In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

* * *

  * Had Henry Trevanion known of the arrangements restricting Mrs Leigh’s access to funds that were held in trust, he might have thought twice. Even so, Georgiana’s marriage settlement proved substantial enough for him to raise £8,332 against it in 1836.

  * ‘Those who, like myself, are animated by an ever-new succession of hopeful visions, have dangers of a different kind to contend with . . .’ Annabella wrote to Lizzie Siddons on 13 June 1834, adding revealingly that: ‘my states of depression . . . arise, not from apprehension of the future, but from regret for the past’. (HRC, bound vol.1, Byron Collection)

  * Augusta’s settlement was predicated upon the always sickly Lady Byron’s early death. None of the money could be released until that eventuality.

  † Georgiana, for reasons that remain obscure, was always a co-operative member of the trio. By telling Medora that she was not the daughter of Colonel Leigh, she seemingly intended the girl to feel less guilt about sleeping with Henry Trevanion, her own sister’s husband.

  * Flora’s father was one of Lady Byron’s closest friends and advisors. He was among the initial three trustees she later appointed to protect her personal papers from scrutiny. On his death, Mr Davison was replaced in that role by Henry Bathurst.

  * The Noel-Bakers are landowners in modern Evia.

  * Fanny Smith was the child of Selina Doyle’s handsome second brother, Charles (‘Carlo’), and an Indian begum whom he was not able to marry. Fanny had known Ada since 1828, when Miss Smith promised to practise flying with her at Bifrons. Fanny became like a second daughter to Annabella during the Fordhook years. Later, she married Edward Noel.

  † The abrupt termination of William Turner’s employment as a shorthand teacher suggests that he was Ada’s first beau, although the culprit was never named.

  * Evidence that gossip had spread appears in The New York Mirror of 1833, which told its readers that ‘Ada Byron, the sole daughter of the “noble bard”, is the most coarse and vulgar woman in England’. Small wonder that Annabella was dismayed.

  † On 27 April 1834, Ada referred to her state of mind ‘this very day last year– believing myself most noble & virtuous, [while] I was made up of deceit & selfishness’ (AAB to Mrs William King, 27 April 1834, Lovelace Byron Papers: the italics are my own).

  * On 22 July 1833, Annabella confided to Harriet Siddons that ‘Self-will has involved one to whose moral and religious welfare all my efforts have been directed, in evils of the greatest magnitude, such as must bring retribution . . .’ Reference to Mrs Leigh rather than to Ada’s recent misdemeanours is clear from the fact that she turned calmly to Ada in the next paragraph: ‘Ada is quite well. We shall move soon . . .’ It remains unclear what Augusta Leigh had done to incur Lady Byron’s wrath on this particular occasion (HRC, bound vol. 1, Byron Collection).

  * The higher the sun, the more of a rainbow’s circle do we perceive. At a certain height, where the horizon presents no cut-off, the whole circle (caused by varied wavelengths of light being refracted off raindrops) becomes visible.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MATHEMATICAL FRIENDSHIPS

  (1834–5)

  Twelve years older than Lady Byron, Mary Somerville was fifty-four when Ada first visited the damp little house beside Chelsea Hospital where the Somerville family had resided, on and off, for the past fifteen years. Here, having recently returned from a heady year of being fêted in Paris, Mrs Somerville offered her young friend a friendly home into which Ada happily settled almost as an adopted daughter. For Mary’s own two girls, Martha and Mary, the arrival of an eager disciple of mathematics offered a blessed release. Time spent in explaining propositions to Ada meant liberty for these sprightly and resolutely unmathematical young ladies to go and polish up their dance steps for a quadrille.

  Known in her teens as ‘The Rose of Jedburgh’, Mary Somerville’s still-glowing cheeks and a fondness for brightly coloured clothes (she sometimes wore an orange kimono) caused the less discerning to underrate her extraordinary mind. Ada never doubted that she had been introduced to a genius, while others sometimes found it difficult to equate Mrs Somerville’s formidable intelligence with her cheerful social manner. Encountering Mrs Somerville only at the dances which her daughters were attending, the Irish novelist Lady Morgan decided she resembled ‘one of the respectable twaddling chaperones one meets with at every ball, dressed in a snug mulberry velvet gown and a little cap with a red flower’. Maria Edgeworth was predictably more discerning. Writing to her mother on 17 January 1832, at the height of Mrs Somerville’s fame, Maria expressed admiration for her absolute lack of pretension: ‘while her head is among the stars her feet are firm upon the ground’.

  The journey to international celebrity had not been easy. Brought up in the Scottish Borders by parents who disapproved of educated women, Miss Somerville taught herself mathematics by reading Euclid under the bedclothes. Other than her brief attendance of a school, her grasp of the subject was facilitated by a sympathetic brother who gave her access both to his textbooks and his tutors. The long absences at sea of her first husband (Samuel Greig was a naval officer) enabled Mary to continue with her studies while bringing up two children.

  Widowed at twenty-seven, Mary remarried in 1812, when she was thirty-two. She found in her cousin William Somerville a devoted husband who revered his wife’s exceptional mind.* Tall, kindly and self-effacing, Dr Somerville shared in Mary’s pride when, twenty years later, the great educationalist Lord Brougham finally provided Jedburgh’s ‘Rose’ with the chance to flower into full bloom.

  That opportunity was an invitation to translate into English the recently deceased Marquis de Laplace’s five-volume Mécanique céleste, a detailed and complex analysis of the movements of the planets in the light of Newton’s gravitational theory. It’s possible that Brougham had been prompted by Laplace himself. Mary and her husband were fond of telling the story of how France’s homegrown Newton, praising the only three women clever enough to understand his writings, had identified just two: Caroline Herschel, Mrs Somerville – and, a little comically, a certain ‘Mrs Greig, of whom I know nothing’. Published by John Murray in 1831, Somerville’s translation achieved the challenging task of simplifying Laplace’s often almost impenetrable text, while adding to it in a way that arguably surpassed the original.

  The Laplace translation won Mrs Somerville the admiration of the scientific world. In 1834, the year that Ada became her protégée, the 54-year-old mathematician was about to publish a work of her own. On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences confirmed Mary Somerville as one of the most brilliant minds of her time: a mathematician who could effortlessly explain the newest ideas about astronomy, electricity, time, motion, light and even music. Nobody, with the possible exception of Somerville’s close friend Michael Faraday, had such a gift for putting difficult ideas into simple language. It was a technique that Ada would absorb and put to powerful use.

  It was not Somerville’s unabashed femininity, but the plain fact that she was not a man that caused her still to be undervalued in England. Back in 1829, she had been hailed by an admiring fellow Scot, Sir David Brewster, as ‘the most extraordinary woman in Europe, a mathematician of the very first rank’. In 1835, the year after Ada began paying regular visits to her home, Mrs Somerville joined Caroline Herschel as one of the first two women to become honorary fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society. (Women – with the exception of Queen Victoria – were not permitted full fellowship until 1945.) It was Mrs Somerville’s marble bust that greeted the gentlemen members of the Royal Society as they walked into the entrance hall of that illustrious building. The lady herself was forbidden entry.

  Mrs Somerville, when Mary Montgomery first brought Ada Byron to her home in February 1834, had been feeling wistful. Her Chelsea riverside home was damp and chilly enough to make her yearn to be settled back in the heart of London. (William Somerville had taken on a dull job at the Chelsea Hospital only after a cousin cheated the couple out of their har
d-won savings.) For Mary, Ada was not only a beguilingly eager pupil, but a breath of fresh air. Woronzow Greig, the son of Mrs Somerville’s first marriage, remembered Miss Byron as pale, plump and shy. Alone with Mrs Somerville, however, Ada became confident and demonstrative. ‘Ada was much attached to me,’ Mrs Somerville would later recall, adding with evident pride that ‘it was by my advice that she studied mathematics’.

  The claim was not precisely true. It was an anxious mother who had first steered Ada towards what was intended to be only a calming discipline; Mary Montgomery had taken the next step of finding her a superlative teacher. What nobody anticipated was that Ada would take to mathematics with such relish, displaying an eager determination to master and understand whatever she was shown. ‘She always wrote to me for an explanation,’ Mrs Somerville remembered; like Dr King, the kindly Scotswoman urged her impetuous pupil to proceed with care. By 24 March, Ada was boasting to Dr King that she had learned ‘to imagine to myself a figure in the air, and go through the construction & demonstration without any book or assistance whatsoever’. It was a typically exuberant claim from a young woman who was still working her way through the second book of Euclid.

  Ada’s enthusiasm appeared to be boundless. Returning to his orderly home on Regency Square in Brighton from an exhausting April fortnight in the company of Miss Byron and her mother at the spa town of Tunbridge Wells, poor Dr King was thankful to escape his protégée’s endless interrogations and demands. ‘You must trammel your mind . . .’ he warned, while urging her to calm herself with soothing readings from William Whewell. If Ada ignored the worthy Dr King’s advice, her excitement was understandable. By the time of her visit to Tunbridge, she had met Charles Babbage twice and been introduced to his remarkable, albeit unfinished, machine.

  The second and more significant introduction to Babbage had been brought about by Mary Montgomery. Miss Montgomery deserves more credit than she has received for the formative role she played in Ada Byron’s life. An invalid herself, she understood better than most the hunger Ada felt for all the experiences of which three semi-bedridden years had deprived her. An alert, clever and empathetic woman, Mary was on friendly terms with many of the giants of London’s leading intellectual circles. It was she who provided Ada with her entrée to the world that opened her eyes to an imaginable future.

  The word ‘scientist’ was first coined by William Whewell for his anonymous and laudatory review of Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in April 1834. The study of science was already in the air and Ada, guided by Mary Montgomery, was escorted to the lecture rooms of London at which the latest inventions and ideas were being displayed and discussed. At the Royal Institution, Ada attended the thrillingly eloquent and vivid lectures of Michael Faraday. Beneath the domed roof of the Surrey Institution at Blackfriars, she listened to talks about geology, chemistry and natural philosophy. Respectably chaperoned by the indefatigable Miss Montgomery (an 18-year-old with the notorious surname of Byron could never have gone alone), she entered the wonderful circus of scientific entertainments on the Strand that had recently been named in honour of William IV’s royal spouse (despite the fact that Queen Adelaide never passed its doors).

  Ada must have adored her visits to the Adelaide. Here, shortly after it first opened its doors in 1832, visitors could watch a Jacquard loom weaving intricate designs by the use of hole-punched cards, before admiring the acrobatic dances of Thalia, an infant prodigy, who performed beneath the floating bulk of a tethered gas balloon. Electrical displays involving Leyden jars and numerous magnets dazzled the gallery-goers with showers of fiery sparks. A central canal – broad enough for Thomas Telford to conduct experiments with his new steamboat paddles – bestowed an unexpected touch of serenity on this palace of educational delights.

  But the ever-helpful Miss Montgomery had further tricks up her sleeve. Some of the most interesting scientific discussions in London at that time took place within the drawing rooms of private houses. In the same month as Ada’s introduction to Mrs Somerville, Mary took her into the home of Roderick Murchison, where fireside debates about geology were raising questions about the divine versus the natural order of the world. (Lady Murchison’s interest in fossils had led to her husband’s identification – while walking in Wales – of an ancient and largely aquatic period of the earth’s history that Sir Roderick named the Silurian Age.) But the introduction through which Mary Montgomery made her biggest contribution to Ada’s life came a month later.

  On 19 March 1834, Miss Montgomery took Ada to dine with the Murchisons before conducting her to a house on Dorset Street, just off Manchester Square. It was here, in his private London home, that Charles Babbage held his famous Saturday soirées. While excited and doubtless intrigued (Mr Babbage’s parties were celebrated for the extraordinary range of guests that they attracted), Ada had no idea that she was about to encounter a mind that was every bit as enquiring, lively and playfully capricious as her own.

  Born into wealth, Charles Babbage was one year older than Ada’s mother. Like Ada, he had suffered from a long period of illness during his youth. Like her again, he had early discovered himself to be both inventive and ambitious. Ada had wanted to use a steam-powered Pegasus for her proposed flights about the world. Babbage had attempted to walk on water (using home-made paddleboards to cross Devon’s River Dart). Further signs that Babbage would follow no conventionally charted path emerged during university. At Cambridge, he was punished for defending a supposedly blasphemous thesis. Forbidden to sit a formal exam, the brilliant young mathematician graduated without honours.

  Aged twenty-one when he married in 1812 and settled in Marylebone, Babbage suffered bitter disappointment when he was refused a mathematics chair at Edinburgh in 1819 (it went instead to a Scotsman, William Wallace). Instead, Babbage spent part of the following year in helping his friend John Herschel to found the Royal Astronomical Society. It was while working with Herschel on various mathematical tables that Babbage dreamed up the idea of a steam-powered computing machine. If his contraption worked, it would simplify the process – and reduce the chances of error – in a core aspect of what was needed for the nation’s military and industrial success.

  This was where Babbage’s travails as an inventor had begun. By 1823, the British government had been persuaded to invest in the ingenious new calculating engine.* Ten years later, an official fireproof room had been expensively constructed within government-owned property to house a machine that remained incomplete. ‘The logarithmetical Frankenstein’ was one journalist’s sneering put-down for the creator of a half-finished monster.

  The construction of Babbage’s ambitious device had offered the inventor welcome distraction during a bleak period in his life. In 1827, Babbage lost a son, a daughter, his father and his wife. Leaving his surviving children in the care of his mother, the widower set off for Europe, to discuss his project with such eminent figures as Laplace and von Humboldt. Interest on the Continent proved encouragingly strong. Back home, however, the British government was in no hurry to invest further sums in a machine that still remained incomplete. The chances of its being finished did not improve when Babbage’s master craftsman, Joseph Clement, responded to criticisms for overspending by withdrawing the expensive precision tools which he, as a professional craftsman, owned and without which the miraculous Difference Engine could not be built. Babbage’s pleas for more backing from the government were rejected. (It didn’t help that Babbage was a witty but lethally tactless man: Thomas Carlyle did not forgive the inventor’s pointed vote of thanks to him for treating his fellow dinner guests to an interminable lecture on the merits of silence.)

  By 1833, matters had stalled in a deadly stalemate. A government representative pointed out that two British battleships could have been built for the £15,000 that had already been loaned to Mr Babbage. The embittered inventor retorted that he had invested more than twice that amount himself, subsidising an invention which – unlike James Watt
’s steam engine – had been developed without any prototype, as the production of a single brilliant mind: his own.

  The plain fact was that by the beginning of 1834, Babbage’s glorious machine remained unbuilt. Only a tiny portion of his projected invention was on display for potential investors to inspect on the night (19 March 1834) when Ada paid a second visit to the inventor’s Dorset Street home.

  Beauty, rank or intellect were declared by the attractive second wife of one scientist (Andrew Crosse) to be the sole criteria for joining Mr Babbage’s Saturday soirées. Wealth – enough to fund an unbuilt machine – was an asset that could buy anyone a ticket of entrance. Ada, bright, aristocratic and appealingly youthful, was the only child of a woman widely known to be immensely rich.

  Eager to please, Babbage began by introducing one arresting young woman to another: the expressive-eyed and attitude-striking ‘Silver Lady’, who balanced an animated bird upon her outstretched fingers, was a gleaming automaton that he had rescued from destruction and painstakingly repaired for display as an amusing curiosity. Did Miss Byron wish to guess which turban the Lady would wear for the next soirée? (Babbage strove to amuse his favoured female guests by making small changes in the Lady’s attire.) But Ada – to the inventor’s astonishment – showed no interest in her host’s pretty automaton. All she cared about was the neatly clicking combination of wheels and cogs tucked away within Mr Babbage’s back-room sanctum.

  Ada’s evident preference for a piece of machinery to a pretty automaton seemed remarkable to those who witnessed her March visit to Babbage’s home. Sophia Frend later described how, ‘young as she was’, Ada had immediately grasped the concept of its operation. More importantly, with an intuitive appreciation of what was to come, she instantly saw ‘the great beauty of the invention’.