of yellow fever before deciding to head for the Crimea where she hoped to help the beleaguered British army. Rebuffed by the military and medical authorities in London, she went out on her own accord as a sutler and set up a British Hotel between Balaklava and Sebastopol where she cared for sick and maimed troops. Her bravery and devotion were enskied by W.H. Russell in a despatch to The Times dated 14 September 1855, and he later contributed a preface to her 1857 autobiography, the first to be wholly authored by a black woman in England (Prince’s had been transcribed by the minor poet Susanna Strickland). It was published to raise funds following her bankruptcy at the end of the Crimean War.
If the financial dependency into which Seacole sank following her return from the Crimea aligns her with Mary Prince and the hapless anonyms who comprised the black female population in London up until the second half of the twentieth century, there are, equally, other features which make her stand out. The most obvious is her nursing prowess. Seacole came to London to get governmental permission to heal rather than to be healed. Literate, proud of her mixed blood, and coming from a financially stable background, she didn’t suffer from cultural cringe and didn’t think of London as a sanatorium to lint and bandage her contused colonial psyche. Nor did she view it as a place to start her life afresh, a city in which she could satisfy those emotional and intellectual desires which a repressive and brutalized colonial adolescence had prevented her from fulfilling. Seacole claimed to have a ‘roving inclination’ and had already travelled widely before she arrived in England.48 She possessed medical skills and was confident in them. By coming to London she was not gingering up to the starting line of a new and more meaningful life. For her, the city’s value was largely functional. It would facilitate and rubberstamp her desire to help those British troops in whose well-being she took as great an interest as her ‘patriotic lady’ of a sister who, according to Trollope, wouldn’t ‘abandon the idea that beefsteaks and onions, and bread and cheese and beer [were] the only diet proper for an Englishman’.49
Almost nothing is known about the final two decades of Seacole’s life other than that she left over £2500 when she died in 1881. Even this biographical shard is very revealing. For though Seacole returned from the Crimea financially ruined, it was only a temporary setback. In 1856 The Times printed several letters from potential benefactors who wished to pay off her debts. In July 1857 a four-night Grand Military Festival was held at the Royal Surrey Gardens for her benefit. She was awarded four Government medals and a bust of her was carved by Queen Victoria’s nephew, Count Gleichen. She lived for long stretches in the affluent West End and told a friend that when she visited the Princess of Wales whose masseuse she was, ‘I go up to her private sitting room and we sit and talk like the old friends we are.’50
Unlike Mary Prince and most of the black women in London during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Seacole’s lapses into penury were short-lived and remediable. Like Sancho, whose amplitude of girth she shared, Seacole had the kind of access to the upper strata of metropolitan society normally closed to the washed up (and washing up) working classes such as Prince. Her autobiography was not composed for polemical purposes, unlike those of Gronniosaw, Equiano and Prince. This accounts in large part for the absence of hectoring diatribes in her book. She shared with Sancho a strident patriotism which may strike modern readers as assimilationist:
I think, if I have a little prejudice against our cousins across the Atlantic – and I do confess to a little – it is not unreasonable. I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related – and I am proud of the relationship – to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns. And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is; having seen with my eyes and heard with my ears proof positive enough of its horrors – let others affect to doubt them if they will – is it surprising that I should be somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have endeavoured to assume over me?51
Yet there were times in London when Seacole feared attitudes towards black people were beginning to resemble those of the Americans. One of the most memorable passages in her autobiography concerns her disappointment upon learning that despite visiting not only Elizabeth Herbert, the Secretary of War’s wife, at Belgrave Square, but also many other Government officials, her offer to go to the Crimea as a nursing recruit had been rejected:
one cold evening I stood in the twilight, which was fast deepening into wintry night, and looked back upon the ruins of my last castle in the air. [ … ] Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks, as I stood in the fast thinning streets; tears of grief that any should doubt my motives – that Heaven should deny me the opportunity that I sought. Then I stood still, and looking upward through and through the dark clouds that shadowed London, prayed aloud for help.52
The passage heaves with melodrama. While Seacole’s memoirs are normally terse and emotionally brisk, here she wallows in her misery. Yet the extract is a useful reminder that all colonial visitors to London need to recognize the possibility that they are there under licence. However enjoyable and equitable the treatment they receive, they always fear that under the froth of social acceptance bubbles a simmering hatred which at any minute might boil over. Writing about her very first visit to London many years before, Seacole recalled
the efforts of the London street-boys to poke fun at my and my companion’s complexion. I am only a little brown – a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much; but my companion was very dark, and a fair (if I can apply the term to her) subject for their rude wit. She was hot-tempered, poor thing! and as there were no policemen to awe the boys and turn our servants’ heads in those days, our progress through the London streets was sometimes a rather chequered one.53
Both of these incidents, pivoting as they do on Seacole’s colour, took place some years before she was lionized by Punch and consorted with members of the Royal Family. Without the fame and goodwill that her Crimean War exploits elicited, in the eyes of the London public Seacole was just one more derisible ‘fuzzy wuzzy’. Lauded by The Times and by thousands of ex-servicemen, Seacole records no slights or slurs after her return from the Crimea. It’s her (social) capital that makes the difference – not only in terms of where she can go and live, but also in how people respond to her, how the city, its corridors and drawing rooms of power and prestige, open up to her.
Seacole’s autobiography shows how black women didn’t all inhabit identical Londons. It might be expected that in the nineteenth century all black women’s lives would have been equally miserable. Yet Seacole, unlike Prince or the Hottentot Venus, eventually attained both fame and wealth. She mingled in rarefied social circles. Although she also experienced a degree of privation and some racial distress, unlike many of her ‘sisters’ she overcame these hurdles to produce a narrative that’s often humorous, relatively bereft of polemic and, on occasions such as the one quoted above, literary. She wrote a book the style and subject matter of which fly in the face of the generally accepted picture of what it was possible for a black woman to achieve in early nineteenth-century Britain.
As far back as 1798 the philanthropist Zachary Macaulay had brought around forty children from Sierra Leone to Clapham to be educated. Throughout the nineteenth century philanthropists and missionaries had brought young Africans to the University of London, medical schools in the capital and the Inns of Court. Their goal was to produce a cadre of learned blacks who would return home and devote their lives to converting their countrymen into civilized Christians. The numbers involved surprised William Wells Brown who noted that, ‘In an hour’s walk through the Strand, Regent, or Piccadilly Streets in
