October 13, 1854, an article by William Howard Russell stated: “Here the French are greatly our superiors. Their medical arrangements are extremely good … and they have the help of the Sisters of Charity These devoted women are excellent nurses.” Immediately a letter to The Times demanded: “Why have we no Sisters of Charity?”

The Crimean Goths in the Russian Imperial and Soviet Periods

2020 ◽  
Vol 80 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 193-231
Author(s):  
Nikita Khrapunov
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Basic Set ◽  
Ideological Struggle ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
Second World

Abstract This paper addresses scholarly and ideological interpretations of Crimean Goths from the late eighteenth century to the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the first stage, intellectual travellers and armchair researchers discovered the basic set of written sources, using archaeology often as illustrations and producing many long-living phantoms. From the mid-nineteenth century on, archaeological and historical researches made a big step towards understanding Crimean Gothic history. However, the Crimean War destroyed sites and museum collections, thus being a prologue to the terrible events of the Russian Civil War and the Second World War. The first Soviet decades were an ambivalent period: advancement of scientific research combined with ideological pressure. The shock of the Second World War put Crimean Goths into the focus of ideological struggle: the Nazis used them in substantiation of their rights to the Crimea as imagined “Land of the Goths” (Gotenland), while Soviet ideologists preferred to erase the Goths from Crimea’s history. However, continuing excavations collected abundant materials related to different periods and features of the Crimean Goths’ history.

Health, Hearth and Empire: Climate, Race and Reproduction in British India and Western Australia

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth A. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Western Australia ◽  
White Women ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
British India ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Florence Nightingale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sanitary Conditions

In the wake of the Indian Uprising in 1857, British sanitary campaigner and statistician Florence Nightingale renewed her efforts to reform Britain's military forces at home and in India. With the Uprising following so soon after the Crimean War (1854-56), where poor sanitary conditions had also taken an enormous toll, in 1859 Nightingale pressed the British Parliament to establish a Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, which delivered its report in 1863. Western Australia was the only colony to present its case before the Commissioners as an ideal location for a foreign sanatorium, with glowing assessments offered by colonial elites and military physicians. In the meantime, Nightingale had also commenced an investigation into the health of Indigenous children across the British Empire. Nearly 150 schools responded to her survey from Ceylon, Natal, West Africa, Canada and Australia. The latter's returns came from just three schools in Western Australia: New Norcia, Annesfield in Albany and the Sisters of Mercy in Perth, which together yielded the highest death rate of the respondents. Although Nightingale herself saw these inquiries as separate, their juxtaposition invites closer analysis of the ways in which metropolitan elites envisioned particular racial futures for Anglo and indigenous populations of empire, and sought to steer them accordingly. The reports reflect prevailing expectations and anxieties about the social and biological reproduction of white society in the colonies, and the concomitant decline of Indigenous peoples. Read together, these two inquiries reveal the complex ways in which colonial matters of reproduction and dispossession, displacement and replacement, were mutually constituting concerns of empire. In this article I situate the efforts to attract white women and their wombs to the temperate colony of Western Australia from British India in the context of contemporary concerns about Anglo and Aboriginal mortality. In doing so, I reflect on the intersections of gender, race, medicine and environment in the imaginaries of empire in the mid-nineteenth century.

Florence Nightingale: Letters from the Crimea 1854-1856 (review)

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-381
Author(s):  
Muriel Evelyn Chamberlain
Keyword(s):  
Florence Nightingale ◽  
The Crimea
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