Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  My heart leapt, and swiftly I descended the stairs and met him. “Good afternoon, Mr. Babbage,” I greeted him, smiling, although my hopes dimmed slightly at the sight of his furrowed brow. “How pleasant it is to see you.”

  I invited him to sit, and requested tea, and for a few minutes we chatted a bit guardedly about our children and mutual friends. Mr. Babbage was the first to broach the contentious subject that had divided us. “I understand your reasons for refusing to withdraw the Memoir, and I respect them,” he said, “although I confess I do not agree.”

  “I respect your disagreement,” I said, managing a smile.

  “As to your conditions for our continued collaboration—” He shook his head and frowned, and my heart plummeted. “I cannot possibly agree to them. You are my interpreter, Lady Lovelace, not my master. The Analytical Engine is my masterpiece, my magnum opus. I could not possibly place it entirely under your control—or anyone else’s, for that matter.”

  My heart thudded, and for a moment I could scarcely breathe. “I understand,” I said, my voice quiet but steady.

  “If you would, however, consider withdrawing your conditions . . .” His voice trailed off, and he raised his eyebrows in a question.

  For the briefest of moments, I was tempted. Then I remembered the great many times Mr. Babbage had compromised his own best interests at the very moment they seemed poised on the verge of fulfillment. How could I plunge back into that morass of aggravation, bewilderment, and frustration? I could not bear to devote years of my life to work that he seemed perversely determined to ruin, again and again and again.

  “I regret with my whole heart that I cannot,” I told him.

  He tried to smile, but grimaced instead. “I understand. I had expected as much.” He inhaled deeply and gazed off to his right, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Well. So be it. I do hope, however, that we shall remain friends.”

  “I should be devastated if we did not,” I replied, impassioned.

  After that, there was nothing more to say. Mr. Babbage rose, thanked me for receiving him, and departed, leaving me to wonder sadly when we would meet again.

  Thankfully, he did not oblige me to wait and worry long. In the first week of September, he sent me a cheerful note accepting my invitation to visit us at Ashley Combe, an invitation I had assumed he had long since disregarded. Eagerly I replied, and a few notes flew back and forth between us as we tried to fix a date, a task that Mr. Babbage’s busy schedule and numerous obligations made very difficult.

  Eventually Mr. Babbage determined that if he waited until he was free, he would never visit at all. “My Dear Lady Lovelace,” he wrote on 9 September, “I find it quite in vain to wait until I have leisure, so I have resolved that I will leave all other things undone and set out for Ashley, taking with me papers enough to enable me to forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans—everything, in short, but the Enchantress of Numbers.”

  Enchantress of Numbers, I thought, warmed by the endearment. If he could think of me as such, perhaps there was hope for our future collaboration after all.

  Soon thereafter, in mid-September, my translation and notes were published in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs under the title “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.” Even now I am gratified to recall how warmly my Memoir was initially received by the mathematic and scientific community. My friends were impressed with my work and showered me in congratulations and praise. Mr. De Morgan wrote to declare it very fine work and to express his great pride in my accomplishment. From Italy, Mary Somerville sent an even more wonderful letter of congratulations, praising me so warmly that tears came to my eyes, and assuring me that she had no doubt this was only the first triumph of what was sure to be a long and illustrious career. My mother sent me a lovely letter of congratulations along with a basket of beautiful flowers and vegetables from the Fordhook gardens. William was exceedingly proud of me, and even the children understood, in their fashion, that their mother had done something extraordinary.

  I was thrilled and grateful, but my joy was tarnished by my diminished hopes that the Analytical Engine, which I had introduced to the world with such poetic insight and scientific understanding, would ever be constructed.

  Within a few weeks, Mr. Babbage’s critique of the government was published anonymously in the Philosophical Magazine, another journal edited by Mr. Taylor and Mr. Francis. It attracted almost no notice whatsoever.

  I had sent my first scientific child out into the world, and nothing remained but to see how it would flourish. “This engagement has been in some respects arduous and troublesome,” I had written modestly to Robert Noel in early August, “and it will probably bring me in but little return of reputation or fame (which were indeed no part of my motive when I undertook it): for there is more of a quiet patient labour and industry in it, than of brilliancy or attractiveness. I have plenty of imagination and eloquence for when the right time shall come. Meanwhile I wish to build upon strong foundations of logic, industry, and real study and training. But I am glad to have got launched, in however humble and dry a form.”

  It should come as no surprise that despite the modest expectations I expressed in that letter, I fervently hoped that great things would swiftly follow the publication of my Great Work. William knew this, as did my mother, Mary Somerville, Hester, and Woronzow. We all waited, brimming over with anticipation for the public acclaim and accolades that would set me upon the mathematical and scientific career that had been my heart’s desire for so many years.

  I waited, and hoped, to no avail.

  Although my work had met with interest and approval in the immediate aftermath of its publication, curiosity quickly arose regarding the identity of its author, and before long it came out that A.A.L. was in fact Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace. As soon as it became well-known that the Memoir had been written by a woman, its perceived value as a scientific work precipitously declined. If a woman had written it, these men of science concluded, it could not be as important as they had first believed. The reasoning could not be as sound if it had come from a female mind, the subject not as significant if it had been entrusted to feminine hands.

  The acclaim, modest to begin with, quickly faded to a whisper, and then fell silent.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  What Deep Wounds Ever Closed Without a Scar?

  1844–1850

  The years passed as all years do, in happiness and heartbreak, sunlight and shadow.

  Mr. Babbage and I remained friends—very good friends—but he never completely forgave me for siding with the publishers against him, as he saw it. Even after I humbled myself and went before him, offering to be simply the high priestess of his Analytical Engine, and to serve my apprenticeship faithfully before I fancied myself worthy to venture a step higher, he kept me at a distance. Eventually there came a time when I knew no more about his plans for his engines than any other acquaintance who attended his soirées. Considering that I remained only second to himself in understanding the Analytical Engine, and in some respects I knew it better, the pain this exclusion caused me was so acute it was almost as if I were mourning a death.

  I believe this profound sense of loss contributed to a sudden, precipitous decline in my health. I was unwell even before Mr. Babbage broke with me, the exhaustion and strain of writing having weakened me over the summer, but suddenly I became afflicted with frightening seizures, difficulty breathing, and strange sensations about the eyes and head. Dr. Locock prescribed exercise and laudanum, until I was taking at least a few drops every day. His treatments brought me some respite from my sufferings, although they never cured whatever ailment it was that caused them. My mother mistrusted laudanum and urged me to try bleedings and a rest cure at Brighton instead, but laudanum offered me euphoria, while leeches and cuppings merely exhausted me.

  Mercifu
lly, I was bedridden for only a short time, but my convalescence under Dr. Locock’s care stretched on for years. In this time, having concluded that there was nothing left to improve at Ockham Park, William moved our family to East Horsley Park, a lovely two-story residence about four miles to the south. It was designed by Sir Charles Barry, the renowned architect who had built the new Palace of Westminster, but William was determined to improve upon his work. We had scarcely settled in when William resolved that we should have a new residence in London as well, so we moved from Saint James’s Square to a temporary residence at Grosvenor Place, and then to another at Great Cumberland Street, until Mr. Babbage helped us find a suitable residence at 6 Great Cumberland Place, several blocks from Marble Arch and Hyde Park. Fortunately, William thought Ashley Combe had not yet reached perfection, or he might have decided to part with that beloved estate too. I doubt very much that he could ever be content to reside anywhere that was not constantly under construction.

  The relentless packing and unpacking and shifting about afforded me little time for work or study, so my mother offered to take responsibility for the children’s education so that I could devote myself to a profession. At first I demurred, not only because I would miss my children, for all their naughtiness, but also because I could not settle on any particular vocation. The interest I felt in one subject or another was a faint glimmer compared to the bright fiery sun of the Analytical Engine, and so I flitted from one branch of mathematics or science to another, like a hapless, distractible fairy. My mother pointed out that if I did not have to worry about the children, I would be better able to discern what profession most appealed to me, and so with William’s blessing, I finally consented. Ralph was young enough to remain at home with a governess, but Annabella was sent to my mother at Esher, and Byron was entrusted to the care of Dr. and Mrs. King in Brighton. Annabella did not want to live with her grandmother and she passionately disliked her new governess, but eventually she resigned herself to her circumstances. As for Byron, he found Dr. King’s perpetual sermonizing annoying to the extreme, and since William felt the same way, he soon entrusted Byron to my mother’s cousin Charles Noel, who managed her Leicestershire estates at Peckleton.

  With the children sorted, I had no more excuses not to devote myself to a profession, but neither that nor my improving health was what finally compelled me to rediscover my passion for mathematics and science.

  I had remained a faithful protégée of Mrs. Somerville even after she and her husband had moved to Italy, and I continued to correspond with her and follow her work with great admiration. By that time, her marvelous book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences had gone through numerous editions, and in each one she included new information and discoveries that had surfaced since the previous version. In the sixth edition, she noted that her tables providing measurements of the motion of the planet Uranus were already “defective,” probably because the planet had been discovered too recently for accurate measurements to have been taken. Or, she mused, the apparent discrepancies could be the result of “disturbances from some unseen planet revolving about the sun beyond the present boundaries of our system. If, after a lapse of years, the tables formed from a combination of numerous observations should be still inadequate to represent the motions of Uranus, the discrepancies may reveal the existence, nay, even the mass and orbit, of a body placed forever beyond the sphere of vision.”

  A few years later, inspired by Mrs. Somerville’s remark, the English astronomer John Adams searched the heavens for that hypothetical planet beyond Uranus that could be affecting its orbit—and discovered Neptune.

  Mrs. Somerville confided to me that she was grateful that Mr. Adams had proven her hypothesis, but she regretted that the discovery was not her own. “If I had possessed originality or genius, I might have found the new planet myself,” she wrote.

  I was so astonished that I immediately replied to insist that I knew of no one who possessed more of both qualities than herself, but in her next letter, she firmly yet sadly disagreed. “I am conscious that I have never made a discovery myself, that I have no originality,” she wrote. “I have perseverance and intelligence, but no genius.” Later, she added that she suspected that this “spark from heaven is not granted to our sex. Whether higher powers may be allotted to us in another existence God knows, but original genius—in science at least—is hopeless in this world.”

  Those words of defeat and resignation, coming from the woman I admired more than any other, dismayed me beyond measure. If she believed she had no genius, no originality, then what hope was there for the rest of us? What hope was there for me?

  I agonized over her conclusion and ultimately formed one of my own: I could not agree with her. She possessed true genius, even if she was too modest to recognize it. She was a woman. Therefore, God did not deny the essential spark of genius to our sex.

  I resolved then that with my own work I would prove it.

  Mathematics, calculating engines, and music all held their attractions for me, but the one that proved the most irresistible was a new science—no, not Flyology—but something I called a calculus of the nervous system. I was fascinated by the mysterious means by which thoughts emerged from the brain, and sensations from the nerves, and I wondered if this could be expressed in a mathematical model. I hoped, and in fact anticipated, that I could one day understand cerebral phenomena so well that I could put them into mathematical equations, laws for the mutual actions of the molecules of the brain. I saw no reason why mathematicians could not comprehend cerebral matter as easily as they did stellar and planetary matters and movements, if we inspected it from the proper perspective. The question of how to conduct the practical experiments required to get the exact phenomena I wished to examine provided an obstacle, but I happily embraced the challenge.

  Even as I delved into this new calculus of the nervous system, another more seductive diversion enticed my attention away from my studies. I had always loved horses, and at certain occasions in my youth I had tasted the excitement of racing, but in these years gambling became an absolute passion with me. At first it was a simple pleasure, and then a guilty one, and then I tried to turn it into a subject for scientific study. If it had been possible to derive a mathematical formula to successfully predict the outcome of the Doncaster races, I would have earned riches beyond my wildest imaginings, but horses are capricious forces of nature, not dice or cards. Eventually my gambling became a dangerous habit, one I tried unsuccessfully to conceal from William and my mother as I backed the wrong horses again and again and tumbled deeper into debt. My pittance of pin money could not even begin to pay off my losses, so I borrowed from my mother, claiming that I needed the funds for books and fine gowns for court. She grew suspicious, but that was not enough to deter me, because although I knew I would not be able to deceive her much longer, I always expected to recoup all of my losses in the next race.

  My inevitable confession was deferred by other concerns that plagued my mother in those years. My half sister (or cousin) Medora did not disappear quietly after she collected Marie from the spinster sisters and set sail for France with her daughter, her deed, her French maid, and her maid’s husband. Instead, although she had hurled invective at my mother at their last meeting, she continued to write and appeal for money. On one occasion, she brazenly compelled poor little Marie, then nine years old, to write on her behalf, piteously describing how ill and impoverished her mama had become, and how she longed to hear from her former advocate. My mother sent a little money in response to each request, and finally one remarkably generous payment of one thousand francs with the understanding that it would be the very last, but not even that was enough for Medora. She and her entourage continued to live well beyond their means, traipsing from one luxurious hotel to another, one step ahead of their creditors, convincing the hoteliers that her aunt, the wealthy widow of Lord Byron, would cover their expenses. Before long my mother would be obliged to p
ay the bills and to instruct the hoteliers not to extend any more credit.

  Eventually legal action loomed. I was obliged to go to the French embassy to sort out the tangled web of lies and deceptions, and the same lawyers who had negotiated my parents’ Separation negotiated a settlement. The unscrupulous French maid and her husband were paid off and sent packing, little Marie was placed in a convent in Saint-Germain to be educated, and Medora, alone, settled into a pension in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Her letters abruptly halted, and it was only much later that we learned what had become of her. Apparently solitude and simplicity had compelled her to change her life, for she took a job working at la pension, where she met one of the boarders, a soldier named Jean-Louis Taillefer. When his term of service was complete, they married, she bore him a son, he adopted Marie, and they settled on a farm in southern France.

  A year and a day after her marriage, Medora died, some said of cholera, others of smallpox. To the brief will she had written on her deathbed, she had added, “I also declare here that I forgive my mother and all those who have so cruelly persecuted me, as I hope myself to be forgiven.”

  I could only assume that she included me and my mother in her list of persecutors. Even so, I felt bittersweet relief that she had redeemed herself in the end, and genuine sorrow that she had not lived to enjoy her newfound happiness.

  Around that time another death struck our family a far more devastating blow, one that grieved me so much that even now I cannot think of it without pausing to catch my breath and to blink away tears.

  My sister-in-law Hester, who had always been so good and kind to me, had moved with her darling husband, Charles, to Italy for his health. There she gave birth to a son, but her time with her baby boy was all too short. She died soon afterward, leaving us bereft and heartbroken. My poor daughter, Annabella, was distraught from grief, for she had particularly adored her aunt Hester.