Florence Nightingale, Frances Ridley Havergal, Catherine Marsh, Mrs. Ranyard ("L.N.R.").

  • Alldridge, Lizzie.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Florence Nightingale, Frances Ridley Havergal, Catherine Marsh, Mrs. Ranyard ("L.N.R."). Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries.

    83/152 (page 79)
    thirty years have not dimmed its brightness ; it is still one of the most living books of its class. The crowd of rough navvies with their tumultuous joys and sorrows, their struggles for goodness, their sudden falls, all surging round the grand woman who alone could control them, who alone could love and admire them, and draw out their best qualities, live in these wonderful pages; we cannot say they live over again, for they have never ceased to pulsate with strong and genuine emotion. It was early in 1853 that nearly three thousand navvies invaded the quiet woods on the Sydenham hills for the purpose of turning them into the great pleasure gardens of the Crystal Palace. The villages around soon swarmed with excavators ; two hundred went over to Beckenham to lodge, and most of the good people of the neighbourhood began to fear that they would prove very troublesome lodgers. Pro- bably Catherine Marsh may have thought so too, but whatever her forebodings, she at once determined to gain the friendship of these rough new-comers if it were possible to do so. In those days no one had discovered the navvy's good qualities : with his heavy boots clogged with clay, his earth-coloured clothes and his habit of going about in gangs, the stranger navvy was a person few people cared to have much to do with before Miss Marsh showed the way to his heart. The two hundred navvies had not been lono- at