The four Noel sons stood halfway in age between Annabella and Ada. Tom, the eldest, now aged twenty-six, was a pleasant but irresponsible young man who liked writing poems. It was Robert, a clever, Pickwickian youth of twenty-two, whom Annabella singled out to act as trustee for his younger siblings, Charles (aged twenty) and Edward (nineteen). From 1825 on, while always taking care to consult and respect their mother’s wishes, the Noel boys would become virtual extensions of Lady Byron’s own tiny family. Writing to Robert from Italy in 1827, she addressed him as ‘Caro Fratello’, but the relationship was nearer to that of mother and son. The warmth of the relationship is apparent from the fact that Robert described Annabella in 1847 as his oldest and kindest friend. It was from conscience as much as for convenience that Annabella chose the third Noel, Charles, to act as her agent and overseer at Kirkby. It was, she reasoned, only right that a male Noel, a Wentworth grandson, should be placed in charge of a vast estate that had been under Noel ownership since the sixteenth century.
Released at last from filial duty, Annabella herself fell ill. Branch Lodge was abandoned as Lady Byron travelled from one spa to the next in her fruitless search for a cure. Ada, together with Miss Briggs, Puff and an additional fine black cat (an inky kitten had been promised to Cousin George), also found herself once again on the move.
Bifrons (originally so named because of its two contrasting façades, although the old house had long since been replaced) stood just outside Canterbury, on the Dover road. All that remains today of the house that Annabella rented for the next few years is bare land and a dwindling avenue of ancient trees. It was here, while being looked after by Mary Montgomery, one of her favourites among Annabella’s friends, that Ada decided that she, like the literary father of whose fame she was now becoming dimly aware, would become a writer. Evidence that Annabella knew of her daughter’s plan and actively set out to thwart it emerges from a curious letter that has survived, tucked away within the archive of John Murray.
On 31 March 1826, Annabella, conscious that Byron’s publisher was always anxious to placate the poet’s widow, issued Murray with a clear directive. He was to publish absolutely nothing initialled ‘AB’ that might appear to have received her authority, ‘tho from the accidental delay of a letter, my consent may have been inferred by the party in question’. And what on earth, a baffled John Murray must have wondered, did Lady Byron mean to convey to him by that strangely ambiguous defence? If an ‘accidental delay’ on her part had caused the problem, why not write again? Few letter-writers were more zealous, after all, than Byron’s widow. And why did she write to him, and not to the mysterious AB? The most likely answer seems to be that Annabella shrank from explicit censorship and chose this elaborate course as the easier route to suppression. It doubtless explains why an enchanting twenty-five-page story by Ada, carefully worked over by another hand, still lies unpublished – and seemingly unknown – within the Murray papers, held at the National Library of Scotland.*
Briefly lodged during the spring of 1826 with Miss Montgomery, at Library House in Hastings, Ada had begun to look upon Lady Byron’s old friend almost as a second mother. (Among the many reasons for Mary Montgomery’s popularity with Ada were that she played the guitar, that she had a pleasingly exotic little nephew, and that she allowed Ada to sit in her dressing room and chatter, while practising her Italian with a lady who spoke the language fluently.) It was not, then, with much gratitude for her real and absent mother’s endeavours that Ada learned that a new governess was on her way. After glumly admitting that it had been ‘quite shocking’ of her to announce she did not believe in prayers, Ada resignedly accepted that this unknown educator was God’s way of punishing her.
A pleasant surprise was due. Miss Charlotte Stamp transformed young Ada’s life. Kind, thoughtful and entertaining, she was everything that a clever, inventive and ebullient little girl could have wished for. An ‘apt scholar’ at chess, a ready partner in the quadrille, a willing collaborator in Ada’s story-writing endeavours, Miss Stamp was extolled by her pupil as ‘an enchantress’ and a treasure. Twenty years later, Ada would still regard this impeccable governess as her chosen model of perfection.
Annabella also approved. Planning the most adventurous step she had taken since leaving Byron, she included Ada and Miss Stamp in the carefully picked group who were to travel with her around Europe for fifteen months.
The Napoleonic Wars had deprived Annabella herself of any chance to visit the Continent as a child. Aged thirty-five, she had still voyaged no further than Edinburgh. Understandably – for a widow whose name remained tainted by the scandal surrounding her separation from Byron – Annabella wanted to travel within a protective circle of friends. Robert Noel, a fluent linguist, acted as her interpreter during the first months of the trip before travelling alone to Lyons, where the base was laid for Robert’s future career as one of Europe’s most eminent phrenologists. (Lady Byron had reluctantly abandoned her wish to settle him in England as a clergyman.) Along with Ada and Miss Stamp, Annabella was accompanied through various stages of the 1826–7 trip by Harriet Siddons, Mary Montgomery and Louisa Chaloner, a friend from her northern youth. Ada, who respected Harriet and loved Miss Montgomery, struggled to feel equal enthusiasm for Miss Chaloner, an outspoken Yorkshirewoman who had recently told Ada that she was a plain child. Intended as a corrective to vanity, the observation had stung. ‘I do like to look well,’ Ada wistfully confessed to her mother on the day of Miss Chaloner’s comment (2 June 1826). The announcement which followed (‘I think it is well for me I am not beautiful’) fell short of true conviction. Physical appearance would become, from this time on, a regular feature of Ada’s letters.
The European tour offers poignant evidence of Lady Byron’s feelings for her late husband. In England, she had paid anonymous visits to Harrow, to the deserted house at Piccadilly Terrace and even to Newstead Abbey, where the emotional experience of standing for the first time in Byron’s own private rooms, back in 1818, had almost overwhelmed her. Arriving in Switzerland, Lady Byron arranged a sailing trip on Lake Geneva, within eyesight of the shuttered villa where her husband had spent the summer of 1816. In Genoa, the city from which Byron had set out for Greece, his final adventure, Annabella rented an elegant palace. Here, Ada’s tutor in singing and drawing was selected precisely because Signor Isola claimed to have known and felt affection for Lord Byron. When the party of travellers moved on to Turin, they took Isola along with them. Annabella declared that Ada needed to continue her drawing lessons, but Isola’s primary role was to talk with his employer about Byron, and his life in Italy.
Such nostalgic indulgence was always camouflaged by Lady Byron’s interest in a higher cause. A second sentimental visit to Switzerland during this same extensive pilgrimage was ostensibly undertaken solely in order to settle Tom Noel as a young teacher at Dr Emmanuel Fellenberg’s celebrated school.
While Tom Noel failed to fit into Hofwyl’s demanding regime, Annabella swiftly established a warm relationship with the school’s creator. A voluminous correspondence commenced, in which Dr Fellenberg’s French addresses to ‘Milady’ were matched by Annabella’s stately responses in her own tongue. Plans were swiftly laid for Tom’s younger brother, Edward, and little Hugo Montgomery to complete their schooling at Hofwyl.
It would be hard to overstate the influence of Emmanuel Fellenberg’s enlightened and progressive school upon Annabella’s future life as a reformer. Recommended to her by Harriet Siddons, herself an ardent educationalist, Hofwyl provided the model for the schools through which Annabella, in her mid-thirties, decided to provide practical knowledge and technical skills to the poor. As at Hofwyl, which she had also heard praised by Henry Brougham, she would raise her pupils up to become teachers and spreaders of learning for a class to whom it had hitherto been denied. Thrillingly ahead of the times when Annabella paid her first visit to Fellenberg’s country academy in 1826, Hofwyl showed her how to start using her great fortune for the public good. It
became the mainspring for her lifework.
Little record survives of Ada’s feelings about her travels, other than some drawings, along with anxious reports to her mother’s friends in England on the subject of Lady Byron’s failing health. Hofwyl had proved inspiring, but the tour reawakened an unforeseen storm of emotion and grief in Annabella. The near loss of Harriet Siddons to a severe attack of ‘brainfever’ seemed to be the final blow from a remorseless fate. Returning to England in the autumn of 1827, Lady Byron managed a month of supervising Ada at Bifrons (Miss Stamp had gone on holiday) before she herself altogether collapsed. The gravity of her illness is apparent from the fact that Ada, composing in February one of many worried little notes, expressed relief that her mother could now manage to scrawl in her own hand the simple words ‘much better’. Two months later, Ada admitted that there had been times when ‘I really thought . . . you could not live.’
While travel had brought Annabella to what seemed to be her deathbed, it fired her precocious 11-year-old daughter with further dreams of escape. On 3 February 1828, Ada excitedly revealed her newest project. She was teaching herself to fly.
I am going to begin my paper wings tomorrow and the more I think about it, the more I feel almost convinced that with a year or so’s experience & practise I shall be able to bring the art of flying to very great perfection. I think of writing a book of Flyology illustrated with plates . . .
The following day, having joyfully conveyed the news that Miss Doyle’s niece Fanny Smith was looking forward to flying alongside her when she next visited Bifrons, Ada set out the next phase of her plan. Once she had mastered the art of flight, she would become a ‘carrier pigeon’, an airborne messenger who would transport her mother’s letters across the skies. As an extra incentive to the recovery of her health, Lady Byron learned that her wish to become godmother to Puff’s new kitten was granted. Puff, so she learned, had become especially bold of late, hiding up the chimney, when not crunching bird bones beneath Ada’s bed.
In part, Ada was making an endearing attempt to comfort an ailing mother to whom she now frequently signed herself off as ‘Carrier Pigeon’ or even ‘Your affectionate Young Turkey’. Nevertheless, as her flying schemes grew ever more elaborate, it became clear that Ada wished her aerial aspiration to be treated seriously. Writing to Annabella at the spa of Tunbridge Wells on 2 April, she requested a scientific book about bird anatomy. A bird’s wings, as Ada explained, offered an ideal model for her own paper constructions. Five days later, Ada’s plans had taken a further leap. She was going to build a flying machine.
I have got a scheme about a . . . steamengine which, if ever I effect it, will be more wonderful than either steam packets or steam carriages, it is to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steamengine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.
Ada’s plans had begun with a wonderful fantasy of flying about in ‘the great room’ at Bifrons and astonishing her mother with her feats. Now, a disused tack room for horses at Bifrons was converted into a ‘flying room’ hung with ropes (presumably for swinging about in simulated flights). Miss Stamp’s discovery of an old saddle stand languishing in a corner led on to another bright idea. Might Ada be allowed to take up riding? Mamma had doubtless forgotten that there was the dearest little pony who was kept in the park at Bifrons: ‘very gentle . . . just a little pottering thing . . . I really think that when you come back, an arrangement might be made without any trouble or inconvenience to any one for me to ride little Shag, as I call him.’
Miss Stamp, who dryly remarked that she now featured so often in her pupil’s letters that she had best just become ‘Miss S’, decided that it was wisest to indulge her excited young pupil’s projects and boasts. (‘When you come home you shall see me ride,’ Ada swaggered to her mother. She had never yet even sat upon a horse.)
Miss Stamp was tolerant. Annabella, recovering her health, grew apprehensive. A brisk course in theorems might calm her daughter’s overexcited state. Arabella Lawrence was consulted, while William Frend and his daughter Sophia were invited to see if they could not help to restrain Miss Byron’s fancies by confining her energies to figures and logic. In vain: instead of furthering Lady Byron’s plan, Frend found himself being recast as her daughter’s pet astronomer. Lady Byron had asked for lessons in geometry. Ada requested a map of the stars. Frend surrendered. People always did, when Ada set her heart upon something. By February 1829, the elderly mathematician had become the bewitched recipient of the young girl’s confidences about her newest project. Flying had been abandoned for the creation of ‘my Planetarium’.
Overexcitement; illness; the onset of puberty; the departure of her beloved Charlotte Stamp to get married (never, sadly for Ada, to return). A combination of these things brought Ada’s year of elated dreaming to a shocking close. William Frend, writing to Lady Byron on 27 May 1829 to enquire if her daughter would be observing the course of Jupiter that June, was informed that a severe attack of measles had left Ada paralysed, semi-blind and bedridden.* It remained impossible to predict how much time might be required for her recovery.
* * *
* Annabella had agreed to Romilly’s suggestion after Augusta Leigh, in February 1816, indicated that she might personally oppose her sister-in-law’s right to keep the child. Annabella feared seeing Ada shuffled off into the Leigh household almost more than the prospect of losing her to Lord Byron.
* It says much for Byron’s underlying affection for his wife that he observed this inexplicable similarity with the keenest of pleasure. To an outsider, the description of Allegra’s features raises the intriguing possibility that she may have not been Byron’s child at all. Claire herself was dark-haired. Her daughter’s fair hair, blue eyes and high forehead were all well-observed aspects of Shelley’s delicate countenance. His paternity is not unthinkable; Claire and Shelley’s intimacy has been widely noted.
* Sarah Carr later married Annabella’s lawyer and devoted friend, Stephen Lushington. Her sister Frances (Fanny to her family) would one day become the most formidable of the three trustees of Lady Byron’s papers.
† Lady Noel went further. In 1818, she wrote to ask the Prince Regent to permit a name change for her ‘insulted and injured daughter’. Annabella was not informed and the Prince did not oblige. (JN to HRH the Prince Regent, 14 September 1818. A copy, or what may have been a draft, survives in the Lovelace Byron Papers.)
* Harriet’s own pioneering school in Scotland seemingly inspired Annabella’s lifelong interest in education, while Harriet’s personable brothers-in-law, George and Andrew Combe, introduced Lady Byron to another enduring interest: phrenology. That would-be science sought to interpret personality from the shape of a skull. George Combe, the husband of Cecilia Siddons, was its leading authority. Annabella became an ardent convert.
* ‘The Neopolitan Brothers’, completed in 1827, possibly during her time in Europe, suggests that Ada had been dipping into the ladies’ annuals which were published (in lavish editions) for the Christmas market. A gothic romance, Ada’s tale features a murder, a haunting, a vividly imagined Italian setting and unspeakable remorse. As the work of a child of eleven, it is impressive. The reviser was most likely to have been Ada’s sympathetic governess, Charlotte Stamp. (John Murray Archive, MS 43363, NLS.)
* It is unlikely that Ada’s measles was related to the paralysis. Although this has happened (most recently, in 1964), such consequences are extremely rare. At the time, a connection did seem possible. (See the appendix on Ada’s health on pp. 475–6.)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A RAINBOW’S ARC
(1829–35)
Utterly mysterious in its origins – Annabella theorised about a latent weakness of the spine – Ada Byron’s state of semi-paralysis lasted for three years. Short periods of improvement were followed by sharp relapses. By the summer of 1830, following one
of these brief respites from invalidism, 13-year-old Ada – formerly an active girl, one who had been eager to take up riding at the time of her collapse – had become chronically bedbound. Letters to her new tutor were shakily written in pencil (to avoid spattering the bedlinen with ink). Brief expeditions, when not confined to a wheelchair, were taken on crutches, with the gold-braided and wasp-waisted black jacket of a hussar that she adopted for these excursions lending a frail but resolutely cheerful Ada the look – although nobody dared to comment on it – of the dashing boy-heir for whom her father had longed. (The birth of a son, as the often surprisingly conventional Lord Byron once remarked, would have made him think twice about parting with Newstead, the ancestral home that he had profitably sold off in 1818 to Thomas Wildman.)
A dashingly Byronic young man had formally joined Ada’s larger family circle in 1826, when Henry Trevanion married Byron’s niece and god-daughter, Georgiana Leigh. Three years later, impoverished and homeless, Georgiana and Henry were generously installed at Bifrons, Annabella’s rented country home near Canterbury. Ada, meanwhile, was brought away from Bifrons to live on the fringes of London, first at Notting Hill and then, during 1830, at The Limes, a large, pretty house standing above the Thames at Mortlake. Here, close to the best physicians that London could provide, no expense was spared in Lady Byron’s attempt to cure her daughter’s baffling condition.
Annabella had first heard about Henry Trevanion, a Cornish-born youth with Byronic connections (the poet’s grandfather, best known as Admiral Byron of the Wager, had married Sophia Trevanion of Caerhays), from Augusta Leigh. On 9 December 1825, Mrs Leigh had sent Lady Byron a gushing account of Sophia’s personable 21-year-old descendant as ‘the Hero of my present fate’. Penniless – his father had disinherited him – and on the make, Henry had recently presented himself as a suitor to Georgiana, the Leighs’ eldest daughter. Augusta’s widely reported role as her brother’s heir added pound signs to the attraction of marrying a slow-witted but exceptionally docile 17-year-old.* Unfortunately for Augusta’s wish to support the marriage, her husband detested Trevanion. Together with Henry’s father, Colonel Leigh refused to grant consent.
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