An American Diary

"I’m currently writing a biography of Barbara Bodichon, who was so like Mary Seacole in many ways. Barbara Bodichon was, incidentally, Florence Nightingale’s first cousin but she was illegitimate, so the two strands of the family didn’t often acknowledge one another. She was travelling in the opposite direction to Mary Seacole. She went on honeymoon to America in 1857, a little bit later than Mary Seacole was in the Crimea. Her particular interest was in exploring the slave states because slavery still obtained in America, although it had been abolished in the British Empire . Unlike Mary, Barbara Bodichon was a campaigner. She was a political traveller and had something to say about her travels. Mary was just relating her adventure, but Barbara Bodichon wanted to show people what was going on in the southern states, how inhumanly slaves were being treated. She was an abolitionist who came from a dynasty of abolitionists. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s interesting to me that the most prejudice that Mary Seacole mentions having ever faced was from Americans. She never actually went to America herself. When she had the hotel in Panama there were East Coast Americans travelling through to get to the goldfields in the West. The picture that Barbara paints of the southern states of America makes you understand what Mary was facing. Barbara was somebody who was ‘other’ because she was illegitimate; Mary because she was Black. She had this slightly distanced view about what she was writing. That ‘otherness’ puts things into relief. You don’t take things for granted if you’re in some ways an outcast yourself. It gives an edge to the subjectivity of any travel account if you feel like a stranger yourself. Not if she could help it. She’s staying in guest houses, hotels, sometimes she stays with people of colour wherever she finds them. She’s very much identifying herself with the oppressed. She went on to make a name for herself as the pioneering feminist of the Victorian era. Again, she was dealing with the oppressed—women. She founded the first women’s suffrage organisation and was also involved with the first university college for women, Girton College, Cambridge. Yes. The point I would want to make is that Mary wasn’t a crusader, in spite of all the amazing things she did, and for all that she was chosen as t he greatest Black Briton in 2004 . She’s a Black icon, and an icon of the nursing profession, but she never set out to be any sort of icon or crusader, she just set out to do what she felt she wanted to do. The remarkable thing was that she achieved it, in spite of everything. Yes, she came back to England and was declared bankrupt because the Crimean conflict ended very, very quickly. The British forces were sent home before they’d had a chance to pay their bills at the hotel that she’d set up, just behind the front lines in the Crimea. So she was declared bankrupt. Fortunately, a subscription fund was got up for her with members of the Royal Family and all sorts of other people giving her money. That kept her going, along with the proceeds from her autobiography, and she settled into feted retirement. She was a great friend of the Princess of Wales, the future Edward VII’s wife Alexandra, and she had all her old army friends. She was well loved. But I think her celebrity was of the flaring sort that once you leave the stage, it also dies. That’s why there was such silence afterwards. She died in 1881 in London. She did go back to Jamaica a few times. She had some business interests there, but she settled in London after the war."