In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

  It was while her daughter was still bedridden that Annabella decided to introduce Ada to her father’s poems. A first copy of every new poem and play her husband produced had been provided to Lady Byron by John Murray (at her own request) every year since 1816. The works she chose to read aloud to the poet’s own child upon this momentous occasion were strangely chosen. ‘Fare Thee Well’ was understandable, as were the romantic lines about Greece which Lady Byron selected from The Giaour. But why would Annabella have singled out ‘The Satire’, Byron’s vicious demolition of their old family friend, Mrs Clermont, for the ears of his ailing and sensitive daughter?

  Ada’s response was disappointing. To Annabella (who loved to write verse herself), all the glory of her late husband lay within his work. To Ada, while she expressed polite enthusiasm for The Giaour, Byron’s enchantment derived entirely from his legend. The father she already admired was the glowing hero of the ‘hidden’ portrait (that shrouded image behind its alluringly mysterious green curtain): an image of which only her mother seemed to imagine that an inquisitive and intelligent girl of fourteen might remain unaware.

  Lord Byron was much in Annabella’s thoughts in 1830. Thomas Moore’s newly published Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: with Notices of his Life had done no favours to Byron’s widow. But what distressed Annabella most was Moore’s assumption (it was based upon his subject’s own notoriously volatile letters) that the Byron couple’s separation had been arranged and controlled by Annabella’s parents. Lady Byron’s dignified response was bound – with the consent of John Murray, Moore’s publisher – into the second edition of Moore’s book. Her ‘Remarks’ included a letter from Stephen Lushington, in which the now-eminent lawyer stated that it had been Lady Byron’s own account, not that of her parents, which had led him to advise her against a marital reconciliation.

  What hovered, unspoken, behind the careful phrases in a letter from Lushington which Annabella had solicited and personally revised, was the question of what it had been, precisely, that Lady Byron had divulged to him. Annabella would never publicly accuse her sister-in-law of incest. She must have been aware, nevertheless, that by including Lushington’s letter within the ‘Remarks’, she was giving new life to a half-forgotten but deliciously scandalous tale.

  Towards the memory of Byron himself, Annabella remained supportive and loyal. On 2 August 1831, she revealed to Robert Noel her plans to send his younger brother Edward out to Greece. The connection was never explicitly stated, but it is clear that, by purchasing from its Turkish owner a 15,000-acre estate on Euboea (modern Evia), where Edward and a German friend intended to set up a school on the Hofwyl model, Lady Byron was following what she believed would have been her late husband’s wishes. Byron would have applauded the establishing of a family connection to Greece (one which survives until this day).*

  ‘The vagrant is located at last. I have bought Mr Duval’s house,’ Annabella announced to Harriet Siddons on 29 August 1831. Duval’s home was Fordhook, a gentrified and bay-windowed farmhouse in which the novelist Henry Fielding had once lived. Situated amidst flat fields to the east of Ealing Common, Fordhook was conveniently close to Acton Lodge (where Mary Montgomery frequently visited her brother Hugh).

  Dr Fellenberg’s renowned school had not done quite so well by the temperamental Edward Noel as Lady Byron had hoped, but Annabella still chose the Swiss establishment for her model as she moved on from making loans to the co-operative schools which focussed on technical education for the poor, to set up her own new school at Ealing. The difference that set Annabella’s project apart from the co-operatives, from Hofwyl and even from the school (one she greatly admired) set up at Cheam in 1826 by Dr Charles Mayo and his sister, was the focus upon constant occupation, and upon character development rather than any religious doctrine. It was one of the most remarkable features of Lady Byron’s educational system that it was open to all creeds, or even none.

  Ealing Grove was a bold venture, one which would become Lady Byron’s most influential educational monument. There were many teething problems, especially with finding the right headmaster and with administering a pioneering allotment scheme that enabled the poorest pupils to pay their modest fees by selling produce that they themselves had grown. By 1836, however, Joanna Baillie was impressed by the spectacle of sixty attentive and happy pupils. Other educationalists began paying visits to Ealing, to learn from Lady Byron’s success.

  Sixteen years later, writing to a new friend, Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, Annabella explained that her project had simply been to offer a basic education, sound morals and clear personal goals to children who would always have to earn their own keep in life.

  Today, this sounds unremarkable. Back in the 1830s, however, Annabella’s undidactic and humane approach was revolutionary. Everything about the programme of education that she described to Dr Blackwell proclaimed Lady Byron’s enduring abhorrence of the English public-school system that she believed had caused such damage to her husband. The banning of any form of religious teaching headed her list of directives for a scheme in which benevolence was united with discipline.

  No creed. No scripture books. No continual sedentary indoor employment. No under-demand on any of these faculties. No over-excitement of feelings by prizes or other artificial stimulants. No definite boundary between work and play, the former as much as possible a pleasure, the latter not a contrast with lessons. No corporal punishment. No over-legislation.

  Annabella’s school, despite the problem of finding male teachers who would consent to be controlled and supervised by a formidably demanding woman, was a success. Turning to her own daughter, however, Lady Byron sometimes forgot her policy of making work pleasurable. Ada, it was always understood, would not only learn, but excel. Aged fifteen, she spoke three languages. In basic arithmetic, she was advanced for her age, but no prodigy. In her knowledge of history and current affairs, however, coached by a mother whose knowledge of global politics had once so impressed young George Ticknor, Ada was precociously well informed. Granted the freedom to read as she wished during three years of extreme ill health, her exceptional powers of imagination had also flowered, unrestrained. ‘God knows I have enough of it, and a great plague it often is,’ Ada later told a mother who possessed no imagination (and who feared its liberating powers). A plague to its possessor, perhaps, but mathematics alone would never have enabled Ada Lovelace to become a visionary prophet of our own technological age.

  By the summer of 1832, while mother and daughter were still settling into their new home at Ealing, 16-year-old Ada had recovered her health enough to accompany Lady Byron on a first jaunt to Brighton, favourite home of William IV, England’s sea-loving king. There, at long last, Ada was deemed well enough to indulge her cherished childhood dream: to ride upon a horse. At the beginning of that year, Joanna Baillie had praised Miss Byron’s ability to amble upon a docile mount across Fordhook’s two outlying fields; by August, in Brighton, Ada was able to boast to Selina Doyle’s illegitimate niece, Fanny Smith,* that both her riding-master and ‘Mamma’ were delighted by her equestrian progress. She could actually canter up the curving street to their hotel (Albion House in Preston Street)! What was more, she had been professionally advised that she now held her reins to perfection!

  There was more. Not without triumph, Ada informed Fanny that she had just started taking guitar lessons from a Spanish count, a truly romantic exile who (so an admiring Ada thought) produced the sounds of an entire orchestra from his soulfully plucked strings.

  ‘[T]ake care to keep strait Dear,’ an anxious Lady Gosford counselled Ada on 13 September 1832. She was referring, not to Ada’s riding, but to an exuberant young lady’s need to be prudent.

  Like many others in Lady Byron’s watchful circle of female friends, Mary Gosford was reassured when she learned that Ada’s new project – allegedly inspired by the allotment scheme that her mother was pioneering in Ealing – was to become a farmer. ‘Mamma encourages me very much,’ Ada repor
ted to Fanny Smith. Mamma was considerably less delighted to learn from Selina Doyle, early in 1833, that her daughter’s ardent interest in the Ealing allotments had become a cover for secret meetings in a Fordhook garden shed, where she exchanged passionate embraces – and something more – with a young man who had been recruited to teach Miss Byron shorthand (for taking lecture notes).† Ordered to behave herself, Ada ran away and promptly showed up at her lover’s family home. His parents, fearful of angering so powerful a figure as Ada’s mother, just as promptly escorted the young lady back to Fordhook.

  Years later, and plainly relishing a chance to shock one of her most susceptible confidantes, Ada boasted to Mary Somerville’s son that relations between the unnamed youth and herself went ‘as far as they could without actual penetration [the word ‘connexion’ was later coyly substituted in Woronzow Greig’s unpublished record] being actually completed.’ Miss Byron’s public disgrace had just been avoided, but enough people in Lady Byron’s own social circle knew what had happened for her daughter commonly to be perceived as damaged goods.* It is noteworthy that one of the first letters Ada would one day write to her future husband thanked him for overlooking her blotted past, and for a consequent debt of gratitude ‘of which I am so sure I shall never need to be reminded by you’.

  ‘Make amends to your mother before it is too late!’ Nanny Briggs scolded Ada on 6 March 1833. Two days later, Ada announced her reform to her mother by stating, with heavy underlinings, that ‘I am an altered person.’

  Repentance proved shortlived. By 27 April, as a letter written a full year later reveals, Ada was already hatching plans to resume the affair.† When a scandalised and despairing Annabella announced that she herself had been appointed ‘by God forever’ to supervise and restrain her wayward daughter, Ada struck back. She was willing to be guided, but not even by divine appointment would she be governed by her mother. Writing from Brighton in May 1833, Ada set out the case for her right to be free.

  I cannot consider that the parent has any right to direct the child or to expect obedience in such things as concern the child only. I will give a practical illustration of my meaning. [The example given was of a window to be closed in Annabella’s own room by her own instructions – fair enough – or of a window in Ada’s chamber: unacceptable.] . . . The one case concerns you & your comfort, the other concerns me only and cannot affect or signify to you. Do you see the line of distinction that I draw? I have given the most familiar possible illustration, because I wish to be as clear as possible. Till 21, the law gives you a power of enforcing obedience on all points; but at that time I consider your power and your claim to cease . . .

  Smart, fierce and articulate, Ada’s letter marked the beginning of a lifelong battle between two intransigent characters: an exceptionally strong-willed mother and her equally strong-willed daughter. The letter also demonstrates that Miss Byron, now seventeen, had developed an uncommon gift for expressing herself. This faculty, as much as her still nascent mathematical ability, would prove crucial to Ada’s remarkable future.

  The stronger Ada grew (she could by now rejoice at her skill in ‘leaping’ a horse over a gate), the more complex her relationship with Annabella became. She had fired off her letter of teenage defiance while consenting – as a sop to her mother – to make her first presentation curtsey in that summer of 1833 at the Brighton-based court of William IV. Arrayed in white satin and tulle and still limping a little as the 7th Lord Byron’s wife gently shepherded her towards the throne, Ada betrayed the same critical eye that her mother had trained on London society when she herself first arrived there from the north of England. Healthy enough by now to stand for fifteen minutes – but no more – without fatigue, Miss Byron was introduced to the Duke of Orléans (‘very pleasing’), to Wellington (who passed muster) and to Talleyrand (whose face reminded her of an old monkey). Visiting Brighton again in the autumn of 1833, a proud Ada boasted to Fanny Smith about how warmly her mother had been received by the royal couple. Lady Byron had actually been invited to sit next to the queen and had conversed at length with the king, Ada informed her friend. Dressed (so Ada bragged) in a dashingly low-cut dress of crimson brown and wearing a pale straw hat decorated with white feathers, ‘my illustrious parent’ had looked ‘very pretty indeed’. Lady Byron herself was shyly surprised by the kindness of the welcome she had received. The king and queen had been really friendly to her, Annabella wrote with evident pleasure to Sophia Frend.

  Ada’s pride in her mother’s warm reception did not mean that she herself had become suddenly submissive. Over a decade later, she would offer a heartfelt apology for the way she had behaved as a wilful teenager, deceiving Lady Byron about ‘all my real feelings’. (Ruefully, she added: ‘And a pretty mess I made of it.’) Back in 1833, a less conscience-stricken Ada evinced every sign of becoming alarmingly uncontrollable. At the end of the year, running short of ways to rein her daughter in, an exhausted Annabella turned to religion for salvation. Perhaps contemplation of the heavens would serve to calm the rattled nerves, not only of a volatile daughter, but of a mother unsettled by the recent evidence of new and shocking misbehaviour by the erring Mrs Leigh.* By March 1834, Ada noted that her mother and she were reading together and enjoying Dr Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise. A religious interpretation of Laplace’s theorising of a godless universe, Whewell’s contribution to the series of treatises commissioned on his deathbed by the Earl of Bridgewater appealed greatly to Ada’s growing interest in astronomy.

  It was around this time that Annabella settled upon the earnest and flawlessly respectable Dr William King as that ideal tutor who might combine sober instruction in calming mathematics for her daughter with an uplifting course of religious education. Ada’s response was suspiciously meek. Mrs King, who had previously been shocked to hear about Miss Byron’s Ealing romance, was demurely informed by her husband’s new pupil that religion was having an excellent effect. Ada took such comfort from the ‘pleasant walks’ and interesting discussions she had been experiencing with kind Dr King. She was absorbing his wise advice about controlling her imagination. She was so truly grateful for his thoughtful care.

  Evidence that Ada was receiving instruction from somebody with a far livelier mind than Dr King began to appear that spring. On 15 March 1834, while reading Whewell and being urged by Dr King to lift up her thoughts unto God, Ada wrote to consult her mother’s old tutor, William Frend, about rainbows.

  Dogmatic though Frend could be upon certain topics – he had controversial views on algebra and rejected the idea of negative numbers – he had never underrated Ada’s capacity to look at life from original angles. Her new preoccupation concerned prismatic light. ‘I cannot make out one thing at all,’ Ada wrote to his London home in Gower Street, ‘viz: why a rainbow always appears to the spectator to be an arc of a circle. Why is it a curve at all, and why a circle rather than any other curve?’ Sadly, Frend’s response to an intriguing but not unanswerable question is not preserved.*

  It was precisely this enterprising, inquisitive aspect of Ada’s mind that Dr King had been urged to harness. A careful examination of the lengthy and seemingly dutiful letter Ada wrote to him on 9 March that year should have warned the earnest cleric that he was on a hiding to nothing. Ada was perfectly aware that mathematics had been singled out by her mother as a means to shackle her unruly mind. Here, however, she gave a completely different reason for her interest in the subject. ‘My wish is to make myself well acquainted with Astronomy, Optics & c,’ Ada explained to her well-meaning instructor, ‘but I find I cannot study these satisfactorily for want of a thorough acquaintance with the elementary parts of Mathematics.’ Mathematics, in fact, was perceived by Ada as a crucial stepping stone on an adventurous journey not into the conventional world of Dr King’s theology, but into the mysterious realm of physics.

  Ada already possessed a skill with words that enabled her to encircle, bewilder and trounce poor Dr King. While sweetly assenting to the prudence of c
ontrolling that dangerous imagination of hers, Miss Byron invited him to consider the worrying vacancy that might be created by the sudden extinction of any source of excitement. How fortunate that science offered a better solution – as she was about to explain:

  [For] nothing but very close & intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement. I am most thankful that this strong source of interest does seem to be supplied to me now almost providentially, & think it a duty vigorously to use the resources thus as it were pointed out to me.

  And on Ada smoothly passed, requesting Dr King to be so gracious as to counsel her as to the best ‘plan’ of study: ‘I may say that I have time at my command, & that I am willing to take any trouble.’ Dr King, in short, was to advise, but not control. His pupil would herself make the final decision about what she wished to learn from him. As to the ultimate purpose of her researches, she would keep that secret to herself.

  Ada’s reference to her new and unexpected access to ‘subjects of a scientific nature’ held the clue – had Dr King been able to follow it – to what had happened. In February that year, she had found a new and sympathetic mentor in her mother’s friend Mary Somerville, a slight, smiling, pink-cheeked Scotswoman who was recognised to be one of the most brilliant expositors of science in England. The following month, Ada – for once, without her mother – attended a party held at the London home of one of Mary Somerville’s closest friends. His name was Charles Babbage.