In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

  * * *

  * Tempting though it is to correct the date here to the opening of the Great Exhibition (1851), Ada needed no special permission to view the gems when all was open to the public. More likely, she was hoping for an advance private inspection of the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond, which the 13-year-old Duleep Singh brought over from India in July 1850 as part of the Treaty of Lahore negotiated by Lord Dalhousie after the conquest of the Punjab. Babbage was preparing a guide for the 1851 Exhibition, which probably gave him special access rights.

  * The Knebworth archive contains three letters from Edward Bulwer-Lytton to his young daughter Emily written in June 1847, when EBL hoped the Lovelaces might soon visit his home. Emily, living alone at Knebworth in unhappy circumstances, feared Ada’s ‘disastrous influences’, but her father thought the young countess might prove ‘a good friend’ to his nervous and intelligent daughter. Three days earlier, he had described Ada to Emily as ‘a very remarkable person, extremely original – but too prononcée for my taste, womanly in mienne [sic] but masculine in mind’ (Letters of 16 and 19 June 1847, Knebworth Archive, Box 88).

  * Visiting the abbey in 1857 as part of a tourist jaunt, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne heard the tale of Ada’s visit and her change in manner from their voluble landlady at a nearby inn. Sophia, a great admirer of Lord Byron (Nathaniel was said to resemble the poet), recorded the story in her journal. Washington Irving popularised the anecdote in Bracebridge Hall, a book which included his own visit to the iconic Newstead.

  * It would be easier to interpret Ada’s puzzling letter to Babbage as being concerned (as it purports to be) with the writer’s health, had it had not been written while Lady Lovelace was shinning up mountains in the Lake District and boasting of her wonderfully restored health.

  * Declining on 29 March 1851, on account of ‘poor George’s health’ (although the invitation to Horsley was planned for the following winter), Lucy Byron asked Ada to tell her the truth about something. It’s unclear whether Lucy had heard rumours about buying Newstead, but it is noteworthy that the Wildmans also turned down the Lovelaces’ invitation. (Lovelace Byron Papers.)

  * On 22 August 1851, Ada asked Charles Babbage to purchase Byron’s rifle and pistols from one of Augusta Leigh’s sons as ‘a favour to us’. Nine days later, following a day’s visit from Ralph to Horsley Towers, she told her mother that the boy needed her own care. (‘Set a Byron to rule a Byron! – For Ralph is a Byron – three-quarters at least.’) Commenting on Augusta Leigh’s death to Annabella six weeks later (15 October), Ada ominously alluded to her own dread of ‘that horrible struggle, which I fear is in the Byron blood’.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  RAINBOW’S END

  (1851–2)

  ‘I am spellbound until my offspring is complete, however imperfect.’

  ADA LOVELACE TO LADY BYRON,

  10 AUGUST 1851

  ‘I have also an awful amount of writing to do at present.’

  ADA LOVELACE TO LADY BYRON,

  21 APRIL 1852

  To have created, aged only twenty-seven, a boldly persuasive and articulate account of the possibilities that Charles Babbage’s unbuilt machine could offer was a splendid achievement, but it is important to remember that the celebrated Menabrea ‘Notes’ seem visionary only to us, enlightened retrospectively by Alan Turing’s generous appreciation of a brilliant predecessor. Within her own lifetime, Ada’s ascendant star was quick to fade. By 1851, confronting her own mortality at the age of thirty-five, the need to prove herself as a serious player in a world dominated by men had become overwhelming. Scientific recognition of Ada was what the Hen and her own loyal Crow had always desired. It was this mark of excellence that she herself most craved.

  Again and again, in the stream of letters that Lady Lovelace wrote to Lady Byron during the last full year of her life, she referred to the excitement she felt about her continuing work on ‘light-filled drops’. It was in connection to this work that Ada, during the summer of 1851, pursued a new collegiate friendship with an eminent Scottish scientist. Sir David Brewster’s discovery of the kaleidoscope, back in 1816, was an offshoot from a lifetime dedicated to studying the properties of light.* Both Ada and her mother had known the elderly Scotsman for years (he was close both to Babbage and Mary Somerville), but it was only in 1851 that Ada began to take a particular interest in his work.

  The idea may have come from her husband, always an eager supporter of his wife’s scientific work. On 17 May, Lord Lovelace, Dr Locock, Charles Wheatstone, Adolphe Quetelet (a highly regarded French astronomer) and David Brewster had all attended a dinner in the Royal Society’s splendid rooms at Burlington House.

  Ten days later, the countess asked Charles Babbage to bring Brewster to see her at home, in order that she might converse with him and Adolphe Quetelet. Ada was therefore already in contact with Brewster when she suddenly decided to resume her old connection with Michael Faraday: ‘you see what I do – ever as you like with me,’ Faraday wrote affectionately on 10 June in a letter that also expressed concern about news of Lady Lovelace’s weakened health. On 21 June, Ada told Lady Byron that she was working hard on ‘the drops’ and hoping that the great scientist would visit ‘to give me his ideas on the subject’. The fact that she entreated 13-year-old Annabella on the following day to write and thank Mr Faraday for his kind gift to her of a book (it was a new primer on electricity) suggests that Lady Lovelace was unusually anxious to please him. A few weeks later, on 2 August, she told her mother that Faraday’s reliance upon experiments meant that he, more than Sir David Brewster, would be able to assist her researches on ‘the drops’.

  So, what was it that Ada was working on in her race for time against the painful cancer that was insidiously spreading up through her cervix and into her womb? What were the ‘prismatic drops full of bright & various hues’ to which she was still referring on 29 October 1851, when she entreated her mother to believe that she might yet achieve something, that she ‘had not lived in vain’?

  Surprisingly little attention has been given to this last phase of Ada’s involvement with the world of science. And yet, to judge by the letters that she and her mother exchanged, that research was intended to crown the summit of Ada’s brief career. The most likely explanation of her ‘drops’ is that Ada had turned back to the phenomenon that had captivated her as a light-obsessed child, when she wrote to William Frend to ask if he could explain how a rainbow’s arc was formed. Aged thirty-five, Ada knew that a rainbow is made by the angle from the viewer at which ‘white’ multicoloured sunlight is refracted into its separate components at the back of a drop of rain. She knew that rainbows brighten as they approach the ground because of the lengthening of the raindrops; she knew, too, that the visible arc is part of a circle.

  All of this, by the year 1851, was current knowledge. Ada’s particular interest in the work of David Brewster (whose speciality was optics and the polarisation of light) and of Michael Faraday (who had demonstrated in 1845 that electromagnetism can twist a polarised ray of light shone through thick glass) suggests that her own study was related to the significance of the way raindrops refract the sun’s light. It’s impossible to be certain, but Ada Lovelace may well have been intuitively feeling her way towards the future invention of the spectroscope, an instrument that can replicate a prism by splitting light into its component colours. If so, she was again far ahead of her time; it is through spectroscopy that the properties of distant stars and galaxies can be measured, something that would have delighted Ada with her lifelong passion for astronomy.

  Everything appeared to connect. On 2 August, Ada told her mother that she thought it better to involve Faraday than Brewster because their friend William Rutter’s experiments were closer to his field. William Rutter was one of the ten men of science who in 1850 had founded the British Meteorological Society at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire. David Brewster and Adolphe Quetelet were among the earliest members; Lady Byron and her daughter wer
e also swiftly nominated by John Drew, a 41-year-old astronomer and geologist from Southampton. (Drew knew Lady Byron through her educational work; he had become England’s youngest ever headmaster, aged seventeen, in 1826, at the Southampton school to which Annabella would send her grandson, Ralph King.)

  The letters which Ada wrote to her mother during July 1851 constantly referred to the fact that she herself was working alongside William Rutter. On 5 August, she finalised plans with her mother for Rutter to conduct a privately held experiment during her own August visit to Brighton. It was agreed that a dinnertime discussion of the experiment would take place afterwards at Lady Byron’s home on Marine Parade.

  And then comes Ada’s curveball. Firstly, she brought not Michael Faraday but David Brewster as her companion on this scientific mission. Secondly, while experiments were indeed carried out, they were not of the kind that Ada’s letters about light-filled drops might reasonably lead us to expect.

  Brewster and his wife were paying an October visit to Hartwell House, the family home of astronomer John Lee, when he finally recorded what he had witnessed three months earlier at Brighton. On 6 August, Lady Byron and her daughter had taken him to observe the movements of a pear-shaped ball of wax when suspended from William Rutter’s fingers by a silk thread. Under Rutter’s grasp, the ball rotated from left to right; dangled from the hand of a woman, the movement was reversed. And what, the shrewd old Scotsman wondered, would occur if a blindfold were in place? But Brewster himself was far from sceptical. The experiment had greatly intrigued him, and he described it with scientific care, while drawing a parallel to the prevalent rage for spirit rapping and levitation.

  William Rutter’s experiment was less fey than Brewster’s description suggests. Its purpose was not to indicate the presence of mysterious spirits, but to demonstrate the power of electromagnetic forces within the human body. It’s possible that Ada – whose interest in creating what she had grandly named ‘a calculus of the nervous system’ dated back to the mid-1840s – may have believed that she could draw upon this inner source of energy to overcome the physical challenges to her weakening frame.

  While the link between magnetism and Ada’s research into light-filled drops remains unclear, it is evident that she considered Rutter’s demonstration a success. On 1 September, she reassured her mother that the ‘drops’ were still flowing well and that she would soon be able to offer ‘a certain solid reality, upon which to judge, rather than to hope’. Lady Byron had already hoped for far too long, as her daughter acknowledged with a wistful plea: ‘Have patience . . . yet a little longer.’

  Two months passed. On 29 October 1851, a poignant letter from Ada followed a brief bedside discussion with her mother. Apparently, Lady Byron’s words had given ‘great encouragement’ and a promise was made that she might yet, ‘by and bye’, see ‘certain productions’. But Ada’s mind was clouded by pain-killing drugs. Her brave assurances shifted into a strange vision of herself presiding over regiments of numbers, ‘marching in irresistible power to the sound of Music. Is not this very mysterious?’

  As Ada felt her grasp upon life slipping away, her attachment to her children grew stronger. Ralph, still living under his grandmother’s supervision at Brighton and Southampton, aroused grave concern in November 1851 when he caught scarlet fever, one of the major killers in Victorian times. Lady Byron’s attachment to her youngest grandchild was never more clearly demonstrated than by the fact that she herself arranged to watch over and nurse him, in her own bedroom, until the highly contagious fever had abated. Ada, helplessly fretting at a distance, urged his sister to write Ralph cheering letters, while wondering at the capricious fate that allowed the lives of both her sons to be threatened when she herself was so ill.

  Byron Ockham’s letters from abroad sometimes took as long as three months to arrive. When they came, poor Ada shuddered at the dangers to which his parents had exposed their oldest boy. She was not to know that Viscount Ockham, who was still only fifteen, was relating his exploits with considerably more verve than accuracy. Promises to bring home a collection of scalps (‘What a very odd mind Byron’s is!’ Ada commented to her mother on 13 November 1851) were based on his having seen such trophies being brandished at officers by a group of marauding ‘natives’ during his stay at Vancouver Island. A dramatic account of his near shipwreck at Mazatlán failed to mention that the Daphne, when a hurricane ripped away her sails and snapped her masts in half, had been safely anchored in harbour.

  Byron’s adventures were, nevertheless, remarkable. In September 1851, a month before the Mexican storm, the Daphne had sailed along North America’s western coastline from Vancouver to San Francisco. The California Gold Rush was then at its zenith. The wooden city of some 30,000 citizens was still being rebuilt after a summer fire had razed a quarter of its flimsy structures to the ground, but brothels and drinking saloons were still flourishing in the town for which the term gold-digger was coined, and where dashing, gun-toting ladies were frequently available for a fistful of glinting coins.

  Had the Lovelaces made a terrible mistake in sending their eldest son to sea? Writing back to Ockham on 15 November, Ada pleaded with her jaunty sailor-son to remember that there was no real need for him to remain on the other side of the world, ‘unless by yr own wish’. By the time her letter arrived, Lord Ockham was off in Mexico, helping Captain Fanshawe to take charge of the crates of silver bullion required by the British government from the owners of some of South America’s most brutal and dangerous mines. Granted, this was an extraordinary way of life for a young Unitarian aristocrat who otherwise would have been swotting over his classics with a tutor, but young Byron’s letters betrayed no trace of homesickness, and no evidence that he wanted to renounce his swashbuckling life at sea.

  Byron Ockham’s reaction might well have been different had he known how gravely ill his mother had become by the autumn of 1851. It was harder to protect his sister from the truth. By the end of October, Ada’s daughter had returned home from a second journey to Europe with Agnes Greig and Miss Wächter. Writing to Mrs Greig just ahead of the September trip, Ada had asked that the young girl should be bought a pretty dress from Paris (‘whatever she likes best’), and that Annabella should be shielded from the news that her beloved governess was suffering from incurable cancer.

  How much did Ada know about her own state when she wrote to Mrs Greig of Miss Wächter’s ‘horrible doom’? Three months later, her favourite physician, the habitually optimistic Charles Locock, reluctantly acknowledged the gravity of his patient’s case. On 25 November, a miserable William Lovelace broke a long silence to tell Lady Byron the ominous news. To the patient herself, Dr Locock spoke only of a slight improvement. On 28 November, Ada urged Annabella to pass the good news along to Papa. Whether Ada herself believed it is doubtful.

  Nothing indicates Ada Lovelace’s acceptance of her fate more touchingly than her new concern for the welfare of the 14-year-old girl who was now home from her travels and living alone at Horsley Towers with her father. Lady Byron, exhausted by nursing Ralph through scarlet fever and worried about the declining health of Frederick Robertson, was in no state, at the close of 1851, to take in a second grandchild. While Ralph was despatched for a second stay at the Fellenbergs’ family home in Switzerland, Ada turned to the trusted friends who had always been quietly present in the background of the Lovelaces’ lives.

  Margaretta Burr was a talented watercolour painter who had taken her sketch pad along when she and her husband travelled around the Middle East with Lord Lovelace’s Egyptologist friend, Sir John Gardner Wilkinson. At Aldermaston Court, a splendid faux-Elizabethan house standing above its own lake in Berkshire countryside (Daniel Burr had rebuilt it from scratch after a massive fire in the 1840s), the Burrs and Wilkinsons lived almost as a single family. On 21 November, Margaretta visited a wan and bedbound Ada in London to glean ideas for a great fancy-dress ball she was planning to welcome in the coming year. It was agreed that Aldermaston shou
ld become a second home to Ada’s children during this sad and difficult time. Meanwhile, discussions with Mrs Burr about young Annabella’s future encouraged Ada to adopt a new policy towards the daughter whom she now began to treat as her confidante and – as she fondly threatened ‘(unless you escape by marrying) . . . my Vice-Queen in everything’.

  A vice-queen’s duties were not onerous. At Horsley, where Ada’s daughter gaily reported that dear, earnest Miss Wächter was urging her to be ‘neat as a new pig’ (with five underlinings), Annabella was instructed (on 29 November) to act as a grown-up hostess. She was to be sure to conduct guests around the earl’s beloved tower (‘You know that the Tower is decidedly Papa’s first born, & dearer to him than kith or kin or life itself’), and prepare herself to preside at the Boxing Day Hunt breakfast, when Lovelace’s new Great Hall became a sounding sea of horns, hounds and red coats. In early January (following a cosy Christmas with the Lushingtons at Ockham), Annabella was to make her grown-up debut at Mrs Burr’s great masquerade, to which Papa would accompany his daughter, wearing the ‘Albanian’ uniform in which – so a fond wife fancied – William always looked his most Byronic.

  Meanwhile, behind her daughter’s back, Ada was urging her reluctant husband to play his part. Mrs Burr was counting upon him to attend the ball; Annabella could not possibly attend without an escort; William’s Egyptologist friend, Gardner Wilkinson, had already picked out a pretty Spanish costume for the dear girl. And besides, Ada weakly pleaded, surely the Crow would wish to see ‘how handsome and admired yr daughter will be!’ Pressed by all, Lovelace gave in. An excited and gravely beautiful Cinderella went to the Burrs’ great ball with her father at her side, a magnificent figure in his glittering uniform.