In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

  Ada was clearly apprehensive about the inventor’s reaction. A final sentence wondered whether he would now dismiss ‘the lady-fairy’ from his service. The following day, Ada wrote again, to backtrack. Perhaps it would be better after all if Babbage ignored the whole idea and behaved ‘as if nothing had passed’.

  And so he did. A note in his personal records stated, without offering an explanation, that Lady Lovelace’s proposals had been rejected. Babbage did, however, back down about his preface. The memoir and ‘Notes’ were published (prefaceless) on 25 August 1843 in an edition of 250 copies, of which Ada received 100 and Babbage fifty. By 9 September, the inventor was almost ready to resume his old, teasing relationship with the young woman he now addressed as ‘the Enchantress of Number’. Almost, but not quite. Of course, he would love to visit her down at Ashley Combe, Babbage wrote, and perhaps he ought to bring along Arbogast’s Du calcul des dérivations so that the two of them could discuss ‘that horrible problem – the three bodies’.

  The allusion to the French mathematician was deliberately malicious. Ada had referred to Arbogast in her ‘Notes’. By offering to bring along the book, Babbage was hinting that she hadn’t read it. But her tussle with Babbage had taught Ada to give as good as she got. While informing the inventor that she (naturally) already possessed Arbogast’s book and would be happy to discuss it with him, Ada passed along a glowing personal tribute to her ‘Notes’ from Augustus De Morgan. ‘I never expected that he would review my crude young composition so favourably,’ Ada remarked with just a hint of menace. De Morgan had powerful friends and Babbage took the point. ‘You should have written an original paper,’ Babbage grovelled on 12 September. ‘The postponement of that will however only render it more perfect . . . Ever my fair interpretress, your faithful slave . . .’

  By the following year, all bitterness had evaporated and Babbage and Ada had safely resumed their easy, quasi-familial role. But it was Charles Wheatstone, not Babbage, who was willing to spend five hours in November 1844 advising Ada on how best to proceed in her scientific endeavours.

  Writing to William later that same day, Ada sounded both flattered and excited. ‘Wheatstone has given me some very striking counsels,’ she told her husband on 25 November 1844. Ada had apparently been planning to expand her observations on the Analytical Engine, but Wheatstone dissuaded her. ‘Don’t be vexed at this,’ Ada reassured William, ‘a subject is fixed on instead, so it will make no difference, & I can as easily do one as the other . . .’

  Here, in her immediate readiness to apply her mind to a new project, is evidence of the degree to which Ada had – as she proudly claimed to Woronzow Greig – become a truly professional person. The boost to her confidence of seeing her own clear work in print, with herself identified as the author, had been immense. All that she now lacked was the means to transform herself into a scientist. It seemed, following her conversation with Wheatstone, that help might be at hand.

  * * *

  * Menabrea had written in his concluding paragraph that – in literal translation – ‘all of the parts, and all of the wheelwork, of which the immense apparatus is composed, have been studied as has their action, but they have not yet been combined’. Ada restated him thus: ‘The plans have been arranged for all the various parts, and for all the wheelwork, which compose this immense apparatus, and their action studied; but these have not yet been fully combined together in the drawings and mechanical notation.’ Progress was being stressed. Ada’s other and far more significant footnotes were added at a later stage (Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs, 1843, p. 670).

  * Ada’s quotes within this chapter are referenced in the text from the original article page numbers.

  * In 2008, Stephen Wolfram’s ‘Mathematica’ program was used to compute the ten millionth Bernoulli number (one that would have taken Babbage’s Engine several thousand years to achieve). It took ‘Mathematica’ a little less than six days. Ada was, of course, using Bernoulli numbers only as a way of showing off the powers of the engine.

  † No precise figure for what that cost would have been is currently available.

  * Recently returned from living in Europe, 31-year-old Frederick Knight was enchanted by Ada. It was probably Knight that Ada was thinking of on 27 June 1850, when she told Woronzow Greig that she ‘had not a leg to stand on’ some seven or eight years earlier. Advice to behave with more discretion had been ignored, for ‘I was then young & plucky & had no mind to be put down about anything at all.’ (Betty Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers (Strawberry Press, 1992), pp. 359–60).

  * A granite headstone, engraved with her maiden name and a quotation from Byron, has only since 1960 marked Medora’s previously obscure grave at Lapeyre, a rural hamlet in south-west France. Married to a soldier’s servant, Georges Taillefer, in 1847, the year after giving birth to a son, Medora died in 1849 of smallpox, aged thirty-five. Her daughter, Marie, ejected from the convent where she had been placed, was subsequently spotted (in 1872) gambling at Baden-Baden by George Eliot. (The novelist made memorable use of this scene in the opening of Daniel Deronda.) Medora’s son, Elie Taillefer, entered the church and worked in an area local to Lapeyre, where he remained scandal-free and was much respected.

  PART THREE

  Visions

  ‘I hope to bequeath to the Generations a Calculus of the Nervous System’

  ADA LOVELACE TO WORONZOW GREIG,

  15 NOVEMBER 1844

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE ENCHANTRESS

  (1843–4)

  ‘Science is no longer a lifeless abstraction floating above the heads of the multitude. It has descended to earth. It mingles with men. It penetrates our mines. It enters our workshops. It speeds along with the iron courser of the rail.’

  MICHAEL GARVEY,

  The Silent Revolution (1852)

  Towards the end of 1843, having worn herself down the previous summer in her heroic endeavour to promote Charles Babbage’s unbuilt machine, Ada Lovelace suffered an unusually grave lapse in her health. Writing to Sophia De Morgan – and entreating her not to tell Lady Byron – Ada confided that learning she was not pregnant had, nevertheless, offered great solace. ‘I don’t the least mind all I have suffered,’ she wrote. ‘I think anything better than that.’

  Of all her family roles, motherhood was the one that Ada least relished. She had been admirably supportive of William’s sisters, while vainly striving to improve relations between her husband and the unremittingly hostile Lady Hester King. As a daughter, she had proved affectionate and loyal throughout Lady Byron’s painful tussles with Medora Leigh and her quasi-keepers, the Beaurepaires.

  As a mother, however, Ada was both negligent and capricious. True, she had written in an uncertainly dated letter to her mother about how tears had ‘rushed’ to her eyes as she watched little Lord Ockham stepping carefully through a dance with his sister. Eager to believe that she had detected signs of genius in her small daughter, Ada had also predicted that the gifted Annabella, aged seven, would become a great artist.

  Such moments of tenderness were rare. From the time of embarking upon her translation of Menabrea, Ada’s mind was focussed upon her own scientific career. Writing to Charles Noel in Dresden in August 1843 about finding a teacher for the Lovelace family, Ada was far more interested in obtaining the latest scientific information from Germany (the admired heartland of scientific study) ‘as to the microscopical structure and changes in the brain, nervous matter, & also in the blood’, than in the academic credentials of Herr Kraemer, Charles’s candidate for her children’s tutor.

  Nevertheless, there was no denying that a competent instructor was required to take care of three small children whose parents’ Unitarian beliefs prohibited young Viscount Ockham and his siblings from attending conventional (Anglican) schools. The thing to impress upon Herr Kraemer, as Ada explained to her cousin Robert at careful length, was that he would be working for ‘a completely professional person’. As such, she herself was u
nable ‘(were I even fitted by nature, which I am not), to associate much personally with my children, or to exercise a favourable influence over them by attempting to do so’. While there would be no regular or frequent association with the Lovelaces themselves, Kraemer would receive instructions on what principles to deliver his lessons, with special attention to the inculcation of religion based upon solid Unitarian foundations (‘subject of course to our more special direction than perhaps in any other matter’) and well-balanced habits of empirical observation.

  It is not perhaps surprising that Dr Kraemer would prove unable to meet such a demanding standard. Hired in the autumn of 1843, his peremptory dismissal was hastened by the fact that Lady Byron had found a more suitable candidate. Summoned to join her mother in October at the genteelly unfashionable resort of Clifton (Brunel’s great suspension bridge had not yet linked Clifton to the thriving port of Bristol), Ada heard Annabella’s proposal. Presented in Lady Byron’s quiet but always decisive tones, Dr William Carpenter sounded ideal.

  It was Annabella’s philanthropic work that had brought her into contact with the Carpenters. Dr Lant Carpenter, a leading Unitarian educationalist who suffered from depression, had drowned in 1840, while travelling around Europe on a prescribed health tour. At the time Annabella arrived at Clifton, his widow and eldest daughter Mary were both working at the celebrated Bristol school inaugurated by the late Dr Carpenter. Mary, then aged thirty-six, would later become one of Annabella’s closest allies and a co-trustee of her papers, while her first cousin, Harriet Martineau, would become one of Lady Byron’s greatest champions. In the early autumn of 1843, however, Lady Byron’s interest was focussed more sharply upon Mary’s younger brother.

  Handsome, clever and highly ambitious, the Edinburgh-educated William Carpenter had already made his name as the author of Principles of Human Physiology, an account of developmental theories of life which paid prudent tribute to ‘our continued dependence on the Creator’. Recently married, young Dr Carpenter was a rising academic in need of a steady income and secure accommodation. That was where the Lovelaces came in.

  Anxious to see her unruly grandchildren given a sterling education while Ada concentrated on her burgeoning scientific career, Lady Byron intended Carpenter to act both as tutor and watchdog, one who would ensure that her daughter was not pushing herself beyond her strength. What Lady Byron did not factor into her plans was the effect that Ada’s celebrated parentage and charismatic personality was likely to have upon a socially insecure academic who – as William Lovelace would later remark – was excessively susceptible to the charms of a pretty woman.

  ‘I like to please people’s eyes and indeed ears and all their faculties as much as I can,’ Ada jauntily informed her mother in an undated letter that was probably written a year or two before meeting Dr William Carpenter. The effect of this flirtatious streak in Ada’s nature was predictable. Dr Carpenter, arriving with his wife for a first interview at Ashley Combe in late November 1843, was flattered by the rapidity with which the young Lady Lovelace (‘more delightful than ever,’ her doting husband wrote to the Hen after Ada’s return from Clifton on 1 November) took him into her confidence, both about her children and about herself. Within the first week of meeting Carpenter, Ada had told him about her teenage escapade with a tutor at Ealing. She had also spoken mysteriously of ‘present troubles’ from which the smitten academic impulsively decided it was his mission to release her. In early December, after agreeing to a provisional engagement as tutor for one year, Carpenter was invited to visit Ada after dinner, at her London home.

  For a married woman to ask her children’s married tutor to call on her alone and late at night was a clear signal of more than professional interest. Summoned to the bedroom-cum-office that Ada spoke of as her ‘sanctum’, Carpenter was made privy to further confidences about his young employer’s private life. By mid-December, the relationship was intimate enough for Ada to entreat him to cheer her with ‘a few kind lines – I need them’. Quoting these words back to her on 15 December, Carpenter asked permission to sign himself as ‘Your affectionate friend’.

  It was here that the trouble began. Already promised £400 a year, Carpenter now felt sufficiently emboldened to lay out his requests to ‘the really kind friend which I believe you wish me to regard you’. He wanted a free house in which to entertain his friends, a horse of his own – presumably from the Ockham stud funded by Annabella – and the freedom to go to London to give lectures as and when he wished. Furthermore, he would only consider work that kept him within easy reach of the City. Remote Ashley Combe, where the King children were used to spending a blissful part of every year, was out of the question.

  It may seem that Carpenter was asking for quite a lot. In his defence, he was no ordinary tutor. A published academic with the genuine promise of an appointment as the Fuller Professor of Physiology (1844–8) was justified in seeking some concessions for educating a trio of undisciplined children. (A governess, Miss Cooper, was independently recruited to act as nursery supervisor.)

  Carpenter’s mistake lay, not in his demands, but in misreading Ada’s volatile personality. In January 1844, following one of the young countess’s sudden breakdowns in health, Carpenter did something – it seems he had already kissed her – at which she took offence. Icily, Ada indicated that he had stepped beyond his role. She had wished only to be friendly. Perhaps the question of his employment should be reconsidered.

  Carpenter was both furious and alarmed. Without telling Ada (on whom he inflicted a lengthy defence of the absolute purity of his intentions), he elected to write separately and at considerable length (concision was not Dr Carpenter’s forte) both to her husband and her mother. Annabella was sufficiently displeased by his revelations to seek advice from Joanne Baillie about alternative teachers for her grandchildren. William Lovelace, offered Carpenter’s commiseration for having to deal with such a feckless wife, grew incandescent with rage. ‘I was completely stunned,’ an injured Carpenter told Ada on 19 January after reading her husband’s response. ‘Though I saw that I had made a great mistake, I could not see in what . . .’

  Carpenter, thanks to Ada’s good-natured intervention on his behalf, was still offered the tutor’s post. The request for a free house at Ockham was confirmed, together with his generous salary. Gratitude, grudgingly, was expressed. ‘That you are a peculiar – very peculiar – specimen of the feminine race, you are yourself aware,’ Carpenter informed his future employer on 24 January. Resentment seeping from his pen, he assured Lady Lovelace that ‘the barriers’ of social position would never again be transgressed. Nevertheless, he owed her a debt of thanks.

  Would not a word from you as to liberties I had even offered, damn me with Lord L. Lady B. and the world? I feel that you must have done your best for me and for yourself to have extricated me as you have done; and to lead to the continuance of the wish that the educational engagement should continue.

  William Carpenter’s appointment as the Lovelace children’s tutor – a role in which he would in fact acquit himself quite well during his trial year – proved timely. His employment coincided with the time at which Ada’s brave words about her readiness to endure – and even to make a research subject of her physical suffering – were put to the test.

  Ada’s health suddenly deteriorated during the midwinter of 1843–4. Dr Locock was shaken when he saw for the first time what he described as a ‘mad’ look in his patient’s eyes. ‘He told me that it was really peculiar, & horrible to a spectator,’ Ada confessed to her mother in an undated note. Put on a light diet and in a state of strict isolation, Ada acknowledged the need for such prudent measures when she found that she could not even cope with the stress of a short visit from a cherished family friend, the Yorkshire vicar Samuel Gamlen. ‘I could not bear it for more than 10 minutes,’ a wistful Ada admitted to her mother in a second undated note.

  My brain then began to turn & twist, & my eyes to burn. I referred him [Gamlen] to yo
u for everything about me . . . & merely said a few little facts as to the present . . . I cannot but weep over my inability to see so many who I would wish to see. It is sad, sad, sad to me.

  Six weeks after Christmas 1843, Ada was still living in enforced solitude at St James’s Square. On 10 February 1844, while eager to visit Woronzow and Agnes Greig, she felt obliged to warn these dear friends not to be startled by the strangeness of her swollen features. William was piteously thanked for the worry that he expressed (‘What a kind kind mate ou is. Your sweetest letter (just received) has almost made me cry. It is so wise, yet so tender.’) But William himself was contributing to Ada’s fragility. ‘I do not feel I am fairly dealt with in this,’ Ada wrote from her London sickroom after her absent husband complained that the children were not always made immediately available to visit him either at Ashley Combe or East Horsley. ‘Either thro’ negligence or intention on your part, you give me no notice of anything scarcely . . . I am expected to make no objection, & manifest no surprise, however impromptu the thing may be, & however unpleasant for what I had planned.’ After scolding her husband for behaving in a way ‘very pernicious to our mutual happiness’, Ada smoothed her Crow’s ruffled feathers. ‘Pray write to me, if only 6 words. I am quite miserable about you because I know you are unhappy, & fancy you have an unkind bird.’