Ada’s wish was granted. By 15 November, she was even apologising for having failed to make a return visit to his house in Albemarle Street. But she had not yet succeeded in luring him to her home. Faraday made one further feeble effort to escape (‘You drive me to desperation by your invitations. I dare not and must not come and yet . . .’) before he yielded to the siren’s call. ‘We must talk business & science next time,’ a gratified Ada announced on 1 December.
The subject of the meeting which took place on 28 November 1844 (one day before Ada’s lengthy discussion with Wheatstone) remains unknown. Religion is a possibility. Ada’s opening letter had engagingly presented herself as a regular hotch-potch of world faiths, although ‘in truth I cannot be said to be anything but myself’. Perhaps they discussed the extraordinary discrepancy between Ada’s physical fragility and the unfailing vigour of a mind which – as she had told him on 13 November, 1844 – ‘keeps me all compos and happy’. Certainly, the relationship had progressed. Three days after that encounter, Ada confided to Faraday her love of going about ‘incog.’ – that is to say, as ‘Mrs William King’ – and without the trappings of a rank that she professed to disdain. (‘I have in fact roughed it thoroughly, as they say . . .’)
Relations had grown friendly enough for Lady Lovelace to admit to Faraday – as Ada very rarely did – how much care she took to mask her physical sufferings from strangers. Plans were hatched for further meetings during February 1845, but – it was often the case with Ada’s grand projects – her plans for an article about electricity fizzled out. Her interest in Faraday’s work remained vivid. Later that year, she eagerly followed the news that Faraday had succeeded in manipulating the course of lights by magnets and thick sheets of glass. Ada’s own final ambition – seemingly to replicate the effect of sunlight on raindrops – would owe much to her knowledge of Michael Faraday’s work.
What was the project on which Ada hoped to collaborate with Faraday back in November 1844, at the time of her lengthy conversation with Charles Wheatstone? The answer emerges from her correspondence with another, less scientifically minded man: Woronzow Greig.
In that same November, Greig, who had been acting as Ada’s researcher for a year, decided to play a little joke. An extraordinary, anonymously authored book had just been published. It was called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and it proposed that the world had emerged from a fire-mist, that men had evolved from apes and that life might yet be generated in a laboratory. Written by Robert Chambers, a member of the Scottish publishing family, the book became a literary sensation. Nobody knew who had written it. Some pointed to William Carpenter and others to George Combe.
It says much for Ada’s standing in the scientific world, just one year after the publication of her ‘Notes’, that many believed Byron’s brilliant daughter to be the modest author of Vestiges. Babbage, perhaps a little jealously, twitted Ada about it. Old Joanna Baillie, convinced of her authorship, gasped to Annabella at the genius of ‘that wonderful creature’, her daughter. William Lovelace, rather gratified by all the attention his wife was receiving, told John Hobhouse that everybody seemed to think she’d written the book. Who was he to deny it?
Ada herself was enchanted by Greig’s notion of demurely presenting her with the very book that everybody was declaring she had written. Having signed herself with particular gratitude (‘With Many Many Thanks’), she rewarded her old friend by sharing with him the secret of her latest project: a calculus of the nervous system. What she intended, so Greig was now informed, was to create what Ada ambitiously defined as ‘a law or laws, for the mutual actions of the molecules of brain; (equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary & sideral world.)’. The problem that faced her, as she explained it in her lengthy letter, was purely practical. She needed to learn how to carry out practical trials on body parts: ‘viz: the brain, blood, & nerves, of animals’.
To us, it may sound either as though Ada had gone mad or as though she had been burying her nose in the imaginative pages of that contemporary masterpiece, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.* But William Lovelace, as ambitious as the Hen for Ada’s success, had heard and approved his wife’s project; Greig, the legally trained, rational and sober-hearted son of Mary Somerville, neither questioned Ada’s sanity nor withdrew his services as her devoted researcher.
On 5 December 1844, Ada wrote again to Greig. His friendly invitation to a play was brushed away with a reminder that she had not set foot in a theatre for over two years. All Ada wanted from him at present was a means of access to that most un-woman-friendly treasurehouse of researchers: the Royal Society. Had she not earned the right? ‘I really have become as much tied to a profession as you are,’ Ada pleaded to the lawyer. ‘And so much the better for me, I always required this.’
A rare view for a woman to take of herself in the mid-nineteenth century, it was one in which Ada Lovelace was assisted by the quiet support, not only of Woronzow Greig, Charles Wheatstone, Lord Lovelace and her own mother, Lady Byron, but by the reassurance in 1844 that Michael Faraday, then regarded as the greatest scientist of the day, had confidence in her declared belief that she – Lord Byron’s daughter – had been singled out to act as ‘the High-Priestess of God’s earthly manifestations.’
Great things were evidently in store.
* * *
* Local insurrections had forced Edward and Fanny back to England from Euboea. Angry altercations began when Lovelace suggested that Edward could become a land agent like his brother, with no loss of social status. Things worsened when Fanny defended her husband’s right to be made a principal at his own school, rather than running one of the village schools set up by Annabella. The provision of a Warwickshire house at Leamington Spa (where Lady Byron owned property) did not lessen the touchy Edward’s sense that he had been insulted. The quarrel with Annabella was never patched up, but Edward, as a widower, became her younger grandson’s most respected advisor on family history.
* To Carpenter himself, Ada wrote of her daughter’s need of ‘a profession’ and suggested, presciently, that it might be that of an artist. (AAL to W. B. Carpenter, n.d. 1844, Dep. Lovelace Byron 44, fol. 16.)
* ‘I find myself in reading her notes at a loss in the same kind of way as I feel when trying to understand any other thing which the explainer himself has not clear ideas of.’ John Herschel to Charles Lyell, 15 November 1844, Royal Society, Herschel Letters, vol. 22. ff. 210–11. Herschel nevertheless had a very friendly correspondence with Ada (Dep. Lovelace Byron 172, fols. 1–29.)
* A book which Ada seems never to have read. It is not known whether she ever met Frankenstein’s creator, but these two remarkable women lived alongside each other in London’s small scientific world from 1822 to 1851. Mary Shelley died in London, just one year before Ada. (See www.mirandaseymour.com for a blog about possible connections.)
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE LADY FROM PORLOCK
(1844–9)
On 14 November 1838, the Taunton Courier excitedly reported that Fyne Court, the home of Somerset’s most eccentric squire, had received a visit from the Earl of Lovelace and his lady, accompanied by a large party of their friends. In the absence of the owner, Mr Andrew Crosse, the callers were given a tour of the house and grounds. Apparently, they had been ‘much gratified’ by what they saw.
There was nothing novel about visiting country houses in the absence of their owners. Fyne Court was old, handsome and enhanced – if you liked that kind of thing – by a garden that featured crumbling follies, ponds, bridges and a serpentine lake (complete with grotto-style boathouse). Those were not the attractions, however, that had brought the Lovelace contingent of scientists, journalists and county folk out on a twenty-mile jaunt across Exmoor, in search of a lonely manor settled deep within the Quantock Hills.
Given the fact that Andrew Crosse grew up in an area that seems to have drawn the romantic poets to it like iron filings to a magnet (Wordsworth and Coleridge were living n
earby when Crosse was in his early teens), and through the landscape of which they all roamed at will, it’s surprising that Mr Crosse’s name does not appear more frequently in literary history. Born at Fyne Court in 1784, Crosse was running the family estate by the age of twenty-one. A tall, ruddy-cheeked and deeply religious man (he bore a striking physical resemblance to his one-time Somerset neighbour, Robert Southey), Crosse was an amateur poet whose passion for science owed something to his upbringing (his father had been friendly with both Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley), something to a sympathetic master at his Bristol boarding school and much to the simple fact that he was himself a clever, well-off man living in an age when science had become a fashionable home pursuit.
By the time that Andrew Crosse married Mary Anne Hamilton in 1809, he was a man obsessed. Five years later, visitors found the once elegant ballroom of Fyne Court transformed into a gigantic electrical laboratory, containing its own power storage supply within the fifty barrel-sized glass Leyden jars that had been provided by a friendly fellow scientist, G. S. Singer. Above them in the gallery (from which Crosse sometimes personally regaled his guests with an organ recital), an elaborate apparatus for measuring atmospheric electricity was connected to long lines of copper wiring that were strung between the swaying branches of an avenue of majestic beeches (trees that still flank the approach to Crosse’s home).
History does not report what the inhabitants of the local hilltop village of Broomfield thought of Andrew Crosse, but the experiments that regularly took place at Fyne Court – especially when a storm was up – often provided an electrical display (one home-made flash was alleged to have towered tall as the mast of a ship) that won the squire his local reputation as ‘the thunder and lightning man’. Kind to his tenants (those who wished it received free electrotherapy treatment for their ailments, courtesy of their landlord and his wife) and always hospitable to his visitors, Crosse never refused a welcome to uninvited guests. Humphry Davy, Charles Babbage and the Shelleys were among those who visited Fyne Court hoping to see wonders revealed, and departed wondering only how Crosse and his family managed to survive in a household of such untrammelled chaos.
In 1836, Crosse performed the infamous experiment that had first caught the interest of the Lovelaces. Mary Shelley, back in 1819, had published Frankenstein, a novel which dared to suggest that a scientifically constructed corpse could be shocked into a state of sensibility. Medical halls and lecture theatres had already offered show-stopping evidence of how electricity could cause a dead man (women’s bodies were never used) to raise an arm, clench a jaw, clasp a hand. Mary Shelley’s fiction raised the stakes by granting Victor Frankenstein’s unfortunate creature the power to feel emotions and to react to the experience of withheld parental love.
Andrew Crosse had done nothing so remarkable, but his discovery nevertheless created a public sensation. Speaking to a local electricity society in 1836, Crosse casually reported the emergence of tiny, living mites after he had dripped a chemical mixture on to electrified red ironstone. To Crosse, a devoutly Christian believer, it seemed clear that the Acarus crossii, as the mites came swiftly to be named, resulted from some unidentified contamination in his process. Simultaneously hailed as a modern Prometheus and hounded by death threats for having dared to challenge the laws of divine creation, the amateur scientist found it impossible to subdue the storm of excitement he had unwittingly provoked. While evidence backed Crosse’s denials (the results of the only attempt to replicate the experiment, conducted under an air-tight bell jar by a surgeon, W. H. Weekes, were never formally confirmed), the idea of spontaneous generation was too alluring to be abandoned. When Robert Chambers began to write Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and to suggest that life could be created in a laboratory, he had Crosse’s experiment in mind. The story of the seemingly life-generating crystals played a small but significant role in the daring survey of modern science that Chambers set before the public in 1844. (The Crosse family were understandably annoyed by this fresh exposure to a publicity they did not welcome.)
It was curiosity about the Acarus crossii that had caused the Lovelaces to escort that inquisitive houseparty to Fyne Court back in 1838. (Four years later, Ada had written to interrogate Crosse about the mysterious mites, but was simply referred to the experiment carried out by Weekes.) Later still, in the autumn of 1843, when Ada was away at Clifton with her mother, the reclusive squire and his younger son, Robert, had ventured back across Exmoor to visit the Lovelaces at Ashley Combe. Crosse’s conversation, according to a disappointed William Lovelace, had proved considerably less sparkling than his enthralling electric experiments had suggested.
Absorbed in embellishing his cliffside palace, Lovelace had been more eager to show off Ashley Combe’s towers and terraces than to listen to Andrew Crosse’s troubles in dealing with a household that could no longer be governed by his invalid wife. The visitor’s slowness of speech was enough to drive a man mad, William groaned to Ada before shifting his letter’s theme to a more engrossing topic: was his dear Bird keeping up her harp practice at Clifton? Never must she forget how much the Crow loved to hear her play.
A year later, Ada herself initiated a correspondence with Andrew Crosse. It was at precisely the same time that she first made contact with Michael Faraday. The countess was seeking any means she could find to further her scientific career, no easy thing in a world that strove to exclude women from any significant activity whatsoever. Ada’s reason for approaching both Crosse and Faraday was that both scientists were known to carry out most of their experiments in private, far from the masculine precincts of lecture theatres and college laboratories. An added bonus in the case of Crosse was the fact that Fyne Court lay less than twenty-five miles from the Lovelaces’ home-grown Somerset Alhambra.
To Andrew Crosse, as to Michael Faraday, Ada Lovelace indicated the seriousness of her own commitment by identifying herself as a ‘bride of science’. A reference to her wish to practise galvanising frogs’ legs may have suggested that Ada was in some ways a little behind the times; such experiments had been carried out forty years earlier. Ada’s interest was nevertheless patently sincere, while the Menabrea ‘Notes’ – these were sent to Crosse twice over, once by Ada and again by her proud husband – offered evidence of a luminously intelligent and adventurous mind.
It was for quite another reason that Lord Lovelace encouraged both Ada’s correspondence with Andrew Crosse and the plan that she hatched in November 1844 to pay a personal visit to Fyne Court. Devoted though the couple were at that time (Ada told the Hen that her dear Crow’s nature grew more beautiful every year, while Lovelace wrote to Lady Byron of his longing that everybody should recognise the nobility and even the ‘grandeur’ of the Bird’s glorious mind), the earl was an orderly man. His wife’s undisciplined habits drove him almost to distraction. Respecting Ada immensely for her courage and independence, her husband nonetheless thought it admirable that, after sacking an unsatisfactory maid, his wife briefly chose to fend for herself. He thought it splendid that Ada now packed her own travelling cases, mended and even made her own clothes, dressed and laced herself and even – when ill – prepared her own modest supper in a saucepan hung over the bedroom fire.
What irked Lord Lovelace was Ada’s vagueness. Payments were forgotten. Books were borrowed from lending libraries and seldom returned. As many as three harps might be simultaneously ordered for trial, and none of them given back to the hard-up instrument-maker for years on end. And as for Ada’s work habits: it was extraordinary, the meticulous Lovelace lamented to a sympathetically clucking Hen, that anyone could be so neat as their brilliant Bird in the arrangement of her wardrobe and yet so chaotic in the order and dating of her notes and papers.
Writing to Lady Byron about her daughter’s proposed visit to Fyne Court, Annabella’s ‘affectionate son’ (for so a devoted Lovelace now unfailingly signed himself) was determined to be frank. He wanted his wife to visit Crosse’s unruly home as a
warning of what could happen when disorder was permitted to rule. With better organisation at home, the earl was convinced that Andrew Crosse could have become a respected figure in the world of science. As it was, Crosse was perceived as a charming eccentric, an amateur experimenter whose one notorious achievement had been the product of his own ineptitude. Crosse would act as a caution to Ada.
At first, all went according to plan. Andrew Crosse paid a second visit to Ashley; Lovelace, citing illness as an excuse for not joining them, loaned his coach and coachman, John, so that Ada and Crosse could together travel back in comfort to Fyne Court.
The journey provided time for fruitful exchange. Reference was surely made to Vestiges and the Acarus crossii, but most of their time, as Ada reported to her spouse, had been occupied in outlining her great plan for a calculus of the nervous system. Mr Crosse had been impressed, especially by the quietness of her reasoning and the soundness of her premises. He did not, Ada was pleased to announce, regard her ideas as ‘mere enthusiasm’.
The success of the visit can be judged by Ada’s response to Fyne Court’s freezing temperature. This was late November: Ada’s circulation was so poor that she habitually slept, even in high summer, in a thick flannel dressing-gown worn over her nightwear. Yet, it was in a spirit of positive gaiety that she sent out her first bulletin from Andrew Crosse’s home at 9.30am, while sitting alone and breakfastless, huddled in her shawl and boa stole beside an unlit fire, within a silent and shuttered house.
Lovelace had been right about one thing. Ada readily agreed that Fyne Court was chaotic. (‘I never saw the like.’) Meals arrived by chance and ended at whim. (The Crosses had talked to her about science until one in the morning upon that memorable first night.) One room was entirely in ruins. Others had been sacrificed to Mr Crosse’s need for space in which to conduct his electrical experiments. The lantern-lit cellars looked more like a surgeon’s theatre than a wood and coal store. There was only one working lavatory in the house, off at the far end of what served as a drawing room. Often as not, the door to it was locked and the key mislaid.
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