The Historical Context
One of the fascinations of research is to make connections – and Victorian society was full of them. The Rose of Sebastopol began with my discovery of a strange coincidence. The first biographer of John Keats, my role model for Henry, was a Victorian golden boy, Richard Monckton Milnes, wealthy, clever and destined for a brilliant future. But Monckton Milnes never quite fulfilled his potential, and disappeared from my reading for a while, only to crop up in a biography of Florence Nightingale as the one man she was ever (allegedly) tempted to marry. She took a rather forlorn note from him to the Crimea. ‘I hear you are going to the East…. You can undertake that when you could not undertake me.’
I found an out-of-print biography of Milnes (Pope-Hennessy) and dug deeper. And low and behold, what is his other claim to fame? That by the end of his life he held a comprehensive collection of pornography in his private library – the mind boggles as to how Ms Nightingale would have dealt with that. So there, in one man, Monckton-Milnes, I had three themes – the poet John Keats and his unrequited love, Florence Nightingale and her fascinating relationships with both men and women, and the sometimes lurid alternative world that lay beneath the surface of Victorian England.
Turkey was very weak, ‘the sick man’ of Europe, and Russia was taking advantage of this weakness to expand its territories, much to the chagrin of the French and English. There was a convoluted squabble going on between the Catholics (supported by France) and the Orthodox (Russian) about the right to worship in the holy places of Jerusalem. England hadn’t been at war for forty or so years – since Waterloo – and had every confidence in its army and navy…Why not have a bit of a skirmish on foreign soil, an outing for the troops, a chance to form an alliance with France for the first time in centuries, and take the opportunity to lick the Russians into shape?
But the fact that the Crimean War, in 1854, took place at the very cusp of Victorian advances in technology and medicine proved fatal to the army. The invention of steamships and modern (minie) rifles gave the army a false confidence – both proved unreliable. At the very moment when troops were dying in their hundreds of cholera in Turkey and Russia, Doctor John Snow was performing a painstaking experiment in London to prove that cholera was spread through dirty water. And Doctor Semmelweiss in Hungary had proved that infection could be controlled by washing hands, but had been castigated by his contemporaries. So the army sailed blithely into unknown territory – Russia – with unreliable transport and weapons, inexperienced generals, and inadequate medical supplies. The result was a catastrophe.
Meanwhile, I read that Florence Nightingale had an illegitimate cousin, Barbara Leigh Smith, an exact contemporary, who was never acknowledged by the Nightingales, but who was an early feminist, educator, supporter of women’s legal rights, and friend to the first woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She is one of the many remarkable women who have historically been overshadowed by Nightingale – Mary Seacole, other Crimean nurses such as Nightingale’s friends Lady Blackwood and Mrs Roberts, and her enemies, Elizabeth Davis and Rev.Mother Bridgeman. These women, and their conflicting ambitions, all haunt the novel as does the Industrial Revolution; the unease felt by some wealthy Victorians that their good fortune was built on the labour and (in their view necessary) exploitation of others. The conditions for the soldier in the Crimea may have been atrocious, but it was the opinion of some that they were far better off on the battlefields than at home.
The Crimean War is one of those periods of history when no matter how much you read, you can never quite understand the reason why. This is because the reasons were many and complicated, the war was ultimately unnecessary but nobody quite had the will to stop it.
