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By her unceasing care of the wounded and sick in the English camps at Crimea, Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) became known as the ‘Lady of the Lamp’. Back in England, she published her reform measures in Notes on Hospitals (1859) and Notes on Nursing (1859), and in 1860 established a school for nurses at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. With her friend Elizabeth Gaskell, Nightingale endeavoured to improve the social and economic situation of those less fortunate in Britain. She knew Dickens, and distributed his books to nurses and soldiers. She also worked with him on the Committee of the Association for Improving Workhouse Infirmaries.

[Copy of a painting of Florence Nightingale, ‘The Lady of the Lamp’.]

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‘Everybody is miserable…about the Crimea. I have an old belief that our Political Aristocracy will ruin this land at last, and altogether London looks gloomy.’ So wrote Dickens to Mrs Gaskell, on 3 February 1855, on the debacle that was the Crimean War (1853 to 1856), a conflict involving the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France, and Sardinia, against the Russians. While acknowledging the need for a balance of power in the area, Dickens railed against gross military and administrative incompetence; the decimation of the Light Brigade being the pinnacle of that mismanagement. To him, the War was a major distraction from the real problems at home. Alexander Kingslake’s informative volume depicts the position of the heavy cavalry, and a facsimile of Lord Cardigan’s understanding of troop positions on that fateful day (25 October 1854).

[Fold-out plate 4, Fac simile (reduced) of a Plan sketched by Lord Cardigan with a view to show... from Alexander W. Kinglake's The Invasion of the Crimea, Vol. IV.]

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Alexander W. Kinglake]]>
]]> 'Everybody is miserable…about the Crimea. I have an old belief that our Political Aristocracy will ruin this land at last, and altogether London looks gloomy.’ So wrote Dickens to Mrs Gaskell, on 3 February 1855, on the debacle that was the Crimean War (1853 to 1856), a conflict involving the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France, and Sardinia, against the Russians. While acknowledging the need for a balance of power in the area, Dickens railed against gross military and administrative incompetence; the decimation of the Light Brigade being the pinnacle of that mismanagement. To him, the War was a major distraction from the real problems at home. Alexander Kingslake’s informative volume depicts the position of the heavy cavalry, and a facsimile of Lord Cardigan’s understanding of troop positions on that fateful day (25 October 1854).

[Plate 3 by J. Jobbins in Alexander W. Kinglake's The Invasion of the Crimea Vol. IV, opposite page 152.]

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Alexander W. Kinglake]]>

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Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ was written in white heat after he read of the suicidal charge by the light cavalry in the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War; 247 men of the 637 in the charge were killed or wounded. In wanting to maintain the jingoistic sentiments of the poem, Tennyson removed the line ‘Some one had blundered’. In this version – a copy from Charles Brasch’s library – the phrase has been restored. Tennyson was godfather to Dickens’s sixth child and fourth son: Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens.

[The Charge of the Light Brigade from Lord Alfred Tennyson's Poems II, page 225.]

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Lord Alfred Tennyson]]>