NIGHTINGALE (FLORENCE)

Autograph letter signed ("Florence Nightingale"), to Captain Frederic Brine of the Royal Engineers, thanking him for his "kind recollection of us & the part we were privileged to take in our Country's late glorious calamity" which has touched her "very deeply", 30 Old Burlington Street, 24 November 1856: 'I FEEL THAT I HAVE BEEN SUCH A BAD MOTHER TO THEM TO COME HOME & LEAVE THEM IN THEIR CRIMEAN GRAVES'.

Footnotes

'I FEEL THAT I HAVE BEEN SUCH A BAD MOTHER TO THEM TO COME HOME & LEAVE THEM IN THEIR CRIMEAN GRAVES'. This extraordinary letter dates soon after Florence Nightingale's return from the Crimea that July, and while she was agitating for action to be taken to avoid future disasters such as she had witnessed. An undated private note to herself, assigned by her editors to the end of the year, voices much of the same concerns as our letter: 'Oh my poor men who endured so patiently. I feel I have been such a bad mother to you to come home & leave you lying in your Crimean grave... But if I could carry any one point which would prevent any part of the recurrence of this our colossal calamity... then I should have been true to the cause of those brave dead' (Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters, edited by Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard, 1989, p.171).

The recipient, Captain Frederic Brine RE, was himself a veteran of the Crimea, and our letter appears to have been written in acknowledgement of a handsomely illustrated book Brine wrote with a fellow veteran, Captain John Colborne (son of the general), entitled The Last Of The Brave; or Resting Places of Our Fallen Heroes in the Crimea and at Scutari (1857). Jane Shaw Stewart, to whom our letter also refers, had served as Nurse in Charge of the Castle Hospital at Balaclava.

Florence Nightingale's last act before leaving the Crimea in the general evacuation of July 1856 was to supervise the erection, by Captain Brine's engineers, of the great marble cross that stood twenty-foot high by the Castle Hospital on the Balaclava Heights. Upon it she had the words inscribed, in English and Russian: 'Lord, Have Mercy Upon Us/ Gospodi Pomilori Nass'.