Feeling Florence Nightingale: Theorizing Affect in Transatlantic Periodical Poetry

Florence Nightingale is best remembered today as the Lady with the Lamp, but modern research on the English nurse primarily addresses her popular iconography as a historical misrepresentation of her character and career. This scholarly reluctance to analyze critically Nightingalean iconography, however, has obscured important cultural work performed by the popular tropes. This article argues that the proliferation of Nightingale's iconic image as a symbol of Christian womanhood in transatlantic periodical poetry, when examined separately from biographical considerations, reveals important insights into the complex relationship between form and affect in mid-nineteenth periodicals. Popular representations of Nightingale give form to the disorienting effects produced on newspaper readers by the nascent field of international journalism and reflect a key generic paradox at the heart of the Victorian periodical: the simultaneous aim to report news objectively and to move readers affectively in response to events beyond national contexts and interests. Focusing on Lewis Carroll's "The Path of Roses" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Santa Filomena," this article contends that Nightingalean periodical poetry mirrors back to readers their own affective response to modern media and functions as a new technology for managing an increasingly acute awareness of events and ethical responsibilities beyond the nation.