Helen Rappaport has been researching Mary Seacole for over two decades. The length of the project – delayed publication due to rapid publications in the early noughties of speedily compiled, often inaccurate, accounts of Seacole – is to be warmly welcomed. The resulting work is a much more complete biographical account and evaluation of this complex and exceptional woman. Of her many books, this has been a special project for the author, sparked by her identification of Mary as the sitter in a portrait in oils that emerged in 2003, apparently hidden behind a Victorian print, following a car boot sale in Burford, west Oxfordshire. When asked for a view on who a bemedaled woman of colour in the portrait might be, and having some three years earlier taken an interest in Seacole for an Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers, Rappaport knew immediately what she was looking at. Mary Seacole (1805–81) was already known for her work as an independent operator during the Crimean War in the 1850s. Now there was a portrait showing this remarkable person, proudly wearing three medals. Much was added to the material already in print on Seacole’s life, including a full-length biography in 2005. This proved a stumbling block in Rappaport’s project: no one would publish a second autobiography of Seacole at that time. Rappaport turned to other projects. However, the subsequent fifteen years or so enabled Helen Rappaport to compile what is a definitive account of the life of Mary Seacole for the present.
Tracing through archives the life records of a Jamaican woman born during slavery was no easy task. The laudable persistence of the author in researching and so refuting all kinds of inaccuracies has led to many discoveries – about her place of birth, her christening, her family and her service under fire in the Crimea among many other matters. Seacole’s (born Grant) family, her siblings, her daughter Sarah ‘Sally’ and her husband Edwin come into focus. Edwin gave her the distinctive Seacole surname that has so facilitated documentary research.
The text includes the period of Mary’s life covered in her book, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (Reference Seacole1857). Rappaport engages in close analysis of that text, emphasising the insights it provides into Seacole’s experiences first in Panama and subsequently, and importantly, in the Crimea. The generous, outgoing and indefatigable nature of Mary Seacole’s character are drawn not only from the Adventures text, but strongly supported and outweighed by research into many archives and contemporary newspaper accounts, not just in the British and Jamaican archives, but from European and Australian newspapers too. Mrs Seacole was noted across the world for her work not only under fire on the battlefields, but also for her ‘British Hotel’ where she provided food and drink for all – from the navvies of the Land Transport Corps to the senior officers (she was privileged to view the body of Lord Raglan after his death in the Crimea) – sustenance with pricing according to means, officers paying more and so funding free medical care and food for less well remunerated fellow expeditionaries. Seacole worked despite the horrors and privations ‘because I wish to be useful all my life’ as she herself put it. After the Crimea, unable even to fund her laundry, as she declared in the bankruptcy court, she was nonetheless not only lauded and cheered, but also rescued from destitution by royal and public subscription and special fund-raising events.
The culmination of the text addresses her life after Crimea, her legacy and developing awareness of her significance when voted Greatest Black Briton in 2004, and today. As I write, a Seacole film is being completed, a stage show has come from New York to London and a statue stands outside St Thomas’s hospital in London. Material continues to come to light, as Rappaport has shown. Among these finds is a letter written by Mary in 1869 to the eldest sister of Albert Challen, who painted the portrait that sparked Rappaport’s interest and submitted it to the Royal Academy Exhibition that year. Matilda Challen (1844–1943), the recipient of this charming personal letter, preserved it in her special box of ‘treasures’ until her death aged ninety-nine. It is likely that the portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, came from the house where Matilda’s nieces lived in Oxfordshire, thence eventually to the boot sale. Surely the preservation of these artefacts is an indication of the personal charisma and celebrity of this remarkable Jamaican ‘doctress’ and ‘sutler’?
