The letter to her father, given above, refers to Miss Nightingale's "Works"; and herein is to be found a second explanation of this peaceful interlude in her life. She had, as I have said, renounced a literary career; but she drew a sharp distinction between what she called literature for its own sake, and writing as subservient to action. She was intensely anxious to find some theological sanction, less assailable than she deemed the popular creeds to be, for her religion of practical service. Again, as I have also said, she was determined to open up a new sphere of usefulness for women. These were the subjects of her "Works," which comprised "a Novel" and a book on "Religion." Of the novel, no manuscript has been found among her papers. But in one of three volumes of _Suggestions for Thought_, which she printed privately in 1860, there is a section entitled "Cassandra," dealing with the life at home of an ordinary English gentlewoman. It may be conjectured that the form of the novel was abandoned after 1852, and the theme treated instead in the pages of "Cassandra." The manuscript book on "Religion" was doubtless enlarged between 1852 and 1860 into the main portion of the _Suggestions for Thought_, of which the first volume was dedicated "To the Artizans of England." Already in 1851, in a sheet of good resolutions, Miss Nightingale had planned to devote some portion of her life at home to giving "a new religion to the Tailors." The hero of _Alton Locke_, published in 1850, was, it will be remembered, a tailor. Miss Nightingale herself had some acquaintance with operatives in the North of England and in London, "among those of what are called 'Holyoake's party.'"[61] She met these latter through Mr. Edward Truelove, whom some readers of earlier generations may still remember as a publisher and vendor of radical and "free-thinking" literature. "The Literary and Scientific Institution" in John Street, Fitzroy Square, was in the 'forties the headquarters of Owenite Socialists, the Secularists (whose chief prophet was George Jacob Holyoake) and other "advanced" persons. In 1846 Mr. Truelove had come up from "Harmony Hall," the Owenite community at Tytherley in Hampshire, to act as Secretary of the Institution in John Street; and in a small house next door he set up his shop--afterwards removed, successively, to the Strand and High Holborn. A west-end lady, who did not at first give her name, used to pay occasional visits to the shop in John Street, and have long conversations with the wife of the proprietor. The lady was Miss Nightingale, and the acquaintance developed into a friendship with Mrs. Truelove, which extended over many years. Mr. Truelove was an unworldly man, conducting his affairs with entire disregard for "business principles," conventional opinions, and constituted authorities. His shop, as Mr. Holyoake said, was one of the "fortresses of prohibited thought, not garrisoned without daring"; and