The colorful names of Dickens’ characters were of paramount importance to him. He could not begin a new book until he had them right. He kept lists of those with special potential and scribbled down myriad variations. Martin Chuzzlewit was nearly Martin Sweezlewag. With age his work grew darker and more serious, but comedy was never far off. Frequently seized by hysterical mirth at the most inappropriate times, Dickens was always quick to see the ridiculous side of things.
Dickens researched carefully and many of his characters were based on fact, such as Fagin in Oliver Twist. In 1849 the journalist Henry Mayhew, founder of Punch magazine, began a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle. They would eventually become the mammoth four-volume London Labour and the London Poor, a work that shocked his middle-class readership with its unflinching picture of the realities of London’s slums and which influenced radicals, reformers and writers, among them Charles Dickens.
Mayhew revealed the dark underside of the city, a world of crime, filth and depravity. Interviewing chimney sweeps and flower girls, beggars and street entertainers, pickpockets and prostitutes, Mayhew depicted a world, as the writer Thackeray described it, “of terror and wonder.” He spoke of the “pure-finders,” who gathered dog feces to sell to tanners. He introduced his readers to the “mud-larks,” children who made their living scavenging around the banks of the cholera-infested, sewage-filled Thames for coins and wood or for coal dropped from the barges.
Mayhew let his subjects speak in their own words and reported his findings with a humanist’s eye. He told of Jack, a West End crossing-sweep, “a good-looking lad with a pair of large, mild eyes”; of his friend Gander, who earned extra money with his acrobatic “catenwheeling.” He described their room in the lodging house that was as clean as it could be and the old woman who cared for them as well as she was able. He told the story of the drunken prostitute China Emma, the “shriveled and famine-stricken” woman lying in “a hole … more like a beast in his lair than a human being in her home.”
It was in this world that the model for Oliver Twist’s Fagin lived. One of London’s most notorious pawnbrokers and fences (receivers of stolen goods), Ikey Solomon became famous for his farcical escape from Newgate Prison. After he was arrested in 1827 for theft and receiving, the hired coach that was intended to carry him to jail was in fact driven by his father-in-law. As the coach took a detour through Petticoat Lane, a gang of Solomon’s friends overpowered the guards and set Ikey free.
Solomon fled to New York, but, in lieu of the notorious criminal, the authorities transported his wife and children to Tasmania. “Determined to brave it all for the sake of my dear wife and children,” Solomon sailed to join them. For want of a warrant, it was a year before Tasmanian officials could arrest him and send him back to England.
Solomon’s trial at the Old Bailey was one of the sensations of the day. But unlike Fagin, Solomon did not hang. Found guilty on two counts of theft, he was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation and promptly sent back to Tasmania. Solomon lived out the rest of his days there. The man said at one point to be worth £30,000 died in his sixties, estranged from his family and leaving an estate of just £70.
But as well as drawing on the accounts of other peoples’ lives for inspiration, Dickens knew from his own experience how quickly a man could slide into degradation. At the same age at which Oliver Twist is confronted with the terrifying darkness of the world, Dickens had become a child laborer. His time in a blacking factory, necessitated by his father’s bankruptcy, was brief. When the family’s fortunes recovered some months later, Dickens returned to school. His parents never spoke of it again. He himself kept it a close secret, though the memory never left him. He wanted always, he said, “to present [the poor] in a favorable light to the rich.” His enduring fear of a return to poverty compelled him to work ever harder.
Dickens-mania gripped rich and poor alike. Installments of his works were read out to crowds of the urban poor, who had clubbed together to hire the latest episode from the circulating library. Dickens made the public laugh and he made them cry. His characters were as real to them as life. At New York Harbor, crowds pressed around disembarking passengers to ask about the fate of The Old Curiosity Shop’s Little Nell. Her death inspired hysteria; the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell was allegedly so enraged that he threw the book out of a train carriage window.
“I have great faith in the poor,” Dickens wrote to a friend in 1844. “I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances … may admit.” In his fantastical exaggerations the radical philanthropist showed the bleakness that faced so many. For some readers, it was an illustration of their lives; it made others realize how wretched such lives could be. One American reviewer considered Dickens’ works a force for reform far more effective than anything the “open assaults of Radicalism or Chartism” could achieve.
Dickens was renowned for his wit and his marvelous talent for mimicry. He developed an extraordinarily successful second career giving public readings of his works. His mammoth tours across England and America sold out in every city. He turned his flock of offspring into an amateur theatrical troupe, performing plays in which he generally took the starring role. In the course of these ventures he met Ellen Ternan, the young actress who was the great love of his later life.
He had a reputation for oddity. He was obsessed with light, filling his brightly painted room with mirrors. When Dickens was a child, his father pointed out to him a house that, he said, would demonstrate a man’s having made it in life. So in 1856 the adult Dickens bought it—Gad’s Hill Place in Higham, Kent. He was a demanding father, while his total repudiation of his wife Catherine after over twenty years of marriage was undeniably cruel.
Dickens’ masterpiece was A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Set in the French Revolution, it ends with Sydney Carton, rogue-turned-savior, giving his life for that of a better man, saying “It is a far, far better thing that I do now, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”
BISMARCK
1815–98
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
Otto von Bismarck
Otto von Bismarck, son of a Junker landowner, was the Iron Chancellor who united Germany, won three wars, created a hybrid authoritarian-democratic German empire and dominated European affairs for almost thirty years. A bundle of contradictions, he was both a militarist ultra-conservative and the bringer of a welfare state and universal suffrage to Germany, a modernizer whose German constitution left real power in the hands of emperor and army, a brutally ruthless and vindictive politician who was also a neurotic hypochondriac and near hysteric, an insomniac who could not stop eating, a Christian believer whose methods were utterly amoral. At home and abroad, he used the threat of democracy to force kings and princes to do his bidding and in the process he created a Germany that was the most dynamic power in Europe, but his creation was utterly flawed and unworkable, partly because he had designed it around himself as ruling chancellor.
As a flamboyantly ambitious and eccentric student, he paid court to two English girls but then fell in love with a graceful and fascinating girl called Marie von Thadden who had recently married one of his friends. Under her influence he embraced the fashionable pietist evangelical Lutheranism, though this never restrained his political intrigues. Ultimately he married the plain, humorless and religious Joanna von Puttkamer with whom he had a successful but probably boring and unhappy marriage blessed with many children.
During the 1848 Revolutions, Bismarck was outraged at the liberal rebellion and planned to lead his peasants to Berlin to back the king. He projected himself as a diehard authoritarian praising the divine right of kings in a series of provocative speeches designed to win him attention. His regular memoranda of advice to the regent and later king of Prussia, the conservative Wilhelm I, a bluff if
emotional Prussian soldier, made clear that he wanted to serve as chief minister but would demand total control over foreign affairs. Instead he was appointed ambassador to the diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt, then to St. Petersburg and lastly to Paris. During these postings and a visit to London, he met the statesmen of the time, including Napoleon III of France and Benjamin Disraeli. He openly and with astonishing foresight told Disraeli exactly how he would manipulate the German princes, France and Austria, using war and the threat of democracy to reunite Germany. Within a few years he had precisely fulfilled his promises.
In 1862, King Wilhelm’s crisis over the Prussian military budget led him to appoint Bismarck minister-president and foreign minister of Prussia. Bismarck almost ruined his job at once with an unwise and notorious speech that threatened blood and iron—war—as the only way for Prussia to find its destiny in Europe. Nonetheless in partnership with War Minister Roon and Chief of Staff von Moltke, Bismarck set about doing exactly that. Prussia’s rival for leadership of the many German kingdoms was the Halsburg empire of Austria–Hungary ruled by Emperor FranzJoseph. First Bismarck exploited the crisis of the succession of the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein to defeat the hapless king of Denmark and then exclude Austria from German affairs.
Then in 1866 he manipulated Austria into a war in which Emperor Franz-Josef was defeated at the Battle of Königgrätz, ending once and for all Austrian pretensions to a role in Germany. Prussia was able to then annex several German kingdoms, including Hanover.
Bismarck was raised to count. Throughout all this, he depended solely on the king of Prussia for his power—in effect he had no party, but Wilhelm had in turn become dependent on Bismarck. Crises were solved by Bismarck’s weeping, hypochondria or threats of resignation, but he took enormous trouble to retain royal support, despite being hated by Queen Augusta as well as Crown Prince Frederick and his wife Vicky, Queen Victoria’s liberal daughter. “It is not easy to be king under Bismarck,” said King Wilhelm.
In 1869, when Spain offered its throne to a Hohenzollern prince, a kinsman of the king of Prussia, Napoleon III insisted that the offer be refused—quite reasonably—since the French feared Prussian power on both sides of their borders. But French arrogance played into Bismarck’s hands: he doctored the text of a French telegram to make it insulting to King Wilhelm, who was outraged. The French declared war but were totally defeated at the Battle of Sedan by the Prussians. Emperor Napoleon III abdicated, a prisoner.
Bismarck’s victory allowed him to unite Germany into a new Empire with Wilhelm I as emperor (Kaiser in German) and himself as chancellor. He was made a prince. The Germany he combined a façade of universal suffrage, parliamentary democracy, and a modern industrial economy, with the reality of secretive authoritarian military rule by the kaiser, Junker-aristocratic army officers and of course Bismarck himself. Real power remained with the kaiser, but it was a complex system that only Bismarck with his unique prestige and political genius could manage and control.
He ruled for almost two more decades after creating the German empire, running a cultural campaign to attack Catholic power, at times allying with socialists, at others pushing conservative policies, creating a welfare state, promoting foreign alliances with Austria and Russia while aiming to keep the balance of power in Europe.
Ultimately his power tottered as he aged and his patron Wilhelm died in 1888. Wilhelm was succeeded as kaiser by Crown Prince Frederick who was already tragically dying of cancer. After a short reign his place was taken on the throne by the young, impetuous and unbalanced Kaiser Wilhelm II, who in 1890 demanded the Chancellor’s resignation. Bismarck was seventy-five but he was infuriated at his downfall. He had created Germany, and a new Europe but his successors—particularly Kaiser Wilhelm II—could not control his creation.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
1820–1910
What a comfort it was to see her pass. She would speak to one, and nod and smile to as many more … we lay there by the hundreds, but we could kiss her shadow as it fell and lay our heads on the pillow again content.
An anonymous soldier in the Crimean War
The Lady of the Lamp overcame obstacles and obduracy to transform the state of medical care in the British army and to establish nursing as a trained and respectable profession for women: she improved the lives of millions.
Named after her Italian birthplace, Florence Nightingale was raised in England and educated at home by her father to a standard well above that considered advisable for women of her era. By the time the bright and bookish Nightingale reached her teens, she was well aware that marriage and a life in society—the usual prospects for a girl of her class—held little appeal for her.
When, at sixteen, she heard God’s voice informing her that she had a mission, Nightingale set about escaping from the family fold into a life of her own. But it was several years before her parents allowed her to enter the socially disreputable profession of nursing. She became an expert on public health and hospitals until finally, at almost thirty, she persuaded her parents to let her go to Germany to one of the few institutions that provided training for nurses.
When the Crimean War broke out and newspapers began reporting graphically the terrible condition of the wounded British soldiers, Nightingale, by now the superintendent of the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London, was one of the first to respond. Sidney Herbert, an old friend and secretary of state for war, asked her to lead a party of nurses and to direct nursing in the British military hospitals in Turkey. In November 1854 Nightingale and her party arrived at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari, near Istanbul.
Battling against filthy conditions and a chronic shortage of supplies, faced with insubordinate nurses who were frequently drunk and intransigent doctors reluctant to acknowledge the authority of a woman, Nightingale transformed the military hospitals. She personally attended almost every patient, administering comfort and advice as she made her nightly rounds. The mortality rate of wounded soldiers when she arrived was 50 percent; by the time she left, it was just 2 percent.
Nightingale constantly set herself new and ever more ambitious goals. Within a year of taking up her first London post she was longing to escape “this little molehill.” After nursing the sick in Turkey for a while, she set her sights on the greater goal of transforming the welfare of the British army as a whole. It was a task to which she dedicated the rest of her life. She pushed for the establishment of royal commissions on the matter and produced reports that were instrumental in the foundation of the Army Medical School. When she turned her attention to army health in India, she became so supreme an authority on the subject that successive viceroys sought her advice before taking up their posts.
“The very essence of Truth seemed to emanate from her,” wrote one contemporary, awed by “her perfect fearlessness in telling it.” Undaunted by resistance, Nightingale triumphed over the Scutari doctor who initially refused to allow nurses into the wards; the inspector-general of hospitals who tried to argue that her authority did not extend to the Crimea; the government officials who were tepid about her mission to improve the health and well-being of the British soldier.
The woman appointed general superintendent of female nursing in the military hospitals abroad transformed nursing into a respected profession. On her return to England she promoted training for midwives and for nurses in workhouses, and in 1860 she established the world’s first school for nurses, at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London.
Austere to the point of asceticism, Nightingale rejected her status as heroine, refusing official transport home from the Crimea and rebuffing all suggestions of public receptions. Back in England, she sequestered herself, rarely leaving her house. The invalidism of the world’s most famous nurse is considered to have been largely psychosomatic. Nevertheless, attended by a constant stream of important visitors, Nightingale was able to devote herself tirelessly to an extensive network of causes.
Her single-mindedness bred a cer
tain ruthlessness. Driven by a sense of divine mission, Nightingale was impatient with those whom she considered to lack the necessary zeal. When the dying Herbert had to curtail his involvement in some or other charitable cause, she cut him off. But it was this tenacity that enabled her to bring about such extraordinary changes in the nursing profession. In 1910 the ninety-year-old Nightingale, blind for a decade, died in London.
PASTEUR
1822–1895
There are not two sciences: there is science and the application of science; these two are linked as the fruit is to the tree.
Louis Pasteur
The French microbiologist Louis Pasteur was a scientist whose varied and innovative studies made a massive contribution to the battle against disease in humans and animals. He did much pioneering work in the field of immunology, most importantly producing the first vaccine against rabies. His investigations into the micro-organisms that cause food to go bad were of vital importance to French and British industry, while the process of pasteurization he developed is still extremely important in preserving food and preventing illness.
Pasteur came from a family of tanners. As a child he was a keen artist, but it was clear to his teachers that he was academically very able. In 1843 he was admitted to the fine Parisian training college the École Normale Supérieure. He became a master of science in 1845, and in 1847 he presented a thesis on crystallography which earned him a doctorate.
With such a prestigious academic background and some ground-breaking research into physical chemistry behind him, Pasteur gained a professorship in the science faculty at the University of Strasbourg. Here he met Marie Laurent, the daughter of the university rector; they were married in 1849 and had five children together, two of whom survived childhood.
After six years in Strasbourg, Pasteur moved on to Lille. He held the firm view that the theoretical and practical aspects of science should work hand in hand, so he began teaching evening classes to young working men in Lille and taking his regular students around nearby factories. He also began to study the process of fermentation; one of his early achievements, in 1857, was to show that yeast could reproduce in the absence of oxygen. This became known as the Pasteur effect.
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