ABSTRACT
The possibility that one of that shadowy group of women, the early nineteenth-century domiciliary nurses, could be viewed as a successful businesswoman is perhaps surprising, but the increasingly wealthy, sophisticated and leisured middle classes of the first half of the nineteenth century generated a demand for their services. There is no dispute that such women were employed to work in private homes. However, the unreformed early nineteenth-century domiciliary nurse is the most elusive of creatures. She appeared fleetingly in diaries and novels where she assisted with critical family events including birth, death, sickness and madness. A variety of fictional nurses were created, the most renowned of whom was presented by Dickens in the person of Sarah Gamp, midwife, layer-out and sick nurse. Although this thoroughly entertaining character in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) was a caricature, her distinctly seedy image in ‘a very rusty black gown, rather the worse for snuff, has survived. Mid-nineteenth-century readers could place the fictional portraits into their contemporary context, but the alarming image of Dickens’ unreformed nurse was so useful to the arguments of later reformers that this became the reference point they adopted. No systematic attempt has since been made to determine whether or not that image was deserved. For the twentieth-century reader the fictional image rests in the context of later propaganda which it is hard to evaluate. The
real nurses-who they were and how they managed their lives-remain mysterious.
