Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  I managed to stammer out a coherent reply when Mr. Murray introduced us and Mrs. Somerville addressed me, and I’m sure I said something polite when I was introduced to the gentleman standing by her side, who turned out to be Woronzow Greig, the eldest son of her first marriage. For a fleeting moment I considered asking him if he knew Mr. Charles Murray Knight, but I realized just in time that Mr. Knight had probably lied about their acquaintance as he had lied about everything else, and I did not want to admit to knowing such an awful person.

  Mrs. Somerville invited us to sit, and her manner was so natural and gracious that I soon felt at ease. I inquired about her forthcoming book, and she seemed charmed by my eagerness to read it. “I’ve worked on the manuscript so long—focusing the subjects, honing the prose so that the writing is as clear and yet as informative as possible—that I confess there were times I wondered whether I would ever be sufficiently satisfied with the book to publish it,” she said, her voice a compelling alto. “Now here I am, preparing to send it out into the world for its judgment—with Mr. Murray’s help, of course.”

  He bowed and seated himself in the other armchair. “Miss Byron shares your passion for mathematics and science.”

  “Indeed?” Mrs. Somerville’s eyebrows rose. “Do you regard them as a pleasant pastime, Miss Byron, or do you hope to make a career of them?”

  “The latter,” I replied fervently, “although I know many consider it a peculiar interest for a young lady.”

  Mrs. Somerville exchanged an amused look with her son. “Oh, Miss Byron, we pay no mind to those sort of people.”

  “Mathematics in particular fascinates me, inspires me,” I said. “It has done so for as long as I can remember. I would love to have a career like yours, and to make astonishing discoveries that we cannot yet imagine, and to have my name enshrined in memory with yours, Newton’s, Euclid’s—”

  “You put my name in very illustrious company, and I’m not quite certain it belongs there. It is fame you seek?”

  “Not at all. I’ve had a taste of fame and I don’t care for it. I want to discover something, to illuminate something previously unknown, not for my sake, but to contribute to the advancement of science, to the sum of human knowledge. But as to fame—” I took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “If I cannot escape it, then I want it to rise from my own achievements, not my father’s.”

  The torrent of words came to an abrupt end. Abashed, I studied my hands in my lap, heat rising in my cheeks. I had never confessed this secret desire to anyone, not even Dr. King, and I was under strict orders to tell him everything.

  “It is an admirable goal, to wish to contribute to the advancement of science,” said Mrs. Somerville kindly. “It is not, however, so often achieved as wished for, even in this age of wonders, when new discoveries and advancements seem to spring up overnight.” She leaned forward, smiling warmly. “I admire you, Miss Byron, for your resolve, but do take care to enjoy the processes of investigation and experimentation as much as you do the discovery. I assure you, you will devote years to toil and only moments to shouting, ‘Eureka!’”

  I smiled, my heart full, joyful tears threatening. She admired me. She did not dismiss my longing for a career like her own as arrogance or folly. This was more encouragement than I had ever received from any of my tutors, who saw my studies only as a means to rein in my unbridled imagination.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Somerville,” I said, glowing with hope and gratitude. “I won’t forget.”

  When Mr. Murray prompted us, we returned to my original question about her new book. As the title indicated, Mrs. Somerville believed that the different branches of natural science were not so disparate after all, but rather rose from the same fundamental wellspring of knowledge. “I intend for my book to demonstrate the astonishing tendency of modern scientific discoveries to simplify the laws of nature, and to unite these detached branches by certain general principles,” she said. “Understanding that all sciences are essentially one rather than marking them off into distinct realms that share borders but no territory will, I think, increase our comprehension of them all in ways that we cannot yet imagine.”

  I nodded. “One cannot understand the branches if one does not first know that they are part of the same tree.”

  “Exactly so,” she said, exchanging an approving glance with Mr. Murray.

  “Intuitively I accept that the sciences are connected,” I said, “but how are they connected? At the root, I assume, to extend our metaphor, but how do we observe this in practice? Or—can’t we?”

  “Indeed we can,” said Mrs. Somerville. “It’s not even very difficult. Simply choose one of the branches and trace it back to where it sprang from a limb, and follow the limb back to the trunk. There they all meet.” I must have looked perplexed, because she smiled slightly and added, “I intend to make this process easier for my own readers by including in subsequent editions new data and discoveries that have emerged since the previous edition.”

  “And I expect there to be many editions,” said Mr. Murray, and with genuine humility, Mrs. Somerville thanked him.

  “I do hope you and Lady Byron will call on me at my home in Chelsea,” she told me when we were obliged to part. “It’s a rare pleasure to discuss mathematics with ladies who find the subject as fascinating as I do myself.”

  I thanked her profusely and promised we would call on her soon.

  The following week—my mother thought it impolite to descend upon her sooner, though I had begged to—we visited Mrs. Somerville at the residence she shared with her husband at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, a splendid army pensioners’ home established by Charles II and designed by the renowned architect Sir Christopher Wren. Her husband, Dr. William Somerville, was a physician there, and in time I learned that he was as kind, sympathetic, and generous as his wife. He encouraged Mrs. Somerville to pursue science and mathematics, editing her manuscripts, introducing her to prominent scientists he met through his medical and military connections, and obtaining books for her from the Royal Society, of which he was a member but from which she, as a woman, was excluded despite her accomplishments.

  Mrs. Somerville welcomed us warmly into the home she shared with her husband, their two daughters, and often, if one included frequent visits, with Woronzow Greig, the eldest and only surviving child of her first marriage. The residence was simply but elegantly furnished, suggesting excellent taste, modest wealth, and a disinclination for excess, a true marriage of military order and womanly comfort. My private fears that my mother would decide that she liked Mrs. Somerville no better than Mr. Babbage were soon put to rest, for they soon discovered that they had much in common and became fast friends.

  After that, my mother never objected when I asked if I might call on Mrs. Somerville, for she rightly concluded that our new friend would be a good influence, both for her understanding of mathematics and for her manner. She was in all things an excellent woman, the very model of serenity, decorum, and restraint, and I would do well to emulate her.

  If my mother only knew how eager I was to do precisely that, she might have alerted Dr. King that I was in danger of developing a new enthusiasm. How grateful I was, and still am today, that the wise, kindhearted Mrs. Somerville took me under her wing. She showed the greatest patience when I eagerly peppered her with questions about mathematics and astronomy, her favorite fields of study, as well as more sensitive topics, such as how to navigate the complicated world of London society, how to become a lady mathematician when there were so few of us, and how to get along better with my mother.

  Recently my mother and I had entered one of our intermittent contentious phases, and unfortunately, her brief absence from London did not seem to be relieving the tension. A few days before, she had returned home to Fordhook because the new boarding school for poor boys she was setting up in Ealing Grove had reached a critical juncture. As always, founding a new school required the
greatest portion of her attention, and when the doors opened it would require a great deal more of her money, too, for she had promised to pay all expenses for the first year of operation, estimated to be about one thousand pounds.

  Education took her away from me, and education was the point of our most recent disagreement, namely, my growing dissatisfaction with the quality of my mathematics instruction. For all Dr. King’s wisdom regarding medicine and morality, he was a physician, not a mathematician, and the difference was beginning to show. Recently, after I had asked him to clarify certain abstruse mathematical concepts, he had confessed to me that he did not grasp them well enough to explain them to me. “I regret that as a student at Cambridge, I rarely read any book that had not been assigned by my tutors,” he admitted, “and this particular subject was never a part of my curriculum.”

  Before my mother left London, I had tried to convince her that I needed a more qualified mathematics tutor, and our argument continued through the post after she reached Fordhook. “Dr. King is an excellent tutor,” my mother had written in reply to my most recent impassioned letter begging her to find someone else. “You need his moral guidance, and you make me suspicious when you try to cast it off.”

  Never once, not in person or through the post, had I suggested “casting off” Dr. King or his guidance. I did not demand that we abandon our long walks and moral lectures, even though they had become infrequent since I had come to London. I still intended to correspond with him regularly and to transcribe his moral precepts into the book my mother had given me. All I wanted, and all that I had specifically requested, was a new tutor in mathematics, preferably an actual mathematician. Back and forth letters flew between the increasingly frustrated daughter and the implacable, intractable mother, and soon I could no longer tell if my mother truly did not understand what I was asking for or if she was only pretending to misunderstand me out of sheer obstinance.

  One afternoon, I called on Mrs. Somerville while still fuming from a letter that had arrived from my mother earlier that morning. “It’s so difficult to make any progress when I cannot receive proper instruction,” I fretted as Mrs. Somerville poured tea and offered me a fairy cake. “The program that sufficed when I was a fourteen-year-old girl languishing in a sickbed is simply not adequate now.”

  “You can always bring your mathematical questions to me,” she replied mildly. “I’m sure your mother will help you find a more qualified tutor as soon as possible. In the meantime, never take what she has done for you for granted. She has always, unfailingly, encouraged you to learn. That is more than most girls will ever have.”

  “There should be schools for girls as there are for boys,” I grumbled.

  “There are some, but you have enjoyed private tutors at home, which many would argue is preferable to being sent away to be educated.” Mrs. Somerville sighed softly. “I for one did not enjoy my year at school.”

  “A single year?”

  “One utterly wretched year too many.” Her voice took on a slight edge, and the strangeness of it riveted me. “When I was nine years old, I was sent to Miss Primrose’s Boarding School in Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, southeast across the Firth of Forth from my home in Burntisland. A few days after I arrived, in an effort to correct my posture, although there was nothing whatsoever wrong with my spine, I was ordered to wear stiff stays with a steel busk in front over my petticoat. Over my dress, there were steel bands that drew my shoulders back until my shoulder blades touched. Then a steel rod with a half circle shaped to fit under my chin was fastened to the steel busk in my stays, to hold my head in a suitably elevated position. In this constrained state I and nearly all of the younger girls were expected to study and otherwise carry on.”

  “How dreadful,” I exclaimed. “Thank goodness it was only for a year—but what a long year it must have been.”

  “The longest of my life,” she said. “When I left, I felt like a wild animal escaped from a cage. My next foray in formal schooling came when I was thirteen, and it was a holiday in comparison. My mother had taken an apartment in Edinburgh for the winter, and she sent me to a writing school there. I learned to write a fair hand and studied the rudiments of mathematics. I learned to love reading there too, and it is well that I did, because I was essentially my own tutor after that. Back home in Burntisland, I studied French, and I taught myself some Latin and Greek. Of course, I was also obliged to master sewing, cooking, painting, and playing the pianoforte, the usual assortment of feminine accomplishments.” She fell silent for a moment, lost in thought. “There was one person who approved of my intellectual interests, an uncle, a clergyman and an historian. He read Virgil with me, and taught me Latin, and always let me borrow books from his library.”

  “Was it your uncle who taught you mathematics?”

  “No, not he. I suppose you could say that my drawing teacher introduced me to mathematics, but he certainly did not intend to.” Mrs. Somerville smiled, amused by the memory. “We used to receive a monthly magazine at home, full of short stories, illustrations of ladies’ gowns, riddles, and puzzles—you know the sort. One day I was leafing through an issue when I came upon an expression which at first glance I assumed was a simple arithmetic problem. When I examined it more carefully, however, I discovered something very curious, strange lines and symbols and x’s and y’s. I asked my younger brother’s tutor what it meant, and I was told that it was an example of a kind of arithmetic called algebra. I was fascinated, but I could discover nothing on the subject in our family library.”

  “There was no one else you could ask?”

  “No one,” said Mrs. Somerville, but then she amended, “There was no one I thought I could ask. I suppose I could have pressed Henry’s tutor for more information, but my parents would not have approved of my troubling him. Be that as it may, one day sometime later, as I was waiting for my drawing lesson to begin, I overheard my teacher talking to two ladies who had just finished a lesson, encouraging them to study Euclid in order to learn about perspective. He said that Euclid’s Elements was essential not only for understanding perspective but also astronomy and all mechanical sciences.”

  “He’s not wrong.”

  “Indeed not,” replied Mrs. Somerville. “I memorized the author and title, and the next time I saw Henry’s tutor, I begged him to help me acquire a copy of Euclid’s Elements. He was a kind young man, and my longing must have moved him, for he secretly brought me an old school edition of the Euclid as well as Bonnycastle’s Algebra.”

  “Why secretly?” I asked.

  “Because I was only a girl.” Her expression turned wistful. “My father firmly believed that a bit of reading, writing, and figuring was all that I would ever need, and he would never permit more, even if it did not interfere with my lessons in sewing, cooking, and the rest. He and my mother both worried that my health would suffer if I spent long hours poring over books, because at the time, it was believed that the strain of abstract thought would injure the tender female frame.”

  “How dreadful,” I murmured, feeling exceedingly sorry for the young woman she had been. “But evidently you must have persuaded your parents to let you study.”

  “On the contrary, I never did. When my father discovered me reading Euclid, he forbade it, and when I persisted, studying in my bedchamber late at night, bothering no one, my parents removed all the candles so that I could no longer see my books.” Her lips curved in a small, satisfied smile. “I found a way around this too. I memorized my texts during the day, reading surreptitiously between more ladylike pursuits, and I solved the equations in my head during the night.”

  My heart went out to the stubborn, clever little girl she had been, and I marveled at her diligence and resolve. I had always been encouraged to study and learn, and no one in my family had ever insisted that certain subjects were better suited for boys than for girls. I felt a sudden rush of gratitude for my mother, and a stab of shame that
I had not understood how far she surpassed other parents in this regard.

  “So you see, Miss Byron,” said Mrs. Somerville, as if she could read my thoughts, “as displeased as you sometimes may be with your education and the qualifications of your tutors, compared to other young women, you have been indulged. That is not to say that you should not try to find the best instruction you can, because you should, but never take for granted your mother’s encouragement and generosity. Where would you be without them?”

  Without mathematics and science? In an asylum, I thought bleakly, utterly mad, clawing the walls and keening—but I craved Mrs. Somerville’s good opinion too much to speak my secret fear aloud.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Quest of Hidden Knowledge

  May–October 1834

  We were a study in contrasts, Mrs. Somerville and I, she with her steady calm and quiet confidence, I with my youthful exuberance, excitability, and anxieties. I’m sure I annoyed her sometimes when I disrupted the peaceful serenity of her home with my exhausting curiosity, but she never turned me away. As the summer passed, we became good friends, in the way of a mentor and a disciple. Her friendship, like Mr. Babbage’s, led me into a vast new world so full of possibility and promise that it took my breath away. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I quite worshipped her.

  Mrs. Somerville was too modest and selfless to talk about herself at great length, preferring to discuss scientific theories and mathematical concepts, especially her acquaintances’ ongoing investigations and recent discoveries. Even so, as spring blossoms gave way to summer warmth, I learned how the intelligent young girl forbidden by her parents to study had gone on to become the greatest female mathematician and astronomer of our time—my words, not hers, for I have never heard her boast.