A Third Look at Sarah Gamp

Abstract

Nineteenth and earlier 20th-century readers of Charles Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit accepted his character of Sarah Gamp as a credible representation of the worst of the old untrained hospital nurses. In the 1980s a number of revisionist historians took a second look at these nurses and concluded that Gamp was a caricature. This article takes a third look at Gamp, setting her into the context of earlier 19th-century hospital nursing and the workforce as a whole and demonstrates that Dickens’s fictional character was based on a reality—there were numerous real Sarah Gamps.