Ada's Algorithm

  We are told that a dozen years earlier, Doyce has perfected ‘an invention (involving a very curious secret process) of great importance to his country and his fellow creatures.’ But instead of winning praise from officialdom for what he has done, from the moment Doyce approaches the Government for help with funding, he ‘ceases to be an innocent citizen, and becomes a culprit. He is treated, from that instant, as a man who has done some infernal action.’

  Dickens’s imagination got by perfectly well, most of the time, without needing to use real people as the basis for all the characters he created. The similarities between Doyce and Babbage, though, are too striking to be ignored. The description of Doyce’s appearance is a good fit to Babbage to begin with (‘… a practical looking man, whose hair had turned grey, and in whose face and forehead there were deep lines of cogitation’) and even the timing of when Doyce ‘perfected’ his invention (‘a dozen years ago’) which after all is an entirely free choice on Dickens’s part, seems to have been chosen very deliberately to allude to Babbage’s work. As for the account of the invention itself, its ‘great importance to his country and his fellow creatures’ also seems to point directly at Babbage, as does the ironic account of Doyce’s plight voiced by another character, Mr Meagles:

  ‘… [H]e has been ingenious, and he has been trying to turn his ingenuity to his country’s service. That makes him a public offender, sir.’

  And what Doyce says about how inventors such as he are treated at home compared with abroad could easily have been words taken down pretty well verbatim from some lament Babbage might, in a self-pitying mood, have made at one of Dickens’s numerous dinner parties at Devonshire Terrace, over the turtle soup, the turbot or the roast lamb.

  ‘Yes. No doubt I am disappointed. Hurt? Yes. No doubt I am hurt. That’s only natural. But what I mean, when I say that people who put themselves in the same position, are mostly used in the same way – ’

  ‘In England,’ said Mr Meagles.

  ‘Oh! of course I mean in England. When they take their inventions into foreign countries, that’s quite different. And that’s the reason why so many go there.’

  On the day when Dickens visited Ada to read to her, there is no record of Lady Byron being present. However, William was there on this occasion. Ada had asked Dickens to come to read to her the death scene from Dombey and Son, in which little Paul Dombey dies. As William wrote, Ada ‘expressed a strong wish to see Ch. Dickens – the passage about the death of the boy in his Dombey on the shores of the ocean had struck her & she wished him to know her sympathy and I wrote to him to hasten if he would see her alive.’

  The passage where little Paul Dombey dies was, by 1852, already one of the most famous in Victorian literature. The novel is about how the cold, unfeeling, haughty businessman Mr Dombey – the embodiment of a nineteenth-century man, flush with steely arrogance and pride – is slowly softened by the reviving, refreshing fountain of feminine life represented by his daughter Florence, who grows to be a woman and is older than her brother Paul. In this scene, she is ‘Floy.’ In many ways, the novel echoes many aspects of Ada’s life: masculinity stubbornly repressing the female spirit and refusing to see anything in women except ornamental charm and intellectual inferiority.

  Little Paul is about five years old when he dies:

  Sister and brother wound their arms around each other, and the golden light came streaming in, and fell upon them, locked together.

  ‘How fast the river runs, between its green banks and the rushes, Floy! But it’s very near the sea. I hear the waves! They always said so!’

  Presently he told her the motion of the boat upon the stream was lulling him to rest. How green the banks were now, how bright the flowers growing on them, and how tall the rushes! Now the boat was out at sea, but gliding smoothly on. And now there was a shore before him. Who stood on the bank –!

  He put his hands together, as he had been used to do at his prayers. He did not remove his arms to do it; but they saw him fold them so, behind her neck.

  ‘Mama is like you, Floy. I know her by the face! But tell them that the print upon the stairs at school is not divine enough. The light about the head is shining on me as I go!’

  The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old fashion – Death!

  Oh thank GOD, all who see it, for that older fashion yet, of Immortality! And look upon us, angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean!

  Ada and Dickens evidently discussed life more generally at this meeting. William wrote that Ada spoke to him afterwards of ‘the comfort she had derived from the concurrence of their ideas about the future.’ As George Orwell pointed out in his long essay on Dickens, Dickens seems almost unaware of the future and it seems more likely that ‘future’ is William’s euphemistic term for what they really discussed – her death.

  Ada, at that moment, had only a few months to live. The appalling diagnosis, which one of her doctors, Dr West, gave, has survived:

  Lady Lovelace’s disease is cancer; the final symptoms of which appeared between eighteen months and two years ago; consisting not in pain but in frequent and alarmingly profuse haemorrhages. In December the haemorrhages ceased but pain began to be experienced, which has increased in frequency and intensity up to the present time; and coupled with which there has been an advance of the disease: an extension of it to other organs. A condition such as hers is thus a very grievous one; there is not merely a local disorder increasing daily in a situation in which surgical dexterity can effect nothing, but the blood itself is poisoned, and our remedies cannot reach to that. The duty of the physician is thus a very sad one; as the highest success which he can hope to attain is to secure not recovery, but euthanasia.

  The medical science of Ada’s day could do nothing to cure her and unfortunately nothing much to alleviate her suffering either.

  The hypodermic needle had not yet been invented, so the only way to administer opiates was orally, which made them much less effective than if they were directly introduced into the bloodstream.

  On Wednesday, August 25, 1852, just six days after visiting Ada and reading to her, Dickens wrote a letter to his friend the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts about the visit.

  The night before I left town (last Saturday) I had a note from Lord Lovelace to tell me that Lady Lovelace was dying, and that the death of the child in Dombey had been so much in her thoughts and had soothed her so, that she wished to see me once more if I could be found. I went, and sat alone with her for some time. It was very solemn and sad, but her fortitude was quite surprising; and her Conviction that all the agony she has suffered (which has been very great) had some good design in the goodness of God, impressed me very much.

  By ‘last Saturday’ Dickens may be referring to Saturday, August 14, rather than the Saturday (August 21) preceding his writing of this letter. There is a slight implication in what Dickens says that he went to read to Ada on the same day when Lord Lovelace told him how ill Ada was, but in fact he did not read to her until five days later, on Thursday. The fact that Dickens evidently did not know Ada was dying suggests that perhaps they had not seen much of each other for a while.

  On August 30, her pulse stopped for ten minutes, but still she did not die. Her agony increased, and she was incoherent where she had previously been resigned, and feared she would be buried alive. Previously an agnostic, she now begged her religious mother and William to pray for her. Lady Byron wrote it was ‘the best moment she has had,’ it appears that she meant ‘that her father had sent her this disease, & doomed her to an early death! She spoke of it as cruel, & unjust of God to allow it.’

  On September 1, at Lady Byron’s prompting, Ada confessed her sins (whatever they were) to William. He walk
ed out of the room devastated and remained silent about what was revealed to him until his death. William’s handwriting was normally like a pigeon’s scrawl and yet, in very clear handwriting he wrote that if he was absent it should be known that ‘Lady Byron is the mistress of my house.’ And Ada was no longer, ‘Our Bird.’

  Before she died on November 27, 1852, Ada still had much pain to suffer, which was only partly relieved by the laudanum and by a new drug, chloroform.

  Lady Byron and William were at her bedside when she died – he was allowed in at this stage.

  A week after her death, Ada was laid to rest next to her father in the small church in the village of Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire, close to Lord Byron’s ancestral home of Newstead Abbey. The father and daughter – whose lives were almost exactly the same length – now lie side by side in a tomb that has been permanently sealed since 1929.

  A detailed report of Ada’s funeral appeared in the Nottinghamshire Guardian on Wednesday, December 8, 1852. The report reads as follows:

  FUNERAL OF THE COUNTESS OF LOVELACE

  On Friday last the remains of the Hon. Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the … remains of the deceased countess were conveyed privately from Great Cumberland Place, London, where she expired, to the George the Fourth Hotel, Nottingham. The body lay in state during Thursday night, and was visited by a large number of the inhabitants of the town.

  The ceremony had a very pleasing and solemn effect. The room was draped with black cloth, and the floor, where the body lay, was covered with the same. The coffin was placed in the centre, bearing a silk velvet cushion with her ladyship’s coronet resting at the foot, and the Lovelace arms richly emblazoned at the head.

  Twelve wax tapers were kept burning, six on either side of the coffin. On the following morning the body was conveyed by the old road to Hucknall Torkard. The mourners consisting of the Earl of Lovelace, Lord Byron, the Hon. Locke King, Sir G. Crauford, Mr King, Dr Lushington [Lady Byron’s lawyer], Col. Wildman, Woronzow Greig, Esq. [Ada’s lawyer], and Mr C. Noel were brought by special train to Hucknall. The funeral cortege was formed in the station yard in the following order:

  Two mutes on horseback.

  Her Ladyship’s Coronet, upon a crimson velvet cushion, covered with black crape, borne by an attendant upon a richly caparisoned and plumed horse.

  THE HEARSE, drawn by four horses, profusely caparisoned with feathers, velvet equipments and velvet hammer-cloths, on which were large coronets, decorated also with plumes of ostrich feathers, and emblazoned with the hatchments of the deceased.

  MOURNING COACH, drawn by four horses, containing the Earl of Lovelace, Lord Byron, the Honorable Locke King, and Sir G. Crauford.

  MOURNING COACH, drawn by four horses, containing – King, Esq., Dr Lushington, and Woronsow [sic] Greig, Esq.

  MOURNING COACH, drawn by four horses, containing Colonel Wildman, Mr C. Noel, and Sir George Wilkinson.

  The private carriage of Colonel Wildman, of Newstead Abbey.

  The procession then moved forward at a funeral pace through the village to the parish church, at the entrance to which it was received by the Rev. Curtis Jackson, perpetual curate, who, reading the funeral service, preceded the procession into the church, where the body was placed in the centre aisle.

  The coffin was covered with rich puce-coloured silk velvet, with silver furniture, bearing a massive raised shield, upon which were chased the emblazonments and family arms, surmounted with the Countess’s coronet, in silver. The plate bore the following inscription:

  The Right Honorable Augusta Ada, wife of

  WILLIAM, EARL OF LOVELACE, and only daughter of GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON

  Born December 10th, 1815,

  Died November 27th, 1852.

  Aged 37 years. [This is an error: when she died Ada was only thirty-six, like her father.]

  The service was proceeded with amidst the deepest silence and the most reverential attention of the numerous spectators, many of whom were much affected. The body was then placed in the vault adjoining the remains of the father. In the vault there are now seventeen coffins. The first that attracts the eye is the coffin of the late poet-lord, placed on that of his mother, at the head of which stands the urn which contains his heart and brains, as brought from Greece. On the top of the coffin is his coronet, very much decayed and reduced. The coffin is in a very good state of preservation. Close to it is now laid the body of the late Countess, having the coronet placed in the centre of the coffin. Many of the coffins are now very much decayed, nothing being left but the leaden shells, some of which very plainly show their antiquity.

  After giving some biographical information about Ada, the report goes on to give a description of the location of the village and of the words on the tablet to Byron’s memory. The report concludes:

  After the funeral the numerous spectators of the ceremony were gratified with an inspection of the vault. Some of them, as we heard them afterwards boasting, succeeded in bearing away precious relics from the poet’s shrine, in the shape of small fragments of scarlet cloth, torn from his mouldering coffin.

  Lady Byron did not attend the funeral of her daughter, perhaps preferring a cure to reports that she had forgiven her deceased husband. Nor did Babbage attend the funeral. Probably he felt that as he and Lady Byron had fallen out, it would not have been appropriate for him to attend. If he had heard rumours that Lady Byron might not attend, he doubtless did not want to meet her and cause a scene in case the rumours were untrue. Besides, the Ada he had known and maybe loved was gone now.

  18

  Redemption

  Lady Byron would live on until her death from breast cancer on May 16, 1860, at the age of sixty-seven. She had told the story of Byron’s incestuous relationship to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published an account of this nine years later. The information Lady Byron had given Beecher Stowe went some way to demolishing Lord Byron’s acclaim as a romantic figure in Britain, though his reputation survived more intact in Continental Europe.

  While it’s tempting to cast Lady Byron’s role in Ada Lovelace’s life as a maternal equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse’s Aunt Agatha, in matters other than her daughter she was mellower. She remained steadfast in her support of the abolition of slavery and, as part of a very small band of women, went to the second World Conference against Slavery in London in 1843 despite having been expressly excluded from attending. She also appears to have been loved by her spa friends. Sophia de Morgan, the daughter of her tutor and wife of Augustus de Morgan wrote warmly:

  Lady Byron was always shy with strangers, especially with those who excited her veneration. This shyness gave her an appearance of coldness, but she and my husband soon knew each other’s worth, and she never lost an opportunity of showing her regard for him and trust in his judgment. He was rather surprised to find in one commonly reputed to be hard and austere, qualities of quite an opposite nature. She was impulsive and affectionate almost to a fault, but the expression of her feelings was often checked by the habitual state of repression in which the circumstances of her life had placed her.

  And Babbage?

  He continued to labour on his dream of cogwheel computers for almost another twenty years, but his heart had gone out of the enterprise, and it never bore any fruit. He was, indeed, still working on his designs for the Analytical Engine when, after a short illness, he died on October 18, 1871, aged nearly eighty.

  William, who married again in 1865 and had another child, a son, by his second wife Jane Jenkins, lived until December 29, 1893.

  In Babbage’s last years he was plagued by headaches and the noise of urban life. He socialised little, spending much time alone in his London home, living among the ghosts of his dreams.

  A precious but tragic insight into Babbage’s forlorn later life was provided at a mathematical conference in July 1914 by Lord Moulton, a man born in 1844 who enjoyed all the privileges of his class and became a prize-winning mathematician, barrister, judge and statesma
n. Recalling a visit he had made to Babbage many years earlier, apparently in the late 1860s, Moulton painted a dismal picture of the price the gods had extracted from Babbage for having bestowed on him a vision of a computer, without granting him the tools – technological, financial and diplomatic – to make his dreams come true.

  One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever. He took me through his work rooms. In the first room I saw the parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before. I asked him about its present form.

  ‘I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my Analytical Machine, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.’

  After a few minutes’ talk we went into the next work-room, where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it.

  ‘I have never completed it,’ he said, ‘because I hit upon an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.’ Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism but I saw no trace of any working machine.

  Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, ‘It is not constructed yet, but I am working at it, and it will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have taken to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.’

  I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart. When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic scientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he had left behind him, either in papers or mechanism, was that everything was too incomplete to be capable of being put to any useful purpose.