The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  The Cambridge community reacted warmly; Whewell was moved to see that all the shops in town were closed on the day of her funeral.23 A huge crowd ignored the family’s plea for a private service and followed the funerary carriage to the church.24 Whewell’s niece Kate came and stayed with the bereaved widower after the funeral. He visited his other nieces and his sister-in-law, and afterwards Lord Monteagle and the Herschels. Wishing to have his last glimpse of the Alps, he traveled to Switzerland, where he suffered from the intense heat, the constant haze veiling the Alps, crowded hotels, and “the craving for the companionship of my darling.”25 When he returned to the Master’s Lodge, he was never again alone; his niece Janet came to stay with him, followed by three of Herschel’s daughters in succession.

  Nine months after Lady Affleck’s death, on January 29, 1866, when he was seventy-one years old, Whewell returned to his favorite pastime: riding.26 During most periods of his life, Whewell rode every day; after Cordelia’s death, he was back in the saddle within weeks—“it cheers and exhilarates me,” he explained at the time.27 He rode horses hard, and they often retaliated; his niece reported that he used to laugh that he had personally measured the depth of each and every ditch in the neighborhood of Cambridge—by tumbling into it.28 While participating in his first hunt, Whewell was unable to ride to the end because his horse finally just came to a standstill in the middle of a plowed field. Whewell was forced to admit to his host, Lord Fitzwilliam, “I have learned for the first time that the powers of a horse are not inexhaustible!”29

  On February 24, 1866, a Saturday, the weather was warm and springlike. Whewell decided to ride to Gog Magog, a range of low chalk hills several miles southeast of Cambridge. (The origin of the biblical name is obscure, but probably refers to the site of a terrible war, as many mutilated skeletons have been found there—the name first appears in an edict of 1574, forbidding Cambridge students to go to the hills.) He had arranged to meet a carriage carrying his niece and a small party, but owing to a delay they did not meet him until they were three miles from Cambridge. Whewell paused to speak to the party; his horse was fidgety. He tried to turn the horse to face the carriage, but the animal pulled at him, and Whewell was thrown from his saddle onto the ground. When his niece jumped down to him he murmured, “Not much harm done, my darling.” He was lifted into the carriage and brought back to the Master’s Lodge.

  The carriage stopped along the way at Dr. Paget’s house. The doctor was concerned that the brain and body had suffered severe shock, and that paralysis might ensue. The patient remained conscious. After twenty-four hours, Whewell was no longer sluggish—indeed it was hard to keep him quiet. He chattered on about the novels of “Miss Austen”—one of his favorite authors—asking Janet to read to him, which seemed to calm him. When she made a mistake he would murmur the correct word, as he knew Austen’s books so well, especially his preferred ones: Emma, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park.30 He worried about his latest article, a review of George Grote’s new edition of the works of Plato, and at one point was found at his desk, attempting to write some additions to it.31

  Soon it was clear that paralysis had indeed occurred: the whole left side of his body and his face were still “not quite right,” a friend reported to Herschel. By March 2 it appeared that Whewell had suffered some brain damage, and he began to speak indistinctly. He received Holy Communion on March 5, and on March 6 he died. His last expressed wish was to have the blinds and curtains opened, so he could look upon the sun shining over the Great Court of Trinity, where he had spent his entire adult life.32 He was buried in the chapel of Trinity College, at the feet of the statues of Bacon and Newton.

  Herschel’s friend William Selwyn had been sending him daily reports about Whewell, but Herschel was too ill to travel to Cambridge to see his friend at the end of his life.33 For the past few years Herschel had been suffering from attacks of gout and severe bronchitis—so bad that, as he complained to Babbage, he was totally “choked with Bronchitis.”34 He was often so weak that he could not walk, and was confined to a wheelchair. Herschel did, however, make the trip for the funeral service, following his dear friend’s casket to the grave. Babbage was not present. There is an unprecedented five-day gap in Herschel’s correspondence during the week of the funeral; he spent the days in Cambridge, completely overtaken with grief.35 Even when he returned to Collingswood, Herschel could not get back to work, leaving a two-week blank in his experimental notebook from March 6 to March 21.36 Among the many obituary notices that were published after Whewell’s death, Herschel’s—printed in the Transactions of the Royal Society—most pithily captured Whewell’s talents: “A more wonderful variety and amount of knowledge, in almost every department of human inquiry,” Herschel boasted, “was perhaps never in the same interval of time accumulated by any man.”37

  MARIA MITCHELL, THE first professional American woman astronomer, and professor of astronomy at Vassar College, had burst into fame as a young woman when she discovered a comet in 1847—it promptly became known as “Miss Mitchell’s comet.” Ten years later she visited the Herschels during a tour of Europe. At the end of her life she recalled that her host “was at that time sixty-six, but he looked much older, being lame and much bent in his figure.” By then, she noted, he had given up his original astronomical researches, but his “mind was full of vigor.” Paramount in her memory was Herschel’s sweet nature. “He was remarkably a gentleman; more like a woman in his instinctive perception of the wants and wishes of a guest,” Mitchell recalled. She was particularly touched when Herschel gave her a page of manuscript written by his aunt Caroline, knowing she would like to have something in the hand of another great woman astronomer.38

  During his later years Herschel’s friendship with another prominent woman, Julia Margaret Cameron, flourished. Cameron, the great-aunt of Virginia Woolf, became one of the premier photographers of the age, and would capture the image of some of the most famous Victorians: Charles Darwin; the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning; the artists John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and George Frederic Watts; the actress Ellen Terry; and Herschel. Most biographies of Cameron note that her daughter gave her a camera as a gift in 1863, when she was forty-eight years old, tracing her interest in photography to that event in later life. But the truth is rather more interesting than the legend. As early as 1841, at the very dawn of the photographic process, John Herschel sent her specimens of his photographs, and began to teach her the methods he had used to create them.39

  In her autobiographical “Annals of My Glass House,” published in 1874, Cameron called Herschel “my illustrious and revered as well as beloved friend.… He was to me as a Teacher and a High Priest. From my earliest girlhood I had loved and honoured him.… He had corresponded with me when the art was in its first infancy.”40 The two had met at the Cape of Good Hope in 1834. Eight years later the Herschels named their sixth daughter Julia, asking Cameron to be her godmother. Cameron named her youngest son Henry Herschel Cameron, and her “beloved friend” was proud to be the boy’s godfather.

  Herschel’s influence on her work went beyond the mere mechanics of the process. She frequently sent Herschel samples of her recent work, asking his opinion of them—opinions he gave freely, even when they were critical of her artistic eye.41 Cameron took a number of photographs of the Herschel family, including one showing Herschel and his daughters as Past (Isabella as Oblivion; Maria and John as Wisdom), Present (Amelia as Industry; Caroline and Francisca as Devotion), and Future (Constance as Hope; Rose and Julia as Patience), which they used for their Christmas card that year—a tradition just starting to become popular in England.42 Beginning in 1864, Cameron beseeched Herschel to sit for her for one last series of photographs.43 Years before, Cameron had shrewdly exacted the promise that he would not have his portrait taken by any others, so hers remain the only photographs we have of Herschel.44

  Herschel continued his frenetic pace of work. He
compiled several star catalogs, including a revision of his father’s double-star catalog, work that he found “fairly severe drudgery.”45 He brought out six new editions of the Outlines of Astronomy and wrote numerous articles, many of which showcased his broad interests—one, “On Musical Scales,” brought together his lifelong love of science and music. Herschel was most pleased with a series of popular articles on astronomy, physics, and geology he composed for a family magazine, Good Words. He also delivered lectures at the schoolhouse in the nearby village of Hawkhurst on subjects of interest to broad audiences, such as one on “Volcanoes and Earthquakes,” another on “The Sun,” and one “On Comets.” He collected these popular articles and lectures and others as Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects. In the lecture on the sun, Herschel happily recalled his days at the Cape of Good Hope, telling the audience, “I have seen the thermometer four inches deep in the sand in South Africa rise to 159 Fahrenheit: and I have cooked a beefsteak and boiled eggs hard by simple exposure to the sun in a box covered with a pane of window-glass, and placed in another box so covered.”46 (While his friend William Henry Fox Talbot was using similar glass-topped boxes to create images painted by the sun, Herschel was using them to cook beefsteaks!)

  Herschel also found the time to complete a project close to his heart: a translation of Homer’s Iliad in hexameter, the standard epic meter in Greek and Latin poetry, rarely used in English poetry or translations. In contrast to Alexander Pope’s looser translation in the eighteenth century, Herschel more scientifically proposed to stay true to the literal meaning of the original, going so far as to print words that were not in the Greek text in a different typeface. Whewell was enthusiastic about the project; back in 1847 he had edited a collection, English Hexameters from Schiller, Goethe, Homer, Callinus and Melager, to which both he and Herschel (and Whewell’s old friend Julius Hare) had contributed pieces. Whewell was reading and correcting the translation as Herschel worked, repeatedly assuring Herschel that it was coming along quite well.47 Herschel asked for Whewell’s help in finding a publisher, and Whewell secured a contract from Macmillan’s.48 Herschel regretted greatly that Whewell was no longer alive when the work appeared in print, only a few months after his death. In his preface Herschel lamented the loss of Whewell, and the “melancholy event” that had cut short such a “noble career” and “robbed the Science and Literature of this country of so bright an ornament.”49

  The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow praised Herschel’s effort, specifically endorsing the use of hexameter verse.50 (Longfellow had himself published a long poem in hexameter, his Evangeline, which Whewell reviewed favorably for Fraser’s Magazine.)51 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, then Britain’s poet laureate, felt differently. Tennyson had been a student at Trinity College; he came up in 1827, but left in 1831 before earning his degree. Whewell had been his tutor, and Tennyson continued to follow developments in the natural sciences, especially astronomy, for the rest of his life.52 He is known to have read Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences and his Bridgewater Treatise, Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse, Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, and the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. This very scientifically minded poet became poet laureate in 1850, when Whewell’s old friend William Wordsworth died. That same year, Tennyson published his “In Memoriam, A.H.H.,” a masterful elegy in 130 short lyrics mourning the death of his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam. The entire work shows a sustained interest in astronomical theories and images, including numerous references to the nebular hypothesis and optical refraction in the atmosphere.53 His friend, the astronomer Norman Lockyer, would later say that Tennyson’s “mind is saturated with astronomy.”54

  Tennyson was a friend of Julia Margaret Cameron, as well as her neighbor: when Cameron and her husband visited Tennyson on the Isle of Wight in 1860, they fell in love with the spot and bought a house there. Cameron showed Herschel’s partial translation to Tennyson and his wife in May of 1862.55 Two years later, before Herschel’s translation had even appeared, Tennyson published his opinion of it. In his 1864 collection, Enoch Arden, and Other Poems, Tennyson included a section titled “Experiments.” The first of the five poems in this section was Tennyson’s telling of “Boadicea”—the very tale that Whewell had spun in his Chancellor’s Prize–winning poem in 1814. (Tennyson had won the Chancellor’s Prize for a poem on a different topic before he left Cambridge.) Next follows a subsection titled “In Quantity.” Here the first piece is a poem titled “Of Translations of Homer/Hexameters and Pentameters,” and in it Tennyson lambastes the very idea of such a project:

  These lame hexameters the strong-wing’d music of Homer!

  No—but a most burlesque barbarous experiment,

  When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses in England?

  When did a frog coarser croak up on our Helicon?

  Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us,

  Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters.

  The final poem in the section is a “Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse,” clearly the style Tennyson, who usually wrote in blank verse, would prefer. Herschel complained that the poet laureate had published “rubbish.”56 Indeed, his whole point in translating Homer was to “wipe off the stigma cast on English hexameters by such people as Tennyson.”57 As Herschel surely recognized, Tennyson was signalling loudly his opinion that the scientists should leave poetry to the poets; his reply to Herschel’s Homer would be one of the final bricks in the wall that came to separate art and science.

  Herschel’s health was so bad in the final years of his life that he was stricken with bronchitis most of the time; eventually he began breathing carbolic acid fumes as a treatment.58 Although Herschel probably whipped this up in his own chemistry lab, it was a standard treatment of the time; in the nineteenth century a “Carbolic Smoke Ball” was marketed for the prevention of influenza and other ailments, and the treatment was still being recommended in a 1908 medical textbook.59 He had bouts of “hemianopsia,” or hemiopsy, during which he was afflicted with optical hallucinations, including, in one instance, floating “patches of coloured chequer-work.”60 These may have been the visual auras associated with migraines, auras that sometimes are unaccompanied by headache. He told Quetelet that he was taking “moderate” doses of “Coca de Peru” (probably in the form of one of the cocaine-based patent tonics then being marketed for a variety of physical ailments), which helped his illnesses.61 Some years earlier Herschel had suggested the use of coca leaves by balloonists to help alleviate the weakness associated with breathing the thinner air at high altitudes.62

  He was still experimenting. Pages and pages in his experimental notebooks were filled in during April and May of 1870, written in an exceedingly small hand. Herschel was mixing chemicals with abandon, indulging his lifelong love of chemistry. One mixture was described with precision as a “highly colored red salt—or, rather, ruddy orange.”63

  Herschel rarely left Collingwood after Whewell’s funeral. Although his letters testified more and more to his physical infirmities, he continued his scientific correspondence, paying closest attention to developments in photography and optics. In one of his final letters to Babbage, at the end of 1870, Herschel praised his godson, Babbage’s eldest son Benjamin Herschel, for a scientific pamphlet he had written. Herschel commiserated with his friend over the ravages of age: “Memory fails … and things rearrange themselves ‘no-how-like’ in the mind of a man just entering on his eightieth year & feeling himself getting stupider and stupider every day!”64 One of his most frequent correspondents at the end was Augustus De Morgan. When the younger man died in the spring of 1871, Herschel wrote to his widow, “Many and very distinct indications tell me that I shall not be long after him.”65 And indeed, within two months, on May 11, Herschel died, gently and peacefully, surrounded by much of his large and loving family.66

  Babbage, the only remaining member of the Philosophical Breakfast C
lub, wrote immediately to Herschel’s wife, Margaret. “You have sustained the loss of one of the earliest and most valued of the friends of my youth,” Babbage sympathized. “I greatly regret that the state of my own health which confines me almost entirely to my house puts it out of my power to pay the last tribute of respect to my departed friend by attending his remains at the grave.” Babbage could not resist one last bitter comment, recalling the opportunities his friend had enjoyed that were never open to him. “The effect of the possession of an illustrious name,” Babbage predicted, “will open for your children paths inaccessible to others less fortunately born and will doubtless lead them to arrive at eminence in whatever line their tastes may induce them to pursue.”67 Sad, envious, and slightly curmudgeonly, it would be the last letter that Babbage ever wrote.

  Herschel was buried with all pomp and ceremony at Westminster Abbey, in the Nave. As if mocking Babbage, the stone reads, “John Herschel, of William Herschel the only son by birth, in work and in fame; having explored the Heavens, he rests here near Newton.” A decade later, Charles Darwin would be laid to rest beside him.68 (In the mid-twentieth century, a plaque would be placed nearby commemorating William Herschel, who had been buried at Upton Church, near Slough: “He broke through the confines of the heavens.”) One of his obituary writers called Herschel “the Homer of science,” noting that “he was its highest poet … rousing the emotions, animating the affections, and inspiring the imagination.”69

  BABBAGE HAD RETURNED, with a flurry of activity, to his Analytical Engine in the 1850s. This time he fully intended to build it, even without government support, and he began to draw up specific plans for the individual parts of the machine. He had begun the work, perhaps, inspired by the idea of building a code-breaking machine, but by the time he commenced the work leading to its construction, his motivation came from a different source. His interest—and, he hoped, the interest of the public—had been sparked anew by the work of a father and son from Sweden.