Nurse-Commander Nightingale
The same for the Illustrated London News – the same weirdness.
We opened one of the volumes at random, from early 1851, a report on preparations for the Great Exhibition. Again, the text is bizarre: arguments about whether the exhibition-hall in Hyde Park should be built or grown. The latter would be both quicker and cheaper, but they’ve settled for Joseph Paxton’s ‘Crystal Palace’ because it’s modular and made, so it can be dismantled after the exhibition’s over, whereas a ‘viner-grown’ building could not.
Mac’s laughing his head off at this, thinks it has to be an April Fool joke or something like that; but from what I’ve seen in this place – the conservatory, the plumbing, all the other weirdnesses here – I’m not so sure. If a farmer could grow a conservatory, with clear windows and all, maybe a proper architect could grow something much larger?
Wait a mo’, says Mac, let’s check something that we know the News reported on. And he opens the 1854 volume, near the end, and hunts out the story on the Charge of the Light Brigade. It’s there, all right: but it’s about a French unit that charged the Russian guns at Balaclava. Pictures of same – wood-engravings, of course, but all in the same fine illustrative style so typical of the News. Tells us that the British – ‘the Commonwealth’, rather – were there only to pick up the wounded, and take them on Wagons to the camp-hospitals run by Nurse-Commander Nightingale. More pictures, including a portrait of Florence Nightingale in a high-ranking military uniform that she would never have been allowed to wear in the culture of that time. And pointed messages in the Editorial about ‘the further futility of war, that the Commonwealth will once again urge all parties to repent’.
What?
The same for the Illustrated London News – the same weirdness.
We opened one of the volumes at random, from early 1851, a report on preparations for the Great Exhibition. Again, the text is bizarre: arguments about whether the exhibition-hall in Hyde Park should be built or grown. The latter would be both quicker and cheaper, but they’ve settled for Joseph Paxton’s ‘Crystal Palace’ because it’s modular and made, so it can be dismantled after the exhibition’s over, whereas a ‘viner-grown’ building could not.
Mac’s laughing his head off at this, thinks it has to be an April Fool joke or something like that; but from what I’ve seen in this place – the conservatory, the plumbing, all the other weirdnesses here – I’m not so sure. If a farmer could grow a conservatory, with clear windows and all, maybe a proper architect could grow something much larger?
Wait a mo’, says Mac, let’s check something that we know the News reported on. And he opens the 1854 volume, near the end, and hunts out the story on the Charge of the Light Brigade. It’s there, all right: but it’s about a French unit that charged the Russian guns at Balaclava. Pictures of same – wood-engravings, of course, but all in the same fine illustrative style so typical of the News. Tells us that the British – ‘the Commonwealth’, rather – were there only to pick up the wounded, and take them on Wagons to the camp-hospitals run by Nurse-Commander Nightingale. More pictures, including a portrait of Florence Nightingale in a high-ranking military uniform that she would never have been allowed to wear in the culture of that time. And pointed messages in the Editorial about ‘the further futility of war, that the Commonwealth will once again urge all parties to repent’.
What?
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