In Switzerland Herschel and Babbage made geology an excuse for adventurous scrambling in the Alps, and wanderings over the glaciers of Chamonix in the footsteps of Dr Frankenstein’s Creature. They also made meteorological studies of the mountain storms and cloud formations, and climbed everywhere with telescopes, thermometers, geological hammers and a ‘mountain barometer’, supposed to warn them of impending storms.63
On his return to Slough, John found his unconquerable aunt Caroline had become the sole person who could manage William’s daily regime, and understand his increasingly rambling scientific requests. She also helped John develop new sweeping techniques with the cumbersome forty-foot, and once again began acting as astronomical assistant, still able — to John’s admiration and amazement — to sustain long nights in the shed beneath the telescope scaffolding. When he formed the Royal Astronomical Society with Charles Babbage in 1820, their first Honorary Member was his aunt Caroline, and this gesture sealed the bond between them. John had strong views about science being open to women — the Society’s second Honorary Member was to be Mary Somerville.
At Slough, the old observations workshops were falling into disuse, and masses of equipment and unfiled papers accumulated. William retreated to his study or his day-bed, but occasionally sent Caroline on quixotic missions to recover sheets of calculations or copies of papers once sent to the Philosophical Transactions. She alone could do this, but it caused her endless frustration and heartache.
Ill health now came to plague both Herschel and Caroline. The long nights of observation had gradually stricken him with crippling arthritis, while she began to suffer from an eye infection that a local doctor (not James Lind) casually diagnosed as leading to inevitable blindness. After several terrifying weeks, spent largely alone convalescing in her darkened lodgings, fearing she would never be able to see the stars again, Caroline recovered and slowly began using her telescope once more. The experience shook her profoundly, and reminded her of her isolation. The disease was almost certainly ophthalmia, which was rife among poorer households in the Thames Valley at this period. Several years before, Percy Shelley, living nearby across the river at Great Marlow, had also caught it while taking food and blankets to destitute families, as part of one of his many philanthropic projects.64
In the last months of his life Herschel had become increasingly weak and immobile. Yet he was loath to give up his stars. During the summer he wrote in a trembling hand on a tiny slip of paper, one of his last surviving notes. ‘Lina– There is a great comet. I want you to assist me. Come to dine and spend the day here. If you can come soon after one o’clock we shall have time to prepare maps and telescopes. I saw its situation last night — it has a long tail.’ Caroline meticulously filed away this note, and years later annotated it in her neat, precise script: ‘I keep this as a relic! Every line now traced by the hand of my dear brother becomes a treasure to me.’65
Towards the end, William asked Caroline to unearth a copy of his late ‘Sidereal’ paper, together with a print of his forty-foot telescope, to present to a friend who had asked for a special memorial gift. Close to tears, Caroline hurried to his chaotic library of papers to find it. After a long, miserable, dusty search, she finally discovered it, but was then too upset to read it through: ‘For the universe I could not have looked twice at what I had snatched from the shelf,’ she recalled. She returned and put it into her brother’s hands. ‘When he faintly asked if the breaking up of the Milky Way was in it, I said “Yes!,” and he looked content. I cannot help remembering this circumstance, it being the last time I was sent to the Library on such an occasion.’66
On 25 August 1822, Sir William Herschel, knighted and recognised by learned societies around the world, died in his room overlooking the great forty-foot telescope. He was quietly buried in the little church of St Lawrence, Upton, where he had been married. Just as he had feared, his son John had been abroad and had not been at his deathbed. But on his return, at Caroline’s urging John wrote a long epitaph to be carved in marble above his father’s tomb, and had it translated into elegant Latin by the Provost of Eton. It contained a wonderful phrase: ‘Coelorum per-rupit claustra’ – ‘He broke through the barriers of heaven’; or as a later friend translated, ‘He o’er-leapt the parapet of the stars.’67
Herschel’s long and distinguished obituary appeared in The Times, and across four columns in the September issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine: ‘As an Astronomer he was surpassed by no one of the present age, and the depth of his research, and extent of his observations, rendered him perhaps second only to the immortal Newton.’ The magazine added punctiliously: ‘In these observations, and the laborious calculations into which they led, he was assisted by his excellent sister, Miss Caroline Herschel, whose indefatigable and unhesitating devotion in the performance of a task usually deemed incompatible with female habits, surpassed all eulogium.’ No doubt Caroline was pleased with that mention, though she doubtless objected to astronomy being referred to as a task ‘usually incompatible with female habits’.68
This obituary was immediately followed in the same issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine by a short notice of the death of one Percy Bysshe Shelley, son of the Whig MP for Horsham. ‘Supposed to have perished at sea, in a storm, somewhere off Via Reggio, on the coast of Italy … Mr Shelley is unfortunately too well-known for his infamous novels and poems. He openly professed himself an atheist. His works bear the following titles: Prometheus Chained [sic] … etc.’69 For good measure a London daily newspaper, the Courier, added: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.’70
The poet Thomas Campbell, who had interviewed Herschel at Brighton a decade before, wrote a long appreciation of his life in the October issue of the New Monthly Magazine. It included a summary of the way Herschel had changed the layman’s view of the cosmos: how the solar system was larger and more mysterious than Newton ever supposed; how the creation of the stars had taken place in inconceivable gulfs of time and space, and was still developing and unfolding; how our Milky Way was probably just one galaxy (or island universe) among millions; and how this galaxy — our beautiful home in space — would inevitably wither and die like some fantastic but ephemeral flower. Campbell carefully avoided raising any theological implications, and instead played wittily on the late, mad King George’s (perhaps apocryphal) remark: ‘Herschel should not sacrifice his valuable time to crotchets and quavers.’71
Among many other honours, a new constellation was proposed, Telescopium Herschelii, The Telescope; and thus it appears in James Middleton’s beautiful Celestial Atlas of 1843, located 10 degrees above Castor and Pollux, close to where Uranus first swam into his ken.
Caroline now seemed strangely detached. Despite everything that John could urge, she took the surprising decision to return at once to Hanover, although she had not been there for nearly fifty years. She was now seventy-two, and set about briskly winding up her affairs, making John the executor of her Will.72 William had left her an annual £100 pension for life, but she immediately made it over to John in quarterly instalments. It was as if she wanted to bring the circle of her life in England to an abrupt close.
The one thing that would have kept her in England, she told John, was if she had been able to ‘offer of my service for some time longer to you, my dear nephew’ as astronomical assistant. But she felt too old and infirm to do this.73 She took with her to Germany a large, comfortable English bed, some astronomy books, and the beautiful seven-foot Newtonian ‘sweeper’ telescope which William had made for her all those years ago in 1786. ‘It shall stand in my room and be my monument — as the Forty-Foot is yours.’74
On 16 October there was a final reception for her at Bedford Square, London, hosted by Lady Herschel and John. Charles Babbage rode down from Cambridge, arriving at the very last minute. Caroline’s parting message to him, an unspoken one, was about John. ‘I could find no time for any conversation with [Babbage]; b
ut just by a pressure of the hand recommended my Nephew (in incoherent whispers) again to the continuance of his regards and Friendship.’75
Caroline was destined to live on for another twenty-six years, her mind sharp and her memories vivid and sometimes bitter. ‘I did nothing for my brother,’ she once confided, ‘but what a well-trained puppy dog would have done, that is to say, I did what he commanded me.’76 She began to send the first version of her Memoirs back from Hanover in the year following William’s death, 1823. It was written up slowly, carefully withheld from all her German relatives and friends, and posted in secret instalments to John in England, with many hesitations and caveats. She wrote poignantly: ‘As my thoughts are continually fixed on the past, I was as it were conversing with you on paper, not choosing to trust them to anyone about me [in Hanover]. For I know none who would understand me, or whom it can concern what my own private opinion and remarks have been about the transactions that continually passed before my eyes. But there can be no harm in telling them to my own dear Nephew.’77
She and John corresponded regularly for the next twenty years. Very rarely she wrote about her personal feelings, but sometimes there were sudden glimpses, like clouds clearing on a good observation night. ‘I am grown much thinner than I was six months ago; when I look at my hands they put me so in mind of what your dear father’s were, when I saw them tremble under my eyes, as we latterly played at backgammon together.’78
She read all John’s Royal Society papers as they appeared, and took huge pleasure in his successes, as if her beloved brother were still alive. She kept him supplied with all the new technical books and papers published in German, and recommended he read the philosopher Schelling. ‘You must give me leave to send you any publication you can think of, without mentioning anything about paying for them.’ Like many old people, she was fierce if he did not reply to her letters immediately.
Caroline’s explanation for her generosity was characteristic. ‘It is necessary that every now and then I should lay out a little of my spare cash … for the sake of supporting the reputation of being a learned lady … for I am not only looked at for such a one, but even stared at here in Hanover.’79 She assembled and recalculated for John a huge new Star Catalogue of the 2,500 nebulae. Should he ever escape on the expedition he was starting to dream about, he could add to it while observing the stars of the southern hemisphere. Herschel and Babbage made sure she was awarded the Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal for this in 1828. It sports her name on a beautiful medallion showing William Herschel’s forty-foot telescope, and the Society’s motto Quicquid Nitet Notandum –’Let Whatever Shines be Noted’.80 For herself there was now little chance of star-gazing: ‘Two or three evenings a week are spoiled by company. And at the heavens is no getting, for the high roofs of the opposite houses.’81
When John visited her in Hanover he found Caroline to be more energetic than ever. After all those years of stellar observation, she was still essentially a night bird. ‘She runs about town with me, and skips up her two flights of stairs. In the morning until eleven or twelve she is dull and weary, but as the day advances she gains life, and is quite fresh and funny at ten o’clock pm, and sings old rhymes, nay even dances! to the great delight of all who see her.’82
It was Caroline who worried about his health, and urged him not to let science drive him too hard. He must not become obsessive about his work, or allow himself to become remote or unfeeling. Here she was clearly looking back on her brother William’s career: ‘I wish often that I could see what you were doing, that I might give you a caution (if necessary) not to overwork yourself like your dear father did. I long to hear that the Forty Foot instrument is safely got down … I know how wretched and feverish one feels after two or three nights waking, and I fear you have been too eager at your Twenty-Foot … I should be very sorry on your account, for if I should not live long enough to know you comfortably married … if you can meet with a good-natured, handsome and sensible young lady, pray think of it, and do not wait till you are old and cross.’83
7
In 1823, pursuing his idea of raising the national profile of science, Davy had accepted a commission from the Royal Navy to solve a major problem with their new steam-powered warships. This was the rapid corrosion of their copper hulls in sea water, which also encouraged their fouling with weed and barnacles. After a relatively short period at sea, the combined effect could drastically reduce the ships’ speed through the water and manoeuvrability in action. The commission was widely publicised in the press, and Davy threw himself into the task, hoping to achieve a public success comparable to his invention of the safety lamp in the winter of 1815.
For this work he no longer asked for Faraday’s help. He solved the corrosion problem quickly and brilliantly, by analysing the corroding (oxidising) effect of salts on copper, and through a series of experiments finding that it could be neutralised with the use of small cast-iron plates placed along the length of the ship’s hull. The more rapid oxidising of the iron produced a charge of ‘negative electricity’ along the hull, which prevented the oxidising of the copper. He wrote excitedly to his brother John of his ‘most beautiful and unequivocal’ results.84 He read a paper on this discovery to the Royal Society in January 1824, and went on naval trials aboard HMS Comet, one of the Navy’s latest steam paddle-ships, to Scandinavia to demonstrate the results. The work was greeted by a fanfare of approval in the newspapers when he got home.
To crown his achievement, Davy announced with a flourish that, as with the safety lamp, he would refuse to take out a patent. ‘I might have made an immense fortune by a patent for this discovery; but I have given it to my country, for in everything connected with interest, I am resolved to live and die at least sans tache.’85 If not the Napoleon of science, he would be the Nelson.
But Davy’s claims for the new process were premature. Within months it was found that the unoxidised copper hulls attracted weeds and barnacles far more quickly and heavily than before. By October accusing paragraphs were appearing in the Portsmouth papers, and sarcastic letters in The Times. The navy was disgruntled, the Royal Society was embarrassed, and the press was derisive. Davy’s reputation was tarnished, not to say barnacled, by this episode, and his unpopularity at the Royal Society increased.86 It was also noted that while he was touring Scandinavia, his wife was altogether elsewhere on the Continent, travelling through Germany and charming the aged Goethe at Weimar, in a party organised by one of her aristocratic friends, the gossiping Lord Dudley.
Ironically, Davy’s science was perfectly correct, only the practical application was faulty. After several years of further sea-trials an adaptation of his iron-plate techniques did keep the Royal Navy’s copper hulls perfectly clean. It was largely his impetuosity, his premature publication of results and his increasing hunger for glory that had betrayed him. Moreover, pure science was not the same as applied science. Successful laboratory experiments did not always transfer smoothly to actual conditions in the field. He wrote touching letters to his mother trying to explain all this, and insisting he was right. ‘Do not mind any of the lies you may see in the newspapers … about the failure of one of my experiments. All the experiments are successful, more even than I could have hoped.’87
But Davy’s reputation was now increasingly vulnerable. Robert Harrington had again mocked him in a widely circulated pamphlet as ‘a self-styled Hercules … seated on the shoulders of Sir Joseph Banks’.88 In 1824 he was attacked by the new magazine John Bull in its satirical series ‘Humbugs of the Age’. He was pilloried not as a scientist, but as a snob and a socialite (No. 1 was De Quincey, No. 2 was a worldly prelate, and No. 3 was Davy). ‘The poor fellow fancies himself irresistible among the girls, and is evidently pluming himself while conversing with them … about the last new novel, or the set of china, or the pattern of a lace, or the cut of a gown — not at all about chemistry. O! he is a universal genius. You never, my dear, would take him for a great philosopher.’89
> Davy was still attempting to secure his position with the younger Fellows of the Royal Society. He had John Herschel appointed as one of the two Society Secretaries in 1824, but then undermined the reformist implications of this by refusing to have Charles Babbage elected as the other. The irascible Babbage accused Davy of temporising and trimming, while Davy let it be known that the combination of two Cambridge University mathematicians in two such key appointments would, in his opinion, unbalance the Royal Society’s traditional composition. Unbalancing the traditional composition, with its predominance of ‘slumbering’ gentlemen amateurs, was of course exactly what Herschel and Babbage had intended.
Babbage began to reflect angrily on the minatory phrase from Davy’s inaugural address, the potential ‘decline of British science’. Here was a possible line of attack. But how could ‘decline’ be inductively demonstrated? For example, how many scientific papers or lectures, he wondered, had each Fellow actually published?. No one had ever considered something so ungentlemanly as gathering such data from the Philosophical Transactions. But it might be a good empirical question to ask. He and Herschel had, after all, already published well over fifty papers between them.90
Over the next three years Davy spent most of his summers travelling outside London — usually to go shooting or fishing — in Wales, the Lake District, Ireland and Scotland. He joined the house parties of aristocratic acquaintances, but was rarely accompanied by Jane. Older friends like Wordsworth and Scott noted that his health was weakened. He walked less (though he still climbed Helvellyn), and he drank and talked more.
In September 1826 his mother Grace died in Penzance after a short illness. This had a profoundly upsetting and undermining effect on Davy, from which he never entirely recovered. It was Grace who had sustained him from the earliest days in Borlase’s pharmacy, and followed all his triumphs so faithfully. It was now that the hollowness of his marriage left him emotionally unsupported. He attended his mother’s funeral in Penzance with his sisters and his brother John, who had returned swiftly from Corfu. But he was not accompanied by Jane, who remained in London. Friends and family thought she was unbelievably callous; but Davy had almost certainly asked her not to come. It had long been agreed between them that his Penzance life was his own.
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