So if Mary's skin colour was not a factor to be overcome, what about the comparision with Florence Nightingale? This shibboleth appears to have been started by a well meaning letter to the Times drawing attention to Mary's financial problems. "While the benevolent deeds of Florence Nightingale are being handed down to posterity...are the humbler acts of Mrs Seacole to be entirely forgotten?"
Weighty rhetoric in a good cause, but the comparison totally odious. Florence was a hospital administrator, and a very good one too. She owes her fame beyond Scutari, to her founding of the nursing profession and her principles of hygiene and hospital design. Mary was a purveyor of comforts to the troops in the Crimea close to the front line. The two overlapped tenuously only in the area of providing fleeting succour to the wounded - the 'lady with the lamp' in the base hospital, the lady with the first aid bag on the battlefield. Both these roles were subsidiary to their main functions, but both being easy to depict simplistically and to manipulate with emotional overtones suitable for tabloid type coverage, we have the stuff of contention; Florence remembered, Mary forgotten. This treatment, inevitable though it may be in the current environment, is highly unfortunate in that it has polarised positions - if you are for Flo you are against Mary, and vice versa, and predictably the race card gets played.
I have described the only meeting between the two in my article so will only repeat here the fact that she went to Scutari to make her mark with Florence, NOT to ask for a job. The oft quoted passage: 'Willingly had they accepted me, I would have worked for the wounded in return for bread and water.' clearly refers to her job applications in London, not her visit to Scutari, although loose editing at this point may result in such misinterpretation by a page skimmer.
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