The structure of Seacole's Wonderful Adventures was probably shaped by commercial considerations: she had to captalise on her fame as a veteran nurse from the Crimean war a conflict that captured the mid-century British imagination to a remarkable degree. Accordingly she cuts to the chase disposing of her first 40 years during which she visited relatives in England ("I am not going to bore the reader with my first impressions of London") in a single chapter. Then once she has moved to Cruces in Panama she uses several chapters to get into her stride as a mature woman before focusing on her career in the Crimea drawn to the experience she writes by the heady "pomp pride and circumstance of glorious war."