Four months after writing his love letter to Ada, Dr Kay married a Yorkshire heiress and changed his name to Kay-Shuttleworth. Might the news that her admirer was courting Janet Shuttleworth have given rise to Ada’s boasts of wild behaviour, and have caused her subsequent collapse? (She suffered a breakdown at the end of the year 1841.) Probably not. Listing the candidates for a colony of her favourite people the following July, Ada teasingly informed her husband that she would include both Dr Kay and himself (‘tho really what use an old Crow would be to me I know not’.) In February 1843, Dr Kay was one of a very select group invited to Ockham, in order to celebrate Hester King’s marriage to Sir George Crauford. (It was a marriage which Ada had been most anxious to bring about.)
A far more likely cause than Dr Kay’s marriage for the despair which Ada confessed to Woronzow Greig on 31 December 1841 (in the same letter that boasted of her ‘harum-scarum’ ways and indifference to convention) was the continuing sense that Medora Leigh had usurped her right to feel that she was Lord Byron’s unique heir. Writing to a concerned Greig from her London home, Ada begged the newly married barrister not to worry about her: ‘I am doing very well indeed: – as well as possible. And I have no notion whatever of either taking myself out of the world, or being a useless invalid in it. So be easy.’ Nevertheless, and to the considerable dismay of the Crow, the Hen and the Greigs (Woronzow’s wife, Agnes, had swiftly joined the inner circle of Ada’s friends), Lady Lovelace suddenly announced her need for a change. Maths was dropped for six months in favour of plays, operas – and new plans for a singing career.
In the spring of 1842, Ada’s letters sound as though she has suddenly vaulted into our times. Her energy appears to be boundless. She writes of taking her meals on the run at a ‘nice respectable shop in Oxford Street’ where breakfast, dinner and supper can be obtained, ‘at a moment’s notice’. She loans the elegant Lovelace carriage to carry ‘that nice old gentleman the Hen’ off to visit the 7th Lord Byron’s home in Belgravia, before dashing off herself for a two-hour chat about science with Charles Wheatstone. Between times, she attends a lecture, inspects another railway, takes a singing lesson and then finds the energy to spend ‘4 or 5 hours at least’ playing her harp. And this, in the spring and early summer of 1842, was just an average day.
Throughout this hectic period of her life, as indicated by frequent references to physical pain and consultations with a new father figure, the kindly eyed royal obstetrician, Charles Locock, Ada was also combating serious problems with her health.
Singing was the antidote to illness, or so Lady Lovelace chose to persuade herself. (She told Wheatstone in 1842 that she thought mathematics made her feel worse.) In singing, she had found her true vocation. The courteous words of teachers (one said she had ‘a wonderful facility’, while another artfully suggested that such genius ‘must not be lost to my friends and Society’) were all that Ada needed to convince herself of her rare talent. William, who like the Hen and the Greigs, longed for his wife to return to mathematics, heard instead about the ways Ada now planned to dazzle their guests at Ockham. She would sing arias from the newly fashionable Norma to an audience gathered in their library. How proud he would be of her! Everybody admired her innate sense of theatre:
. . . and the more scope I have in prospect for it, the more settled, calm & happy, does my mind become . . . Think how merrily & joyously evenings would go: how delightful when we have company, to be able to improve them a little, as I know I could through song . . . For there is a mysterious kind of Mesmerism in such expressions as I am likely to be able to give, which ennobles the hearts of those who listen . . .
The quotation is taken from the torrent of exuberant letters in which Ada swamped a distant William – busy with his building projects at Ashley Combe – during her short-lived love affair with the stage. With each fresh epistle, Ada’s horizon expanded. Singing was just the start: poetry might well be her true destiny. ‘And if so, it will be poetry of a unique kind – far more philosophical & higher in its nature than aught the world has perhaps yet seen.’
One thing was clear. Ada Lovelace would not be stopped. Her ‘undevelopped [sic] power’ must find expression, she wrote in the same letter. It could do so only by the provision of ‘very powerful, & continually-acting stimulants’, and for these, money was required. Vague about the stimulants, she was clear about her urgent need of funds. ‘Money,’ Ada informed her husband, ‘is the rub.’ Threats followed: ‘it will be the very Devils’ own work, if the wants of this case cannot be supplied’. But then she became alarmed that William might ask her mother for the cash that he himself lacked. Not a word to the Hen, she instructed him: all plans would be discussed with her by ‘myself only at present’.
Ada was always a little apprehensive of her mother’s uncompromising personality. Fortunately for her, Lady Byron was far too distracted by her protégée’s erratic behaviour in the summer of 1842 to focus on that of her daughter.
Nothing could have been more calculated to provoke Elizabeth Medora Leigh, now viewing herself as Ada’s co-heir and social equal, than to see Byron’s more brilliant child free, at liberty to enjoy a life of adventurous independence of the kind that she herself – now imprisoned within a sedate mansion situated on the fringes of the quiet English village of Esher – now craved. In April, a disillusioned Anna Jameson predicted troubles to come. In May, following Augusta’s unexpected relinquishing of the coveted financial deed and Annabella’s prudent decision to place it in the care of her own solicitors, Medora erupted. Annabella, the object of her fury, was forced to admit that she had never – not even from Lord Byron at his wildest – seen the like of Medora’s rage. Fleeing from Moore Place and its screechingly aggressive inhabitant, Annabella took refuge with the sympathetic George Byrons in London, at their home on Eaton Place. There, having regained her composure, Annabella drew up a list of observations on her niece and sealed them up in an envelope she temptingly inscribed: ‘Not to be opened without my leave.’
It has naturally been opened long since. What the document reveals is that, even at this late stage, Annabella was trying to mitigate her protégée’s behaviour. Medora’s anger had been pure drama, not deeply felt. Her obsession with money had by now become unavoidably apparent, but it was not the poor young woman’s fault. All could be blamed on the way Medora’s character had been shaped by her dissolute and neglectful mother. Nevertheless, mindful of her past promise to Byron, Annabella added a memo to herself. While declining to name her reasons, she noted that she must try to protect ‘the mother’ by some future arrangement. Relations between the two sisters-in-law had seemingly reached their nadir when Lady Byron could not bring herself to identify by name Augusta Leigh.
Family issues of a happier nature had provided Ada with a welcome break from trying to soothe the tantrums of an importunate and increasingly temperamental sister. Visiting Cambridge in the high summer of 1842 (Ada wanted to be on hand for the birth of Charlotte King’s first child, while her husband completed a Cambridge degree in divinity), Lady Lovelace discovered that a new and promising romance was budding. Ada, who looked upon Hester as the true sister of her heart, was determined to help.
Lord Lovelace doted on his younger sisters. He had been perturbed when Charlotte married a penniless seminarian. Sir George Crauford was a vastly more eligible candidate. An old friend of Demetrius Calliphronas, Sir George was a large, shy baronet with an enormous head and a heart to match it. Recently returned from years in India and possessed of a splendid new mansion (Burgh Hall in Lincolnshire), Sir George, having fallen deeply in love with Hester King, planned to install the impoverished Calliphronases in a wing at Burgh and to allow Hester, until such time as he could marry her, to live with them there. Sir George’s one wish, so Ada reported to William from Cambridge in early July, was to make the King sisters happy and comfortable, ‘& indeed to give them every luxury almost’. There was just one problem: William Lovelace’s morbid horror of obesity.* Sir George’
s girth was comparable, even in the devoted Hester’s view, to that of a wine cask.
Ada’s attempt to circumnavigate the problem of Sir George’s massive proportions was endearing. Not having yet met the baronet, she described him to Lovelace as allegedly ‘very handsome and attractive’. As to size, Hester had said that her suitor was really ‘not at all too big, or what exceeds the proportions of a fine well-made man’. Goodness evidently shone out of the dear man and – although bashful in company – Sir George was reported to have plenty to say, when aroused in ‘particular’ conversation. Really, Ada pleaded, no man could be better suited to their dear Hester, or more likely to produce the happiness that she so richly deserved.
Ada’s commendations won through. Plans were made for a wedding to take place at Ockham in February 1843. (Locke King and his wife Louisa risked maternal wrath to attend the ceremony. William’s mother, furious at what she perceived as Hester’s selfish desertion, maintained her usual unforgiving distance.) Writing to Ada, whom he had still not met, back on 3 November 1842, Sir George thanked his unknown advocate for the ‘so strangely so surprisingly kind’ way in which she had represented and welcomed him into her branch of Hester’s family. Her affectionate message of congratulation, so he told a gratified Ada, had given him more pleasure than any other letter he had received. It was a kindness which was never forgotten, as the grateful Crauford would demonstrate in his fond attentions in later years to all three of Ada’s children.*
Lady Byron had been equally delighted by the news of Hester’s suitor, signifying her approval by providing both a trousseau and a gift of £300 to a young woman whose tender affection for Ada’s children had long since won their grandmother’s own heart. Concern for Hester’s welfare offered a welcome distraction from the unpleasant memory of how easily she had again exposed herself to Medora’s manipulations.
Medora had lost favour with her aunt after her tantrums at Moore Place. Seeking to regain her old ascendancy, she took the only route that never failed. On 19 July 1842, having fuelled herself with alcohol, Medora concocted the most ignoble letter she ever addressed to ‘Dearest Pip’. The subject, once again, was Augusta Leigh.
It was by chance that Medora, while lodging at the Lovelaces’ home in St James’s Square, had happened to catch a passing glimpse of her own mother. (Augusta had been visiting another resident in the square, her cousin the Duke of Leeds.) Mrs Leigh had not weathered well. Nevertheless, she is unlikely to have represented the nightmarish portrait conjured up for Lady Byron’s delectation by an inebriated correspondent. ‘I have drunk quantities of wine since,’ Medora admitted before launching forth:
God forgive her. Oh how horrible she looked – so wicked – so hyena-like – that I could have loved her so . . . Had death passed over me the chill – the horror – could not have been so great. Pity & forgive me if I involuntarily pain, I do not mean – but I do suffer . . .
Reverting to more practical details and suddenly recalling that she was meant to be preparing to go back to France in less than a week, Medora added as a (characteristically ungrammatical) afterthought that ‘Ada and me will consult about road.’
By July 1842, Lady Byron was perfectly aware that Medora was an inveterate liar (one against whom she had already resolved to protect Augusta Leigh from future financial pressure). Nevertheless, Medora’s awful account was nodded through as no more than the truth. ‘I could not read of that meeting without great pain,’ Annabella responded (forgetting that no actual encounter had been described), ‘and yet I believe it best that you should see what it is.’
It was not one of Lady Byron’s finest moments.
To Ada, the news that Medora, paid off with a small allowance from Lady Byron, was to be settled in a remote French village with her daughter and servants, came as an unqualified relief. Writing to her mother on 23 July, the day of Medora’s departure, Ada thankfully noted the arrival of a warm west wind as ‘the very thing’ to speed their intrusive relative on her way.
Ada Lovelace’s relief was understandable. At the end of her own patience after a series of difficult interviews with Medora (undertaken at Lady Byron’s request), she made no effort to hide her scorn. Lady Byron heard how Medora had insulted both her kind patron and Anna Jameson before announcing her intention of getting the money (of which she had been so unjustly deprived) by ‘throwing herself down the throat of the first man she could get hold of to marry’.
The language of Ada’s paraphrasing of Medora’s threat revealed her own contempt. Acting with just a touch of malice, Lady Lovelace had apparently offered to arrange a marriage to her own French dentist, adding that Medora could think herself lucky if the gentleman agreed to such a match. At this point, Miss Leigh completely lost her temper.* ‘And then came all sorts of vituperations; some so really ridiculous, that one could scarcely feel otherwise than inclined to laugh.’
Writing to William at approximately the same time, Ada was more candid still. The whole Medora business had been both miserable and infuriating, she told her husband. But what saddened her most was to see the hurt that had been caused, both to her mother and to loquacious, well-meaning Anna Jameson. ‘I cannot bear to think of it, & the folly of so many people.’
By the end of July 1842, Medora – modestly subsidised by her aunt and supposedly under the close supervision of the Beaurepaires – was gone. Annabella, although disillusioned, grieved at the loss of a niece who had become close as a daughter, one in whom she had seen a vivid glimpse of the irresistible, volatile husband she could never forget. Ada, freed from a disturbing and exhausting presence, reverted to her good-humoured self again. While sending teasing thanks two days later for her mother’s generosity – Annabella had just funded the expensive purchase of an Ockham stud of horses – she offered sympathy for a loss that she knew her mother felt more deeply than she cared to admit. It was sad that ‘a nice stingy Old Hen, (especially about horses . . .)’ should be feeling bereft. ‘I am afraid you are lonely this evening. I wish I were with you.’ To William, Ada sent her promise to please him by a change of lifestyle. For the rest of the year, his wife planned to stay quietly at home in the country. ‘I know you would prefer such a state of things . . . dear Mate.’
Ada kept her word. Throughout the August of 1842 and on into the autumn, she retreated to the now partly habitable splendour of Ashley Combe. There, dwelling within her husband’s Gothicised riff on a medieval castle, its lancet windows looking across Porlock’s broad and silvery bay, Ada played her harp and resumed her mathematical studies. Writing to Augustus De Morgan at the end of August, she told him that she had been working hard, and with good results.
All that mattered was to find the right balance.
Writing to Woronzow Greig on 16 December 1842, in answer to one of his annual and always searching letters about her projects, Ada chided Mrs Somerville’s sober son for treating her ambitions as mere whims. Slyly, Greig had compared her to Madame de Staël’s Corinne, a woman possessed of exceptional imagination, sensibility and – like her creator – an immense ego. And how many worlds did their very own Corinne plan to conquer, he had enquired?
Greig’s reference touched a raw nerve. Tartly, Ada responded that she did not care for de Staël’s loquacious heroine and her Werther-like dramas of the heart. For herself, she aspired only to reconcile her desire to excel in music (she thought now both of singing and of composing) with what might still prove to be ‘my ultimate vocation: namely, Science and Mathematics’.
Brave words. And yet, Mr Greig and his wife must have shuddered when they read what followed:
Time must show. To say the truth, I have less ambition than I had. And what I really care most about is now perhaps to establish in my mind those principles & habits that will fit me best for the next state. There is in my nervous system such utter want of all ballast & steadiness, that I cannot regard my life or powers other than precarious . . . there are the seeds of destruction, within me. This I know.
Ada Lovelace�
�s egocentricity – the words ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘myself’ appeared twenty-seven times in a not especially lengthy letter – bore out Greig’s reference to Corinne. Here was the ego written on a de Staël-like scale. And with cause. Aged just twenty-eight, Ada was a young woman who lived under the constant threat of a total breakdown in her health. The projects she described were always overshadowed by the intimations of her own frailty. How could Byron’s brilliant, ambitious daughter not obsess about her own mortality as she remembered the cruel shortness of her father’s own life span. Ada was twenty-eight. Byron had died at thirty-six. Time was running out.
Ada had chosen to be a little reticent with Woronzow Greig. Writing an undated letter to Lord Lovelace from St James’s Square sometime during the final weeks of 1842, she began with generalities. She was taking the affianced Hester off to the theatre to hear Adelaide Kemble sing. Her interest was now confined entirely to matters that were either musical or scientific. And then, as if to tease her husband, for ‘I have nothing very particular to tell you’, Ada released the information that an admiring Crow and a devoted Hen had been patiently hoping to hear:
Wheatstone has been with me a long while today, & has taken my translation away with him, after reading it over with me. I hope to receive the proofs of it for corrections, by & bye as I trust [Richard] Taylor will not reject it. I am now translating a beautiful Italian scientific paper.
It is not known what the ‘beautiful’ Italian paper was, but the translation that Charles Wheatstone had carried off to submit for future publication – considerable revisions still lay ahead – was the first account to be published in English – from French – of Charles Babbage’s magnificent, and still unbuilt, Analytical Engine. And it was Ada – wild, unpredictable, brilliant Ada – who was the translator.
In Byron's Wake Page 27