In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

  Ada seemed to be describing a madhouse, one which was considerably less organised than an actual London madhouse patronised by Lady Byron and Elizabeth Fry.* Unfortunately for Lord Lovelace’s plans, Ada loved Fyne Court. Here, so she joyfully informed her husband, she was treated, not as an empty-headed peeress or – at best – as Byron’s daughter, but as a professional colleague. If she felt ill, she could simply withdraw to her room. (Ada had given Andrew Crosse advance warning of her ongoing and ‘terrible’ physical affliction and of her imperative need to be alone when battling it.) Scientific discussion was the order of the day. Never for a single moment was Lady Lovelace treated as that inferior being: a woman.

  The focus of Ada’s letters home, from the very start, was less upon her host than on his eldest son. Six years older than herself, John Crosse struck Ada as being both well-read and highly intelligent. A good mathematical mind was apparently combined with a strong sense of humour and a lively relish for strenuous debate. John was planning to spend six months of the following year in Berlin, studying all that was new there in the world of German science. Meanwhile, Ada coolly proposed to her husband that the young man – she emphasised John’s great youth with deceptive care – should become her colleague and assistant. Perhaps John could come and live at Ockham, where he would be able to keep her mind up to the mark by stimulating discussions of her views. ‘This is very useful and good for me,’ Ada announced to her husband on 24 November. The Crow, delighted, reported to Lady Byron the good news that their clever Bird had at last found the support that she required for the scientific endeavours in which both her husband and mother so ardently wished her to succeed.

  As the daughter of one of Europe’s most notorious rakes, it was inevitable that gossip would always hover close to Lady Lovelace. While the scandal often emerged from the hostile camp presided over by Lovelace’s resentful mother at Woburn Park, the stories which reached John Murray’s dining table in December 1844 – from whence they were reported back to Ada and her mother as ‘public news’ – had originated at Ockham. Ada, writing to Woronzow Greig about how she planned to combat these malicious tales, dismissed them as unfounded and absurd. Her mother, she told Greig, had ‘quite chuckled’ at Ada’s plan to embarrass the ‘Traitor’ by confronting him with her ‘great eyes’ and delivering his own malicious words straight back to his face.

  It was soon after this that a newspaper item appeared in which it was hinted that Lady Lovelace was on over-friendly terms with a Somerset neighbour. The newspaper was behind the times: the admirer named was not John Crosse, but Frederick Knight, the genial country neighbour with whom Ada often rode out both on Exmoor and in London, although never without her husband’s calm assent. (Ada, reporting this particular titbit to Babbage in July 1845, thought it hilarious.)

  Not all the gossip could be blamed upon spiteful in-laws, chatty servants and nosy visitors. Ada herself was hopelessly indiscreet, as her impulsive revelations to Dr Carpenter had already shown. In the opening months of 1845, she began to confide in Woronzow Greig.

  Evidently, the countess’s new relationship with John Crosse was causing her to question her marriage. Early in that November, Ada had been writing about William Lovelace with exceptional affection. Now, just after her first visit to Fyne Court, Ada abruptly told Greig that no husband could suit her, and that it was a ‘cruel & dreadful’ mockery to hear the lawyer talking about conjugal kindness. Lord Lovelace, however well-meaning, was incapable of understanding her. (‘He is a good & just man. He is a son to me . . . But it has been a hopeless case . . .’)

  And then, with one of those lightning impulses that had so often baffled her father’s friends, just as the well-meaning Greig began to offer advice, Ada changed her mind. On 12 February 1845, eight days after describing the relationship with her husband as ‘hopeless’, Lady Lovelace ordered Greig to forget all she had said. She did not regret her marriage. Nobody could suit her better than Lord Lovelace. ‘More than this you cannot desire in reason,’ she entreated, forgetting that it was she herself who had introduced the whole awkward subject. It was nonsense, she pleaded now. Her mind had been distracted by other affairs ‘quite unconnected with any of my own’.

  Reading that puzzling allusion to her sudden interest in affairs ‘quite unconnected’ with her own, it seems possible that Ada was already pondering John Crosse’s glib tales of financial hardship and wondering how to help him. Money, as Crosse was quick to intimate, was what he required from a woman whose access to immense wealth offered considerable temptation to a man who possessed little of his own.

  Sexual frustration may also have contributed to Ada’s sudden outburst against her husband. In January 1845, the countess had only just turned twenty-nine. Her multiple ailments included gynaecological problems which would later manifest themselves, agonisingly, as a large sore in her cervix. An inability to enjoy sex might well have given rise to the despair that Ada betrayed to Greig, drawing back only when she belatedly realised the risk attached to confiding in her husband’s oldest friend. Much of Ada’s correspondence was later destroyed, with a view to protecting her reputation. Whether an emotionally passionate relationship with John Crosse was ever physically consummated remains an unknowable mystery.

  On an intellectual level, John Crosse and Ada soon found a subject upon which they could collaborate. In the summer of 1845, Roderick Murchison’s old ally in geological studies, Adam Sedgwick, published an eighty-five-page denunciation of the anonymously authored Vestiges in the Edinburgh Review. It was the longest article that the magazine had ever published (and it was the last review that Sedgwick was ever asked to write).

  For Ada and her proud family, it had been quite enjoyable, until this point, to see herself being identified by a number of eminent people as the author of a book that was already in its fourth edition and that would continue to be a huge seller until the end of the century. However, while it was gratifying for her to note that Sedgwick was keen to identify her as the author of Vestiges (he spoke only of a woman, but there was no other female contender in the field), Ada was far from pleased by Sedgwick’s chauvinism. Only a woman, so he wrote, could have written in such a giddy, skipping, illogical style about a subject of such importance as the genesis of mankind. Poor research (in Sedgwick’s jaundiced view) again indicated a woman’s hand. No woman (this was an astonishing observation by a man who was well acquainted with the scrupulously methodical and industrious Mary Somerville) was capable of the ‘enormous and continued labour’ required for scientific work.

  John Crosse’s bone of contention was with Vestiges, rather than Sedgwick. As embarrassed as his father had been by the spotlight that Andrew Crosse’s discovery of sentient mites had thrown upon a reclusive family, he resented the way in which Robert Chambers’s controversial book revived interest in this awkward topic. (Chambers had even included letters from Weekes, the surgeon whose own experiments between 1842 and 1844 led him to believe in the notorious Acarus crossii.) Studying Sedgwick’s extended diatribe alongside Chambers’s book, Ada and Crosse decided to present their own appraisal of Vestiges.

  It was unthinkable that Lady Lovelace (or even the coy ‘AAL’) should acknowledge her contribution to John Crosse’s essay. Ada nevertheless betrayed her close involvement by the anger with which she wrote to Charles Babbage on 2 September about the ‘infamous’ way that a certain Mr John Crosse (‘I have leave to mention his name to you’) was being treated by the Westminster Review. Crosse’s contribution was filled with printer’s errors and had been ignominiously positioned at the end of the magazine.

  The Westminster may have been careless in editing Crosse’s piece, but relegating it to the final pages was a deliberate decision. By September, already sated by Sedgwick’s interminable rant in the July issue of the Edinburgh Review, the public wanted no further attacks upon a book which was widely admired. Neither, as the owner (Sir William Molesworth, a friend of the Lovelaces) or the editor (William Hickson) must have concluded, was it
useful to give prominence to a piece which criticised Vestiges’ treatment of the ‘acarus Crossii [sic], or horridus’ resulting from Andrew Crosse’s 1836 experiment.

  There was nothing wrong with challenging the author of Vestiges for his suggestion that electricity was involved in ‘the shrub-like crystallisation of frozen moisture on windows’. (This was ‘a fatal blunder’, Crosse and Ada justly scolded; ‘none so bad’.) Overall, however, the tone of the collaborators was shrilly assertive. One chapter of Vestiges (on the mental capacity of animals) ‘appears to us altogether erroneous’. Chambers’ Malthusian proposal that mankind could be subjected to a mathematical diagnosis was dismissed as ‘downright nonsense’. Such jaunty writing did not suit the pages of the soberly intelligent Westminster Review. No further reviews by John Crosse and his invisible colleague would grace its pages.*

  Charting the progress of Ada Lovelace’s secretive relationship with John Crosse is not easy. One fact stands out. Following that first husbandless stay at Fyne Court in November 1844, the countess began to carve out a more independent life for herself. At the end of August 1845, after spending three weeks with her mother at a village house in Kirkby Mallory (the main Noel home had been rented out on a long lease to a widowed Lady de Clifford), the countess retreated to Brighton where – as her husband teased her – she lived in such privacy that not even the notoriously inquisitive Mrs Jameson could find her. Lovelace’s prophecy proved correct; Anna Jameson left Brighton at the end of the summer in a state of perfect ignorance about Ada’s whereabouts.

  Writing to Woronzow Greig from the partially completed Horsley Towers on 24 November 1845, Ada boasted of the ‘positive’ and ‘conclusive proofs’ she had received at Brighton that her incognito was successful. Plans were being hatched for a new way of life and they were not only driven by a sick woman’s need for seclusion and Brighton’s bracing air. By the following summer, Ada had persuaded her unsuspicious mother to subsidise the furnishing of a permanent pied-à-terre in Brighton’s Russell Square, one of the smartest areas in town. (Annabella’s untypical lack of interest in her daughter’s activities was due to the fact that she was preoccupied by innumerable philanthropic and educational enterprises, both in England and America.)

  Of all Ada’s letters to her mother, the one that she wrote to the preoccupied Lady Byron from Brighton on 8 July 1846 was the most affectionate. She began by apologising for the expense of the Russell Square furniture, pointing out that it had been of the simplest kind, ‘much of it being only such as is used in servants’ rooms’. What mattered was that she now possessed a first little home of her own, a cosy nest to which she could retreat. Ada’s elated tone makes it tempting to assume that John Crosse had become a regular visitor to Russell Square.

  ‘This life, backwards & forwards, between home & here, suits me delightfully,’ Ada informed her mother, in full underlining mode.

  I return home con gusto always. – Much of the comfort I am now enjoying I owe to you, – & I feel so grateful for it, – that I do not well know how to say so adequately! I think of it often . . . Every night & every morning I go to sleep thinking ‘I owe my comfort to the Hen!’

  And how – whether in Brighton or elsewhere – did the illicit couple pass their stolen hours? If we can trust Ada’s own testimony, the answer is touchingly innocuous. Back in 1844, following her first visit to Fyne Court, a relieved Lady Lovelace told Andrew Crosse that she had discovered in her own pocket the little gold pencil that she had been so very anxious not to have left behind at his home. Drawing up her will eight years later, Ada carefully specified that Mr John Crosse was to receive the instruments contained in her gold writing case, and to make use of them ‘habitually, in remembrance of the many delightful & improving hours we have jointly passed in various literary pursuits’.

  Hard though it is to credit, intellectual affinity may have been the prime stimulus of Ada’s secret love affair.

  Speculations about the nature of Ada’s relationship with John Crosse should not obscure the strength of the family bond that continued to unite the Hen, the Bird (as Lovelace and Annabella continued lovingly to refer to Ada) and the Crow (who relished his nickname enough to make occasional playful use of a gaunt black bird in lieu of his signature).

  The difficulty of removing William Carpenter from their lives had occupied screeds of inter-familial correspondence in 1845. In truth, the Lovelaces had never entirely trusted Carpenter after the opening spat in their relationship. The move from Ockham to nearby East Horsley provided a perfect excuse to end it. The tutor’s trial year was up and there was no home adequate to satisfy his (rather grand) requirements at the new estate. Carpenter’s desperate eagerness to stay on beyond his appointed term – despite having secured a professor’s chair and regular work as a lecturer at the London Hospital and University College – suggests that he valued his post and liked his employers better than they did him. But pride was also at stake. Back in 1844, Lady Byron had paid the tutor a £200 advance upon a promised £1,000 to do up a house for his family. Now, there was to be no house and Lady Byron required Carpenter’s written gratitude for the £300 she was still willing to offer, irrespective of the purpose for which it was used. If thanks were not forthcoming – or rather, an apology from the impetuous tutor for having prematurely assumed that Lady Byron would be less charitable – the sum would not be paid. Thanks extracted, and due obeisance made, the money was handed over.

  Annabella could be chillingly legalistic where money was concerned, but she had no reason to offer such a generous sum to a man who, however well-meaning – he carried the children off to see the sights of London and on various jolly outings in Surrey – had been a troublesome employee. Carpenter’s demands for improved terms had rarely slackened, while his habit of gossiping about a fiercely private family had caused Lovelace, on 22 August 1845, to describe him as ‘a villainous incendiary’.

  Overqualified as a children’s teacher, Carpenter had never succeeded in winning over the 9-year-old and stubbornly wayward Viscount Ockham. Mrs Jameson, meeting with young Annabella towards the end of the tutor’s trial term of employment, was shocked by the little girl’s neglected air. ‘I never saw a child to whom a firm, cheerful & tender influence was more wanting,’ she wrote to Lady Byron.

  Mrs Jameson was also aiming a shaft at the child’s absent mother. Ada, until her early thirties, remained singularly detached from her offspring. Back in 1839, she had cared enough to insist – in keeping with her Unitarian beliefs – that little Ralph must not be formally christened. By 1845, she was happy to yield the 6-year-old boy’s upbringing entirely to her mother, while leaving Lovelace to oversee conscientious Miss Cooper, the governess to their older two children.

  Ada’s withdrawal from the conventional maternal role meant that the earl, while always able to draw upon the Hen for calm advice, was obliged to take an active interest in his children. A stickler for discipline, he tried to control everything, from the hour at which the children rode out upon their ponies to the hour at which Miss Cooper began her schoolroom duties. A clock stood within sight of the earl’s bed and his door was always wedged open. Miss Cooper habitually commenced her duties fifteen minutes late. The impulse to provoke such a time-conscious employer must have been irresistible.

  Lord Lovelace’s children never learned to love their father in the way that they did the small, upright figure of whom little Ralph once sweetly observed that ‘Granma’ reminded him of a cow licking her newborn calf, while Lady Annabella relished the occasional treat of being allowed to unpin and brush her grandmother’s waterfall of light-brown hair.* Their grandmother had a gentler manner, but the earl, in his own gruff way, did his best. Taken out of context, Lovelace’s actions can sound harsh. But it was not so unkind for a father to ask a 9-year-old Victorian boy to write his granny a short letter in Latin about the tearing of his riding cape on a bramble bush. While it was thoughtless to threaten a habitually inattentive pupil (Byron Ockham again, on 19 August 1845) w
ith putting him in the blinkers of ‘a nasty, dirty horse’ if he did not sit up and listen, a threat is not equivalent to a deed and Ockham was a very reluctant pupil.

  It was the remembered tedium of sharing his dinner table with William Carpenter (together with the tutor’s wife and their starchy visitors) that caused Lovelace to reject his mother-in-law’s prompt offer to engage a replacement tutor. (Annabella ended by hiring the phrenologically impeccable Mr Herford herself, as a special tutor to young Ralph.) Meanwhile, advised by an anxious mother-in-law that Ada was far too ill to assist him, Lord Lovelace resolved to educate the children on his own.

  Writing to her esteemed son-in-law from Kirkby Mallory on 21 August, Annabella bleakly described Ada’s health as ‘of a very unfavourable character’. She herself planned to remain in Brighton in order to assist in any way that her daughter might require. Ada also admitted that she was indeed in a bad way. ‘You poor dear patient thing – my own bird – the news you give me of the abcess tears my heart,’ Lovelace wrote to Ada in Brighton on 30 August. On 12 October, he despatched one of his most tender notes, hoping that his dear Bird might soon again ‘spread her brilliant wings in the sight of the admiring crow & her young’. Two days later, he confessed to Ada his terror that she might become too ill to perform the work, both in science and music, that she so loved (‘one of the saddest of my many sad reflections about you’).

  It’s impossible to doubt that William Lovelace, although often selfish and increasingly obsessed by his social position in the world, remained deeply attached to his fragile, clever wife. Meanwhile, his new paternal responsibilities turned the earl’s thoughts to religion.