The day after writing this letter, Ada wrote to Lady Byron again, though now she had evidently been chastened by a letter from her mother indicating Lady Byron’s disapproval of the thinking-time she was giving to her pioneering of aviation. As Ada wrote:
My dearest Mammy. I received your letter this morning & really do not think that I often think of the wings when I ought to think of other things, but it was very kind of you to make the remark to me …
I have now decided upon making much smaller wings than I before intended, and they will be perfectly well proportioned in every respect, exactly on the same plan and of the same shape as a bird’s. Though they will not be nearly enough to try and fly with, yet they will be quite enough so, to enable one to explain perfectly to any one my project for flying, and will serve as a model for my future real wings.
It wasn’t the first time Ada and Lady Byron would disagree over the nature and direction of Ada’s interests, and it wouldn’t be the last. Ada’s fascination with flying continued and on Wednesday, April 9, 1828, she wrote to her mother that she (Ada) had had
… great pleasure today in looking at the wing of a dead crow and I still think that I shall manage to fly and I have thought of three different ways of flying that all strike me as likely to answer.
It was not much later that Lady Byron hired a tutor at £300 a year to teach Ada mathematics. This equates to around £30,000 today and was a substantial salary. Clearly Lady Byron thought her daughter merited such an expensive education and she wrote to the tutor with careful instructions:
There are no weeds in her mind; it has to be planted. Her greatest defect is want of order, which mathematics will remedy. She has taught herself part of Paisley’s Geometry [presumably Batty Langley’s Practical Geometry 1726, dedicated to Lord Paisley], which she liked particularly.
Strangely, and perhaps paradoxically, Lady and Lord Byron were in complete agreement who their grown-up daughter should be. When Byron had asked for a description of his daughter’s character from Lady Byron through Augusta, just before his death, he had said:
I hope the Gods have made her anything save poetical – it is enough to have one such fool in the family.
6
Love
When in 1837 Benjamin Disraeli, a novelist before he became one of Britain’s most famous politicians, based the heroine of one of his novels closely on Ada, such was Ada’s celebrity due to the fame of her father’s separation from her mother that he could take it for granted readers would recognise his portrait of her. Disraeli named the Ada character ‘Venetia’ – the eponymous name of the novel – and the Lady Byron character ‘Annabel,’ with only a slight change of spelling of the original.
Having begun his novel in traditional nineteenth-century style, with a lengthy description of the ancient, ivy-draped country house, Cherbury, in which the drama, such as it is, takes place, Disraeli continues:
This picturesque and secluded abode was the residence of Lady Annabel Herbert and her daughter, the young and beautiful Venetia, a child, at the time when our history commences, of very tender age. It was nearly seven years since Lady Annabel and her infant daughter had sought the retired shades of Cherbury, which they had never since quitted. They lived alone and for each other, the mother educated her child, and the child interested her mother by her affectionate disposition, the development of a mind of no ordinary promise, and a sort of captivating grace and charming playfulness of temper, which were extremely delightful.
As far as is known, Disraeli never met either Ada or Lady Byron. Nonetheless, Disraeli’s romantic take no doubt reflected the views of the chattering classes of the time, who’d all read Byron’s lampoon of his wife. As Disraeli wrote:
Lady Annabel rose from her seat, and walked up and down the room, speaking with an excitement very unusual with her.
‘To have all the soft secrets of your life revealed to the coarse wonder of the gloating multitude; to find yourself the object of the world’s curiosity, still worse, their pity, their sympathy; to have the sacred conduct of your hearth canvassed in every circle, and be the grand subject of the pros and cons of every paltry journal, ah, Venetia! you know not, you cannot understand, and it is impossible you can comprehend, the bitterness of such a lot.’
If that wasn’t purple enough, Disraeli continued with gusto his baroque account of a wronged woman pining for death to release her from her heartache.
‘I have schooled my mind,’ continued Lady Annabel, still pacing the room with agitated steps; ‘I have disciplined my emotions; I have felt at my heart the constant, the undying pang, and yet I have smiled, that you might be happy. But I can struggle against my fate no longer. No longer can I suffer my unparalleled, yes, my unjust doom. What have I done to merit these afflictions? Now, then, let me struggle no more; let me die!’
Lady Byron, though, had no intention of dying. There was far more sport in enjoying her money and rest cures. Nonetheless, Disraeli’s novel does suggest that Lady Byron had a point when she picked remote places for Ada to reach maturity. Far removed from fashionable society and its gossip, there was no risk that anyone would cause Ada to be upset, or ask questions, by referring to the shadows of the past.
On December 10, 1828, Ada turned thirteen. Now she entered a new phase of her life. Her governess Miss Stamp, whom Ada liked so much, was leaving the employ of Lady Byron at the end of the year. Instead of hiring another governess, Lady Byron decided, for the time being at least, to make use of several of her friends to develop Ada’s mind, enhance her studies and exercise a good moral influence over Ada.
Then, early in 1829, Ada became very ill. No one knows what was wrong with her, and some biographers have suggested measles, but measles do not normally cause paralysis, which Ada suffered. A more likely candidate is polio. However, the truth will now probably not be known.
She was bedridden until the middle of 1832. The illness had a profound effect on Ada and she lost her dreamlike insouciance and gained focus. She continued her studies with great ardour for the three years when she was bedridden. Lady Byron took care to ensure that Ada did not try to do more than her health permitted, but she now worked hard and was frequently very tough on herself and her educational failings, even though Ada precociously mastered German on her own.
If ever Ada came close to being Lady Byron’s aristocratic mini-me, it was now. Ada reports on occasion that she has gone for a few turns in her wheelchair, and the tone she adopts towards her studies and herself is often indeed serious and even self-chastening. On occasion she is even not averse to making sneaky comments about her mother.
To her cousin Robert Noel, who had joined their Grand Tour, Ada wrote in flawless German the following note. The translation reads:
27 August 1830
I thank you for your letter, and especially for your beautiful handwriting. I am reading Schiller’s translation of Macbeth which I find very interesting because I have never read the play in English. Maybe when I have [read] this work I can obtain one of the books you have so kindly recommended. Miss Doyle and I are reading German together and like the lame and the blind we assist each other.
Ada’s recovery was painfully slow, however. Barely able to move or write, she had lost her appetite for activities such as riding or imagined ones such as flying.
I don’t think you would recognise me, that is how much I have changed since you saw me; I am getting stronger step by step, and with the help of crutches I can go for walks. I lost my taste completely for riding and flying and such, but I feel well enough to play a little piano which give me great pleasure, and if you would be so kind to send me some light pieces of German music, I would be very happy. I especially like the waltz. I hope to hear from you again, even though I cannot write a letter twice as long as you would like me to. Miss Doyle sends her best regards and I do also, my dear cousin.
A. Ada Byron
The next part of Ada’s upbringing is chronicled by a particularly fascinating document, a short bio
graphy of Ada (written in about 1847, the precise date is not known) by Woronzow Greig.
Ada had got to know her future biographer when she and her mother moved to Fordhook Manor, Ealing, in 1832. Today, Ealing is a suburb of London, but at the time when Ada and Lady Byron lived at Fordhook, Ealing was a separate village, located about eight miles west of the centre of London, and popular with wealthy people who wanted to escape the smells and bustle of the capital, yet remain within easy access to London.
Fordhook Manor had a long literary history. It would be good to know whether this fact influenced Lady Byron’s decision to move herself and Ada there, but there is no evidence either way. One of the manor’s claims to fame was that it had been the home of the writer Henry Fielding (1707–1754), the creator of immortal, wordy but entertaining and somewhat bawdy novels such as Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). Ada was now sixteen, somewhat overweight from having been bedridden for three years, but the time was rapidly approaching when she would be expected to enter London society and find an aristocratic husband. It was time for the oyster shells of her childhood to open and filter in the outside world.
Lady Byron gave Ada more leeway at Fordhook than Bifrons but recruited three friends to help supervise Ada’s education and demeanour. Ada referred to the three women as the ‘Three Furies’ and, resenting their presence in her life deeply, she did all she could to escape their influence. Her success rate was low. Greig wrote, ‘As Ada grew older the interference of these ladies became more insufferable, but every attempt to resist it was [illegible] by Lady Byron.’
Born in 1805 and ten years older than Ada, Woronzow Greig was one of the two sons of Mary Somerville. Ada and Lady Byron got to know Mary through Dr William Frend, by that time an ancient Cambridge mathematician who had been Annabella’s tutor when she was young, and whom she had recruited to teach Ada mathematics too. (Frend was no stranger to avantgarde thinking; a convert to Unitarianism, he had taught Hebrew and philosophy to his daughter Sophia and been one of the tutors of the influential economist Robert Malthus.)
Born on December 26, 1780, in Scotland, Mary Somerville was another female genius, a science writer and polymath who mastered mathematics, astronomy and other sciences later in life. Mary was to a large extent self-educated, and her family – typical for families at the time – did not approve of Mary being so brainy and studious.
In 1804, when Mary was twenty-four years old, she married a cousin of hers, Captain Samuel Greig. Mary and Greig went to London but Mary found that her husband wasn’t sympathetic to her intellectual interests. As she put it, ‘He had a very low opinion of the capacity of my sex, and had neither knowledge of, nor interest in, science of any kind.’
Greig died three years after the marriage. By this time, Mary had given birth to two sons. After Greig’s death, she went back to Scotland with them. Fortunately, Mary’s remarkable mind and charismatic personality had by now won her an excellent circle of friends who encouraged her in her intellectual interests.
In 1812, Mary made a more successful marriage to William Somerville, an inspector of hospitals. William was interested in science and also supportive of his wife’s desire to study. By the time Ada and Lady Byron met Mary, she was well on her way to becoming not only one of the greatest female mathematicians in the world, but one of the greatest mathematicians of either sex.
Her son Woronzow Greig soon became a close friend of Ada, as well as later on her lawyer. It is quite clear that, like all of London society, he was fascinated by Ada, and had a romantic interest in her. The feeling wasn’t reciprocated, but she enjoyed shocking him and he lapped up her shocks eagerly and faithfully.
His biographical document about Ada fills seven foolscap handwritten pages. Unfortunately, most of the document is illegible; legible handwriting was not regarded as necessary for a gentleman in the early nineteenth century and Greig was a determined gentleman. The biography is often illegible at precisely the moment when it is most interesting. As Greig wrote:
My first recollection of Ada Byron about 1832 or 3 is when as a young girl she was a visitor at the house of my mother at the Royal College Chelsea. She was very intimate with Mrs [illegible] who was about her age and as she had even in those early years a decided taste for science which was much approved by Lady Noel Byron [Annabella] …
Greig continues with an almost photographic glimpse of the teenage Ada:
She used to lie a great deal in a horizontal position, and she was subject of fits of giddiness, especially when she looked down from any height. As might be expected at this early passage of her life, she had not much conversation. She was reserved and shy, with a good deal of pride and not a little selfishness which developed itself with her advancing years. Her moral courage was remarkable and her determination of character most pronounced.
Greig’s pages are particularly interesting because Ada completely trusted his discretion and gave him an unobscured view of her life:
In afterlife I became very intimate with her; quite as much so as it is possible for persons of different sexes to become consistently with honour. Her communications to me were most unreserved.
We learn, intriguingly, of Ada’s first love affair. Greig plainly exults in his recollection of what Ada told him: that she successfully escaped the suffocating shackles of the three furies to be with her first lover, a young tutor. As Greig wrote:
A short time before my family became acquainted with Lady Byron and her daughter … the services of a young man, the son of John Hamble … to come for a few hours daily to assist her daughter’s studies … tenderness soon sprang up between these young people. This was not observed … by Lady B and the three furies.
Greig’s account now lapses into a brief phase of considerable legibility, possibly because he didn’t want there to be any danger of him not being able to read his own writing when he read this particular part of his account back to himself subsequently. After some illegible material about the friendship continuing to develop, Greig goes on to say how Ada:
managed to place in the young man’s hands a scrap of paper appointing an assignation at midnight in one of the outhouses. The assignation took place and Ada informed me that matters went as far as they possibly could without connection being completed. After this Ada’s feelings towards the young man naturally became stronger and more uncontrollable. At length the mother’s eyes were opened and the young man’s visits were discontinued. Driven to madness by disappointment and indignation at the conduct of the furies … [Illegible: Greig seems to be writing something about Lady Byron, but it is not clear] Ada fled from her mother’s house to the arms of her lover who was residing at no great distance with his relatives.
This passage in Greig’s document is the only surviving evidence of Ada’s sex life prior to her marriage. We can rely on it as evidence because there is no doubt that Ada did make a confidant of Greig:
Ada told me many anecdotes of her early days but I omitted to take them down in their entirety at the time and have forgotten most of these. However, I recollect that …
But here he becomes illegible again. Our own encounter with the Greig’s short biography of Ada is not much less frustrating than Ada’s encounter with her lover must have been for both of them.
As far as Lady Byron was concerned, the sooner Ada was married off, the better.
One gets the impression that Ada had a rough time in many respects in her relationship with her mother, and not only in connection with a young man who might have been pursuing her. For example, Ada, when she was a younger girl, once made the mistake of remarking what a beautiful voice she had.
‘Ada,’ Lady Byron responded sharply, ‘do you think you gave yourself your voice?’
There can be little doubt that Lady Byron knew exactly what to do to rein in her daughter and collect her from her hugely embarrassed friends. A guilt trip is a modern term, but, if a letter from Ada to her mother on March 8, 1833, is anything to go by, that was unmistakably her lot.
Fordhook
My dear Mama. I must now thank you for your last very kind letter. Though deeply impressed by the ceremony I attended on Sunday for the first & I hope not the last time, certainly I had no inclination to weep. – The more I see & the more I think & reflect, the more convinced do I feel that no person can ever be happy who has not deep religious feeling and does not let that feeling be his guide in all the circumstances of life. Had I entertained my present sentiments two years ago, I should have been now a very different person from what I am. But I am yet quite in the spring of life & hardly indeed full blown. I trust I may be spared many years longer, & may thus be allowed the opportunity of showing that I am an altered person.
Ada includes in the same letter a barb to Lady Byron about the lapse of a mother’s power to oblige her daughter.
If you said to me, ‘do not open the window in my room,’ I am bound to obey you whether I be 5 or 50. But if you said to me, ‘don’t open your room window. I don’t choose you should have your window open,’ I consider your only claim to my obedience to be that given by law, and that you have no natural right to expect it after childhood. The one case concerns you & your comfort, the other concerns me only and cannot affect or signify to you. Do you see the line of distinction that I draw? I have given the most familiar possible illustration, because I wish to be as clear as possible. Till 21, the law gives you a power of enforcing obedience on all points; but at that time I consider your power and your claim to cease on all such points as concern me alone, though I conceive your claim to my attention, and consideration of your convenience and comfort, rather to increase than diminish with years …
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