ABSTRACT
In late Victorian London, the hospital had a unique topographic position and imaginative-place identity, explored in this chapter. Within it, the figure of the nurse was a meeting point between classes, genres, and urban zones. This profession and the hospital’s spatial identity can be explored by juxtaposing a literary text with other contemporary materials. The chapter gains access to the experiential qualities of the hospital – specifically its spatial borders and entry points – by reading a novel, Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl: A Realistic Tale (1887). The materialities contained in this novel include the specific urban zone made up of the central London hospital and its immediate surroundings. The materiality of this novel consists of its brevity and matter-of-fact-tone, contrasting with earlier Victorian fiction and drawing on various new non-fictional text genres in which Harkness herself was also active as a writer. Among these genres was a new mass-market journalism, an example of which is investigated alongside the novel in this chapter: Harkness’s own article introducing the profession, ‘Hospital Nurses’.
Understood via this spatialising framework, the late Victorian central London hospital combined progressive elements (resembling reformed institutions such as the universities and civil service) with the noxiousness and predatory aspects of the inner-city factory. As a belief system itself, its existence in a setting surrounded by industry and slums was alongside and indeed challenged various religious denominations. Harkness writes the hospital through interaction with literary tradition, nuancing the ‘fallen woman’ plot used widely by (chiefly male) Victorian authors of longer, three-volume, novels.
