March 1834 marked the birth of Ada’s deep interest in Charles Babbage and his work. In June, she attended a lecture in which Dr Dionysius Lardner stressed the urgent need for funds to complete Babbage’s remarkable machine. Nevertheless, credit is also due to Lady Byron who – during the very difficult summer that followed upon her daughter’s attempted elopement – had herself conducted Ada on a brief visit to Dorset Street. It may have been during this earlier visit, paid in June 1833, that an attentive Sophia Frend was struck by the young girl’s interest in engineering. Mary Somerville had been more interested in hearing Lady Byron’s views – and Annabella (expressing her opinion that June to both Mrs Somerville and Dr King) did not disappoint her.
We both went to see the thinking machine (for so it seems) last Monday. It raised several Nos. to the 2nd and 3rd Powers, and extracted the root of a quadratic equation – I had but faint glimpses of the principles by which it worked. [Babbage had explained its ability to count regularly to 10,000.] There was a sublimity in the views thus opened of the ultimate results of intellectual power.
Clearly, Annabella had grasped the machine’s capabilities. Nevertheless, the praises which Mrs Somerville lavished that summer upon the really exceptional elegance of dear Lady Byron’s own wonderful understanding of the Difference Engine were suspiciously obsequious. Mrs Somerville was a good friend to Babbage and she knew the financial quandary in which he was trapped. Quite possibly, she was flattering someone whom she thought might be persuaded to invest in the unfinished machine. Mary Somerville was not lacking in guile.
Ada had inherited two of her father’s most dangerous qualities: changeability and the ability to manufacture a persona. The Ada who wrote to Dr King and Mary Somerville that summer of 1834 was entirely under the spell of Charles Babbage’s machine. ‘I am afraid that when a machine, or a lecture, or anything of the kind, come[s] in my way, I have no regard for time, space or any other ordinary obstacles,’ Ada wrote to Mary Somerville on 8 July.
Lady Byron, knowing her daughter better, remained sceptical about the depth of Ada’s new passion. On 26 May, for the second year running, Annabella had asked Harriet Siddons’s brother-in-law, Andrew Combe, to provide her with a phrenological reading of Ada’s skull. For the second time, Combe’s reading confirmed Lady Byron’s fears: her daughter’s intelligence was considerable, but it was of an impetuous and wilful kind. Writing to her ‘dearest kitten’ (Harriet Siddons’s daughter, Lizzie) that summer, Annabella sighed that Ada’s mercurial mind had already darted off in a new direction. ‘Ada does not think anything the world offers worth trouble, except Music.’
Lady Byron was right. The harp – much admired at that time for its romantic ability to reveal the player’s soul through the rippled communion of fingertips and vibrating strings – was the latest object to have caught fickle Ada’s fancy. Who knew what might come next?
Music had never interested Lady Byron. Towards the end of July, she decided to revive Ada’s interest in figures by a statistics-seeking tour of England’s factories. In 1832, Charles Babbage had written a hard-nosed study of industry and its time use. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (a book which helped to inspire Dickens’s creation of Mr Gradgrind) had won its author considerable respect in the world of commerce. It was Lady Byron’s intention to introduce her impulsive daughter to a real-world context against which Ada might more accurately evaluate the worth of Mr Babbage’s unbuilt Difference Engine.
Officially, the 1834 tour took mother and daughter to observe spar-cutting at Ashby, ribbon manufacture at Coventry and the operation of Jacquard looms at a Matlock mill. (Here, Annabella demonstrated her own keen interest in technology by making a careful drawing of one of the machine’s innovative punch cards.) In Derbyshire, where they inspected the roaring furnaces and kilns of Stoke-on-Trent, the travellers stayed with Florence Nightingale’s parents. A visit to Doncaster was entirely unconnected to the town’s celebrated racecourse. Unlike her sporting parents, Lady Byron detested racing. ‘The risk to man and beast – the desperate gambling among the spectators – the futility of the object – press upon my mind in a painful manner,’ she wrote in an undated letter to Mrs Siddons.
Unofficially, the tour enabled Lady Byron to make a quiet evaluation of her daughter’s state of mind. Writing to Harriet Siddons from Harrogate, Annabella sounded reassured. The worries of 1833 were at last beginning to recede, she remarked in an oblique reference to Ada’s attempted elopement with William Turner. As Ada grew calmer, her mother’s own health began to improve. ‘I feel my intellect reviving . . .’
Ada’s own skittishly active mind required livelier fodder than factory inspections. Yawning her way through a sleepy summer month at Buxton Spa in the company of Lady Gosford and her daughters, she decided to pass on some of her newfound mathematical knowledge to the countess’s eldest child. While Olivia Acheson, Lady Gosford’s younger daughter, was humoured with affectionate notes about ponies and cats (‘Livy’ had inherited the now venerable Puff), her older sister Lady Annabella (‘my dear little Friend’) was treated to a gruelling course in Euclid. Trying to encourage a reluctant pupil (‘You are going on as well as possible’), Ada could not resist the temptation to lecture.
My dear Annabella. You must pardon my scolding! You know as a master, I am bound to tell truth! After studying your Prop[osition] for some time, I have come to this conclusion: either that you do not understand what you have written about, or that if you do understand, you certainly have not expressed your meaning. So try again, and do not be at all discouraged, for it requires much practice to explain with clearness, & I assure you I was not ‘born’ with the power . . . attend to my orders pray. Let me hear as soon as you can.
Poor little Annabella; it was patently a relief when her stern teacher turned to the less taxing subject of music, begging the Acheson girls to look out for a harp in the attics of Worlingham, the charming Norfolk house where they now spent most of each year, together with Lady Gosford. Annabella had not been exaggerating her daughter’s passion for music: ‘I am now so excessively fond of my harp & my hour’s practice,’ Ada informed her small pupil, ‘that it is a much greater merit in me not to practice for three hours a day, than it is to practice steadily for one.’
Keen to mentor, Ada knew herself to be still essentially a beginner. While delivering a course that she spoke of publishing as a mathematical correspondence (in the style of Jane Marcet’s educational conversation books), Ada paid acknowledgement to the patience of her own tutors: ‘indeed I think I am making great progress,’ she advised little Annabella from Fordhook on 26 November. ‘Mr Babbage and Mrs Somerville are very kind indeed to me. The latter generally enquires with interest “how my pupil” is going on.’
It must have been an urgent need for medical attention (Lady Byron had fallen into one of her recurrent declines in health) that caused a temporary move from Fordhook to a house in Wimpole Street in the autumn of 1834. It was during this time that Ada found herself present at a couple of remarkable conversations between Charles Babbage and Mary Somerville.
Hot competition from the harp had not lessened Ada’s enthusiasm for Babbage’s invention. On 1 September, she rapturously described it to Dr King as ‘a gem of all mechanism’. By November, she was copying out some of Babbage’s notes and even borrowing some of the plans for his Engine from his son, Herschel. (Herschel was his father’s chief draughtsman.) On 28 November, Ada sat in on a discussion between Babbage and Mrs Somerville about the straitened inventor’s lack of financial backing and Babbage’s fears that Robert Peel, the new prime minister, would do even less for him than Peel’s predecessor, the Duke of Wellington. (Babbage was correct.) The fact that this information went straight back to Wimpole Street, where Annabella carefully recorded it, suggests that the ever-prudent Lady Byron was still weighing up the merits of herself investing in Mr Babbage’s ill-fated Engine.
On 15 December, Ada returned to Wimpole Street with far more exciting news. That ni
ght, her mother’s diary recorded a thrilling discovery that Babbage had made. It was ‘in the highest department of mathematics – I understand it to include the means of solving equations that hitherto had been considered insoluble’.
Frustratingly, we don’t know precisely what the conversation had involved. Just possibly, Ada had witnessed Babbage’s long-nourished plans for a contraption which would perform more complex tasks than Difference Engine 1 (which could most simply be described as a long line of gears designed to produce a calculated figure). That autumn, or so Babbage latterly recalled in his autobiography, plans had been drawn up from the inventor’s own notoriously messy diagrams for machinery that would enable the final figure to be fed back into the Engine, ready for further calculations. Such a machine would – in Babbage’s later and splendidly graphic term – be capable of ‘eating its own tail’.* Lady Byron was herself a forward-looking woman who took a keen interest in technology and who was surprisingly open to new ideas. (During her autumn at Wimpole Street, she wrote a poem in which God the Father was boldly replaced by a maternal deity.) But Annabella had her limits. While Ada waxed ecstatic about the possibilities that Babbage’s conversation with Mrs Somerville had unfolded to her own imaginative mind, Lady Byron briskly rejected this first intimation of the machine that we know today as Babbage’s Analytical Engine. His new idea, so she firmly noted, was ‘unsound’.
Annabella’s ongoing fears about her excitable daughter’s capacity for mental strain proved justified. In February 1835, Mrs Somerville wrote – mother to mother – to ask if it were better that the lessons should stop. During her last visit, Ada had passed from evident fatigue to extreme agitation. Her face had undergone a curious change.* Anxiously, Mrs Somerville hoped that she herself had not been pushing Miss Byron beyond her capabilities.
Mrs Somerville remembered all too well the tragic death of her own firstborn daughter, aged only twelve, under circumstances of excessive academic pressure. But Ada now intervened, imploring Mrs Somerville not to abandon her. She was not ill, she pleaded, only nervous and frightened, and more now at the prospect of losing such a treasured friend:
In a few weeks I dare say I shall be quite strong (particularly if I see a good deal of you). When I am weak, I am always so exceedingly terrified, at nobody knows what, that I can hardly help having an agitated look & manner, & this was the case when I left you. – I do not know how I can ever repay or acknowledge all your kindness, unless by trying to be a very good little girl & showing that I profit by your excellent advice. I feel that you are indeed a very sincere friend, & this makes me very happy I assure you.
Ada’s plea was effective. Her dreaded banishment did not take place; instead, a change of pace and scenery was briskly enforced. In April 1835, Ada wrote to Mrs Somerville from Brighton, where she was enjoying daily visits to a nearby riding school. Riding – and especially soaring over a delicious little jump – was the best exercise imaginable, a newly ebullient Ada declared, ‘even better than waltzing’. As for mathematics, she was prepared to slow down: ‘I have made up my mind not to care at present about making much progress, but to take it very quietly . . .’
Ada kept her word. The subject of mathematics was not raised again until the autumn of 1835.
By the autumn of 1835, however, a great change had taken place. The worryingly unconventional Miss Ada Byron had become an outwardly most respectable married woman.
* * *
* Expounding upon Italian painting to a septuagenarian Mrs Somerville in the 1850s, the art historian Anna Jameson was silenced with a scowl: ‘Mrs Somerville,’ Mary’s husband informed their loquacious visitor, ‘had rather talk about science than art.’ Dr Somerville’s irritation was understandable: his wife was attempting to conduct a conversation with another visitor. Maria Mitchell, America’s first professional woman astronomer, had come to pay her respects (H. V. Morton, A Traveller in Italy (Methuen, 1964), pp. 482–4).
* Both Pascal and Leibniz had produced forms of calculating machines over a hundred years earlier, but those mechanical devices were intended to perform specific arithmetical tasks, and were operated by hand. Babbage’s machine, operating autonomously, was designed to produce a long series of numbers from the setting of a very limited number, functioning upon the repeated use of differences. Most importantly, it was designed to print out the result.
* The curious expression ‘eating its own tail’ can be applied both to the Analytical Engine, a model of which is currently being built in the UK, and to Difference Engine 2, of which a model is on display in the Mathematics Gallery at London’s Science Museum. While plans were allegedly being drawn for the Analytical Engine during the autumn of 1834, mathematicians and computer scientists incline to believe that Babbage was discussing Difference Engine 2 with Mrs Somerville. My suggestion that it could have been the Analytical Engine is, perhaps, wishful thinking.
* This reference to a startlingly altered face crops up again and again in Ada’s later medical history. See the appendix on Ada’s health on pp. 475–6.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ADA’S MARRIAGE
(1835–40)
By the spring of 1835, when Ada had just turned nineteen, Mrs Somerville regarded her almost as a daughter, a substitute for her first and long-departed child. Mary was well aware of Ada’s intense but mercurial nature and her delicate physical health. (The two were, as she soon realised, closely entwined.) Mrs Somerville also knew how profoundly anxious Lady Byron was about her only child, and how fearful for her reputation.
If only a husband could be found for the young woman, some special man who would cherish and understand this rare, eccentric girl. But where was a mother to find such a paragon? Annabella had not taken to the smoothly eligible youths who swarmed around her daughter in the year of Ada’s debut at court. Ada, to be fair, had not helped herself. An engaging lack of concern for how she dressed attracted censorious comment. The folly of her runaway affair had caused a scandal, whispers of which had even crossed the Atlantic. Her enthusiasms – whether for maths, for riding, or for music – were always too fervent and extreme. Clearly not cut out to become a bishop’s wife or even a conventionally well-behaved lady of the manor, Miss Byron now stood in real danger of joining Mary Montgomery, relegated in her maturity to the position of a clever semi-invalid, one who was forever socially dependent upon the indulgent care of understanding friends.
Such a future was not the one that any loving mother would wish upon her child. It was then with real pride, if not relief, that Mary Somerville identified a man who seemed (at least, in the opinion of her own son) to be the ideal candidate for Ada’s hand. His name was Lord King. He had for some time lived abroad, remote from spiteful gossip about Ada’s misdemeanour. Better still, Lord King was utterly captivated by the legendary figure of Lord Byron.
Woronzow Greig, Mary’s son, had become acquainted with the reclusive and intelligent William King in the mid-1820s, when both young men were being tutored by William Whewell at Trinity, the former college of Byron himself. Stories of the poet’s wild exploits, his brilliance and his eccentricity still abounded at Trinity in 1824, the year of Byron’s tragically premature death. It was not by chance that Lord King, after leaving Cambridge, took up an invitation to work as secretary to his cousin and fellow-Byronist, Lord Nugent, High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands that Byron had visited during his doomed journey to Greece. There, living on Corfu while he saturated himself in Byron’s poetry, William commissioned a portrait of himself in full Byronic mode.
A brocaded Ionian costume and fez cap failed to bestow quite such an aura of panache upon William King as had the dashing Albanian turban donned by Byron for Thomas Phillips’s famous portrait (the one that had officially been hidden from view behind its own green curtain throughout Ada’s youth). But William King’s intense sense of identification would never wane. One of his first actions after returning to England in 1833 had been to rename the fields of his newly inherited Surrey estate afte
r his hero’s poems. The map still exists on which the new names are carefully penned in: Lara’s Field, Corsair’s Field, Ali’s Field, Harold’s Meadow, Chillon. All that was missing from this exoticised landscape was the ultimate connection to Lord Byron himself: the intimate link that only Ada Byron herself could provide.
William King had grown up in the expectation of becoming a grand landowner. The King family possessed large estates in Surrey and North Somerset, to which his mother, Lady Hester Fortescue, had added her own West Country domains and considerable personal wealth. It’s unlikely that William’s father had meant to cause difficulties for his heir when he made his wife the interim beneficiary of his will. William certainly foresaw no trouble when he wrote home from Corfu on 29 June 1833 that – following the news of his father’s untimely death, aged fifty-seven – he intended Lady Hester and his four siblings to lack for nothing in the future. William was aware that his mother preferred her second son, Locke. (Peter Locke King’s middle name honoured John Locke, the most famous of the family’s ancestors.) Nevertheless, so William assured Lady Hester, ‘nothing shall be wanting on my part to you and for you . . . to meet all your wishes will always be my first duty’s pleasure’.
William was in for a shock. Reaching home two weeks later, he discovered that Lady Hester was making full use of her new powers. Locke had already been granted an extensive portion of the King estate in Surrey. In the West Country, while William was permitted to retain the steep and wooded hillside enclosing his father’s hunting lodge above Porlock, Locke had been given the giant’s share. William had scarcely set his foot within Ockham Park, the King family’s principal home near Guildford, when Lady Hester had it gutted. The furniture, as she barely troubled to explain, would be divided between 38 Dover Street, the Kings’ London residence (it was now to become her personal domain) and Woburn Park, the new Surrey mansion in which Locke King, together with two of his three young sisters, Hester and Charlotte, were to live as their mother’s companions. (A third and mentally impaired daughter, Emily, was packed off to London to act as a companion to ‘Aunt Lucy’, an elderly relative who was eking out an existence in Charlotte Street and to whom, when Lady Hester deigned to remember, she would grudgingly send money for coals and rent.)
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