The only person who may have glimpsed these journals before they were destroyed, or known something of their contents, was another woman, Caroline’s future editor Margaret Herschel, the wife of her nephew John. Though restrained by strong family loyalties, Margaret left one circumspect but highly sympathetic comment about the journals in print: ‘It is not to be supposed that a nature so strong and a heart so affectionate should accept the new state of things without much and bitter suffering. To resign the supreme place by her brother’s side which she had filled for sixteen years with such hearty devotion could not be otherwise than painful … One who could both feel and express herself so strongly was not likely to fall into her new place without some outward expression of what it cost her — tradition confirms the assumption – and it is easy to understand how this long significant silence is due to the light of later wisdom and calmer judgement, which counselled the destruction of all record of what was likely to be painful to survivors.’70
Over the years Caroline gave various quite different reasons for taking this extreme step. Mostly she passed it off by saying her journals were too dull to be of interest; or would not be understood; or else showed her lack of scientific achievement: ‘These books I thought it best to destroy; excepting some fragments which I some 4 or 5 years since sent to my Nephew as waste paper. For, in consequence of my employment at the Clocks and writing Desk, when my Brother was observing I had no other opportunity for looking out for Comets, but when he was absent from home, but this happened so seldom and my sweeps were so broken and unconnected that I could not bear the thoughts of their rising in judgement against me; and besides they contained nothing new but the discovery of 8 Comets and a few Nebs. & clusters of stars.’71
At the very least Caroline must have felt that a highly successful scientific partnership was being endangered, one that was now increasingly recognised in the international community of astronomers. But perhaps she felt more, much more. Caroline cannot have forgotten that ten years previously she had given up her own future as a concert singer, when she rejected the offer of a solo appointment after performing arias from Handel’s Messiah in 1778.72
It is hard to believe that she did not feel deeply hurt, and even in some obscure way emotionally rejected, by her brother. But it is difficult to gauge the exact nature of these deeper feelings, and she may not have analysed them too closely herself. More immediately evident was her sudden loss of social status within Herschel’s household. During this period in England, and even more so in Germany, previously dependent women — and notably unmarried younger sisters — would expect to be incorporated and remain happily within the newly married household. Caroline’s new quarters above the workshops at The Grove were an acceptable adaptation, but her loss of managerial and social responsibility must have felt humiliating. This eventually led her to take the extreme step of abandoning her apartment altogether, and taking rooms in Slough village with the wife of Herschel’s head workman, Mr Sprat.73
Yet outwardly things went on smoothly. Fanny Burney saw them all at a reception at Windsor later that summer, and thought the situation more amusing than tragic. ‘Dr Herschel was there, and accompanied them [the Miss Stowes] very sweetly on the violin; his new-married wife was with him and his sister. His wife seems good-natured; she was rich too! And astronomers are as able as other men to discern that gold can glitter as well as stars.’74
When the French astronomer Jérôme Lalande visited The Grove observatory in autumn 1788 he was evidently charmed by Herschel’s whole circle, and wrote to thank him with characteristic exuberance: ‘Je n’ai jamáis passé de mat plus agréable, sans en excepter celles de l’amour.’ Caroline may have considered that an odd turn of phrase, in the circumstances. Lalande also reported that he had had an audience with King George III, who announced that he was immensely proud of the Herschels and pointedly remarked, while walking on the terrace at Windsor, ‘that it was better to spend money on building telescopes than on killing men’.75
Caroline’s spirits were lifted a little just before Christmas 1788, when on 21 December she discovered her second comet. This time it was moving through the constellation of Lyra, the Harp or Lyre. Although it eventually turned out that it had already been spotted by Charles Messier, this discovery produced much more correspondence than the first, and letters of congratulation — mostly still addressed to William, but sometimes sent directly to her — came crowding in from all sides: from Alexander Aubert, Sir Harry Englefield, Nevil Maskelyne and Jérôme Lalande in Paris. Thereafter Lalande became one of her most faithful, witty and faintly flirtatious correspondents, happily conforming, as he himself pointed out, to the archetype of a Parisian professor. He sent ‘a thousand tender respects to la savante Miss, of whom I frequently speak with enthusiasm’. But then Lalande liked a little Gallic hyperbole, as he also addressed William on the envelope as: ‘Monsieur Herschel, le plus célèbre astronome de l’univers, Windsor, Angleterre’.76
Sir Harry Englefield, a stalwart of scientific committees, adopted a bluffer, but no less satisfactory manner, writing to Herschel on Christmas Day: ‘I beg you to make my compliments to Miss Herschel on her discovery. She will soon be the Great Comet Finder, and bear away the prize from Messier and Méchain.’77
The most significant, and perhaps unexpected, of these correspondents was the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. Writing directly to Caroline from Greenwich Observatory on 27 December, he began a regular and increasingly confidential exchange of letters. Although he wrote formally to congratulate her, he then added a long, teasing speculation about the interesting possibilities of a close physical encounter with her new comet. He wondered whether Caroline would ever be tempted to ride off on it into space. Any true astronomer like her, he suggested, would consider ‘without horror the thought of our being involved in its immense tail’. However, he hoped she would not be tempted: ‘I would not affirm there may not exist some astronomers so enthusiastic that they would not dislike to be whisked away from this low terrestrial spot into the higher regions of the heavens by the tail of a comet, and exchange our narrow uniform orbit for one vastly more extended and varied. But I hope you, dear Miss Caroline, for the benefit of terrestrial astronomy, will not think of taking such a flight, at least till your friends are ready to accompany you.’
Then he added, formally enough: ‘Mrs Maskelyne joins me in best compliments to yourself and Dr and Mrs Herschel.’ Yet these light-hearted urgings that Caroline should refrain from departing into outer space perhaps disguised Maskelyne’s deeper concern about her unsecured position at Slough. Maskelyne was a family man himself, with an only daughter, Margaret, whom he doted on. Perhaps he understood Caroline’s anxieties better than many in the scientific world.78
3
When the great forty-foot was at last put into operation in spring 1789, Herschel’s first discovery was Mimas, one of the tiny innermost moons of Saturn, with a diameter of only 250 miles. This was a remarkable piece of astronomical observation, and promised well for the powers of the new monster instrument. Mimas is dominated by a single huge crater, eighty miles across and six miles deep, which was much later photographed and named ‘Herschel’, but only after the Voyager flyby of 1980.
Herschel gave a detailed description of the way he managed the forty-foot in a series of papers delivered to the Royal Society, illustrated by careful drawings.79 He also described Caroline’s wooden shed, situated some fifty feet beneath his own platform, equipped with masked candles, star atlases, warning bells and zone clocks.80
The completion of the telescope had finally been achieved with grants totalling £4,000 from King George III, an unprecedented amount for the sovereign to spend on a single scientific project of this kind. It was in fact exactly the same sum that the Royal Society had invested in 1768 in the entire scientific team (excluding Banks) for Cook’s first three-year expedition to the South Seas. Like King George’s Library (presented to the British Library by his son), the forty-foot telescope at
Slough became one of the glories of his reign. It quickly became a tourist attraction, and was eventually featured in a popular Victorian magazine as one of ‘The Wonders of the World’, comparable to the Colossus of Rhodes.81
The doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes included it in his tour of famous sites outside London. In his book The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) he described how he had previously seen an engraving of the great telescope in a child’s encyclopaedia back at home in America. So when he rode down the London-to-Bath turnpike road its huge outline reared up over the trees at Slough ‘like a reminiscence rather than a revelation’. It seemed a strange, unworldly shape. ‘It was a mighty bewilderment of slanted masts, spars and ladders and ropes, from the midst of which a vast tube, looking as if it might be a piece of ordinance such as the revolted Angels battered the wall of Heaven with, according to Milton, lifted its mighty muzzle defiantly towards the sky.’82
But Herschel found the huge barrel of the forty-foot telescope unexpectedly difficult to prepare and manoeuvre in anything but perfect weather conditions. The vast surface of the metal speculum was far more susceptible to misting, oxidisation and distortion than those in his smaller telescopes. The one-ton mirrors were also alarmingly cumbersome to change, and Caroline remembered how both William and Alexander ‘had many hair-breadth escapes from being crushed’ when taking them in and out of the base of the telescope, even with the help of their workmen.83 By the end of 1789 it was evident that the forty-foot was going to take years, rather than months, to prove its worth.
Through the 1790s Herschel had an ever-increasing sense that he must justify his project, and that the forty-foot was becoming something of a liability. He recorded that in the five years between 1788 and 1793 he managed only seventeen nights of ideal observations, a disastrous statistic.84 Ironically, the elegant twenty-foot (much preferred by Caroline) continued to be better for deep-space stellar observations, being both more manoeuvrable and more stable. After Mimas, Herschel’s best discoveries with the forty-foot remained inside the solar system: he added two new moons to Saturn, five already being known. The forty-foot fared much better as a national scientific showpiece, attracting a large number of European visitors, among them the head of the Paris Observatory and astronomy professors from Berlin, Cracow and Moscow.85
The annual need to repolish the huge three-foot mirrors became a growing burden, and in September 1807 Herschel was nearly killed when the one-ton speculum slipped from its harness while being removed from the tube. Many years later, in 1815, he quietly published a paper entitled A Series of Observations on the Georgian Planet’, in which he admitted the insoluble problems of condensation, manoeuvring and servicing which the forty-foot had brought him.86
Yet Herschel’s theoretical work now blossomed in an extraordinary and daring way. In 1789, the year of the Fall of the Bastille, he published a paper carefully dated ‘Slough near Windsor May 1 1789’, and gave it the deliberately anodyne title ‘Catalogue of Second Thousand Nebulae with Remarks on the Construction of the Heavens’. This developed his revolutionary 1785 paper ‘On the Construction of the Heavens’, and extended it with a striking analogy between the botanical cycle as observed on earth, and an organic or ‘vegetative’ cycle which appeared to be operating throughout the entire universe.
The paper completely overturned any residual idea of a stable, overarching, temple-like universe, created once and for all by the great Celestial Architect and decoratively ‘fretted with golden fire’, as Hamlet once mentioned. On the contrary, Herschel suggested, the whole universe was subject to enormous fluid movements and changes, over vast periods of time, and these could be observed in the degree of ‘compression’ or ‘condensation’ of nebulae, and the ‘comparative variety’ of size and structure of deep-space star clusters. Herschel’s crucial observation was that some galaxies were evidently older, and more evolved, than others. ‘We are enabled to judge of the relative age, maturity, or climax, of a sidereal system, from the disposition of its component parts.’ Nebulae and star clusters were in effect like ‘species of plants’, at various stages of growth and decay.
He explained this in his usual quiet, patient manner. ‘Youth and age are comparative expressions; and an oak of a certain age may be called young, while a contemporary shrub is already on the verge of its decay.’ The fundamental force at work was gravity, gradually over time compressing nebulous gas into huge, bright galactic systems, and eventually condensing into individual stars, ‘So that, for instance, a cluster or nebula which is very gradually more compressed and bright towards the middle, may be in the perfection of its growth.’ While another type of cluster, showing a more equal compression or distribution of individual stars, might be looked upon as ‘very aged, and drawing towards a period of change, or dissolution’.
This method of viewing the galaxies (‘to continue the simile I have borrowed from the vegetable kingdom’) presented the entire universe in a new kind of light, with the most radical implications. ‘The heavens are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden which contains the greatest variety of productions, in different flourishing beds … and we can extend the range of our experience [of them] to an immense duration.’ In a garden we may live ‘successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering and corruption of a plant’. Just so, the universe presented ‘a vast number of specimens, selected from every stage through which the plant passes in the course of its existence’, but brought ‘at once to our eyes’, and viewed at one particular moment from the earth.87
In this paper, astronomy changed decisively from a mathematical science concerned primarily (for practical purposes) with navigation, to a cosmological science concerned with the evolution of the stars and the origins of the universe. The implications were slowly absorbed, most notably by the French astronomer Pierre Laplace, who published his first paper on what he called ‘the nebular hypothesis’ in 1796.88 But the revolutionary analogy, which made astronomy a life science with huge philosophical implications, was soon to be celebrated by Erasmus Darwin in the final book of The Botanic Garden (1791).
There were other, more personal forms of evolution. The year 1792 saw a decisive change in Herschel’s family life. At the age of fifty-three he rejoiced in the birth of his first and only child, his son John. The regime at The Grove became steadily more domestic and sociable. Annual summer holidays, previously unheard of, began, with trips to Cornwall, the south coast and Scotland. Although Caroline rarely participated in these, the arrival of this little child would eventually affect her life too, as much even as her comets.
For the moment, though lonely and isolated, Caroline was doing the best observational work of her career. Pierre Méchain wrote admiringly to William on 25 October 1789, ‘her renown will be held in honour throughout the ages’.89 She continued to find new comets. In 1790 she found her third and fourth, in December 1791 a fifth, and a sixth in October 1793. She herself reported this sixth comet directly to the Royal Society, and her reputation continued to grow fast in astronomical circles. Articles appeared about her work in a number of women’s journals, and a faintly scurrilous cartoon was published entitled ‘The Female Philosopher Smelling out a Comet’. The comet is depicted as a small child hurtling through the night sky, driven by a fart, while the female astronomer, peering through her telescope and clutching her hands in delight, remarks enthusiastically on the ‘strong sulpherous scent’ of the comet’s coma. But the depiction of Caroline, with her characteristic mass of curly hair, is surprisingly handsome.90
Her friendship with Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, continued to deepen, and he invited her to stay with him and his family at Greenwich, though she did not immediately accept. With his approval she had begun an updated Star Catalogue, which would eventually correct and supersede Flamsteed’s, and receive the signal honour of being published at the Royal Society’s own expense.
In November 1795 she ‘shared’ a comet with the German astronomer Johann Encke. T
hen in August 1797 she found her seventh. She was so excited by this last one that she did something unprecedented for her. After only one hour’s sleep, she had a horse saddled for her in Slough, and rode the twenty-odd miles into London at dawn, then crossed the Thames bridge, and appeared at Maskelyne’s observatory at Greenwich for a late breakfast. She gave him a precise memorandum of the comet’s position, which he confirmed that night.
At Maskelyne’s urging, Caroline wrote to Sir Joseph Banks in Soho Square pointing out that it was a truly historic day, since she had never previously ridden more than two miles beyond Slough. This letter, dated 17 August 1797 from Greenwich, has a light-headed, almost flirtatious tone, which was again quite new for Caroline.
Sir — This is not a letter from an astronomer to the President of the Royal Society announcing a comet, but only a few lines from Caroline Herschel to a friend of her brother’s, by way of apology for not sending intelligence of that kind immediately where it was due … Dr Maskelyne was so kind as to take some pains to persuade me to go this morning ‘to pay my respects to Sir Joseph’, but I thought a woman who knows so little of the world ought not to aim at such an honour; but go home, where she ought to be, as soon as possible.91
It would appear that Caroline stayed on with Maskelyne’s family for at least two days. This gesture of independence was shortly followed by a radical change in her lodging arrangements. In October 1797 she moved out of her apartment at The Grove, and into lodgings up the road in Slough village. She also began a new ‘day book’, in which the first entry read: ‘1797, in October I went to lodge with one of my brother’s workmen (Sprat), whose wife was to attend on me. My telescopes on the roof, to which I was to have occasional access, as also to the room with the sweeping and observing apparatus, remained in its former order [at The Grove], where I most days spent some hours in preparing work to go on with at my lodging.’92
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