A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (17 page)

17

After 1843, the most intellectually exciting year of Ada’s life, she continued (not always explicably) to be friends with Babbage and having quite a busy social life among the higher echelons of Victorian intellectual society, her friends including Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday and many other literary and scientific luminaries of the age.

Her mother was also busy with her social life and with her various health preoccupations. It is possible that Ada met Countess Teresa Guiccioli, Byron’s former lover, who was travelling with her new husband, the Marquis of Boissy, and spent some time in London with him. The Marquis had pursued Teresa ardently before she succumbed to him, and he was always deeply proud that she had been Byron’s lover. Boissy liked to introduce Teresa to people as ‘Madame la Marquise de Boissy, autrefois la Maitresse de Milord Byron’ (Madam the Marchioness of Boissy, formerly the mistress of Lord Byron)
.

Teresa lived into old age. She survived until 1873 and so outlived not only Lord Byron and his only legitimate daughter, but also Lady Byron and Babbage.

Babbage most likely met the Countess and while Lady Byron would naturally not have been keen for Ada to meet Teresa, Ada possibly did. Teresa evidently liked London and visited there on more than one occasion. Teresa was interested in science and attended at least one lecture, in 1845, given by the well-known scientific populariser Dionysius Lardner, whose lectures Ada herself had attended avidly ten years earlier to understand the Difference Engine. The actor William Macready, who was probably the person who introduced Babbage to Dickens and vice versa, wrote in his diary on June 18 1835 that he had gone to Dr Lardner’s house and met, among other people, Teresa Guiccioli.

Ada wrote two letters to Babbage in 1844, asking him what to do about someone Ada seems to have called ‘Countess Italia-Italia’, though the transcription is hard to be sure about. However, Babbage had probably met Teresa himself during one of her visits to London, and it is at least possible that Ada met her herself, but there is no definite evidence for this.

Much of Ada’s life during her last years is inadequately documented. It is known that she became interested in the late 1840s in going horse-racing, and became quite addicted to this pursuit and lost large sums of money on gambling on horses at the beginning of 1850 apparently, when slips of paper with tips addressed to her maid can be found among her papers. According to her son Ralph, she lost about £3200 on betting on horse races; this was a vast sum at the time and it is not clear how Ada paid it. She suffered almost continual money problems in the last few years of her life. William could not help her much as he himself had times when he was short of cash and was in any case parsimonious, and Lady Byron, while on occasion generous to Ada and in possession of a vast fortune, did not regularly help Ada financially.

There have been some efforts to investigate whether she might have been trying to develop, perhaps with Babbage’s help, some kind of mathematical system for betting on horses. These efforts are spurred on by Ada and Babbage mentioning a ‘book’ (it is not known what kind of book they mean) in letters in 1848 and 1849. It has been speculated that the word referred to a book, a term used in horseracing. But it is more likely that it referred to a book that they perhaps planned to write together to continue their cooperation over the
Notes
. This illusory project would have provided Babbage with a face-saving way to maintain their friendship and avoid having to give Ada a blunt ‘no’ to her long written request of being involved with the Engine after the
Notes
.

On September 7 1850, not long before her death, Ada finally visited Newstead Abbey for the first and last time in her life. She was travelling with her husband William in the north of England and visited the Abbey, as well as the popular novelists Edward Bulwer Lytton and Walter Scott, and the owners of a racehorse she had mentioned to Lady Byron. Ada and William’s host was Colonel Wildman, who had been busily restoring Newstead Abbey after having bought it from Lord Byron. Lady Byron had herself made a visit to Newstead Abbey, alone without Ada, in 1818, and had written a feeble poem about being there:

I remember when beside the bed

Which pillowed last that too reposeless head,

I stood – so undesert’d looked the scene

As there at eve its inhabitants had been.

Struck by that thought, and rooted to the ground,

Instinctively I listen’d, look’d around,

Whilst banish’d passion rushed to claim again

Its throne, all vacant in my breast till then.

And pardon’d be the wish, when thus deceiv’d

To perish, ere of hope again bereav’d!

Ada, for her part, was profoundly moved by her own visit to Newstead Abbey. After she and William arrived, Colonel Wildman gave them a tour of the main chambers, and they were then shown to their rooms, which were above the old cloister, overlooking the Gothic fountain. Ada and William appear to have had separate rooms at Newstead.

Ada’s initial response to Newstead Abbey was that Wildman had done an excellent job of the renovations and spent money such as ‘no Byron could have afforded’, but that the place seemed bereft of the spirit of her father. On September 8 she wrote gloomily to her mother that she felt:

[L]ow and melancholy. All is like death round one; & I seem to be in the Mausoleum of my race. What is the good of living, when thus all passes away & leaves only cold stone behind it? There is no life here, but cold dreary death only… I am glad to see the home of my ancestors but I shall not be sorry to escape from the grave. I see my own future continuing visibly around me… I have not yet seen my father’s rooms. No one is here but the Hamilton Greys, & we are perfectly quiet, & just like Goody Two Shoes!

Only I feel as if I had become a stone monument myself. I am petrifying fast.

However, on September 10, when Ada went for a walk by herself in the grounds of the abbey, she wandered among places such as the Devil’s Wood, a thick, dark grove of trees overlooking one of the fishponds. Walking in the grounds, Ada was haunted by feelings about the father she had never seen. Colonel Wildman encountered her there in the grounds, and while it is not clear what she and Wildman spoke about, it appears that she told him much about her feelings about her father, his Cambridge friend.

Colonel Thomas Wildman, 1831 (Thomas Lawrence).

On this meeting, Julian Hawthorn recounts in the biography of his father Nathaniel a letter from his mother in which she describes what her landlady at Newstead had told her during their visit to Byron’s former home. Wildman had invited Ada to Newstead, expecting a ‘pleasant knowledgeable guest’ and he had read up on his classics and mathematics to be well prepared for his well-read guest. Instead the Ada who turned up was ‘not beautiful, and did not resemble her father at all’, she was ‘extremely careless in her dress… very silent and gloomy.’ Fed up after two days of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ to questions, Colonel Wildman finally followed her into the garden and ‘accosted her with resolute sociability.’ Under his friendly attack Ada’s sepulchral mood finally broke down. She explained why she was so glum and the rest of the visit she was indeed the delightful guest he had hoped for.

The experience Ada had at Newstead Abbey led to a rift between Ada and Lady Byron that probably never completely healed. Ada had received money before the trip from her, on this rare occasion, munificent mother. But neither she nor William were subsequently able to conceal the emotional closeness she had felt to her father while at Newstead, and Lady Byron became convinced that Ada was now taking the long-dead Byron’s side against Lady Byron’s, which it appears Ada was indeed doing. There is evidence that after visiting Newstead Abbey, Ada was never again as close to her mother as she, Ada, had been before going there.

Her friendship with Babbage continued to be an important part of her life and his. In an undated letter Babbage sent her that was most likely written in 1851, Babbage even felt able to confide in Ada, rather self-pityingly but also movingly, about his loneliness. At the time, it was usual for wives whose husbands had left the marital home to place advertisements in newspapers offering forgiveness and reconciliation if the husbands would come home. In those days before the telephone and long before the internet, this was just about the only technique available to communicate to the ‘wandering lords’, as Babbage described them. The husbands were, naturally, not referred to in the advertisements by their names but by initials.

Babbage, seeing some of these advertisements one day, was seized with a consciousness of his own loneliness.

My dear Lady Lovelace

I sat last night reading the advertisements of deserted wifes to charm back their wandering lords.

I am not a wanderer though I had none to charm me…

Another glimpse of how he feels inwardly is provided by Babbage including on the title page of his autobiography the lines
‘I’m a philosopher. Confound them all! / Birds, beasts and men; but – no, not womankind’
which appear in Byron’s long poem
Don Juan.

The lines are at the start of Canto Six, stanza 22, but Babbage has misquoted the passage, which actually reads as
I’m a philosopher; confound them all -/ Bills, beasts and men; and
– no, not womankind!’

But even though Babbage thought Byron had written ‘birds’ when he meant ‘bills’ (logical enough things for Byron to object to), the emphasis on a belief in womankind being the salvation is what really matters here, and Babbage obviously shares this belief.

Here, as in the reference to the wandering lords and in the letter where he may be describing Ada as the Enchantress of Number, we encounter sudden depths opening up that give us peeks into the deeply-feeling and even romantic man who seems much of the rest of the time to have kept this aspect of his personality in check.

The misquotation may be due to Babbage confusing the lines in
Don Juan
with an extract from Byron’s poem
Darkness
, which reads:

… and kept

The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay.

Did Babbage and Ada ever read Byron’s poetry together? It is a tantalising idea, but there is no record that they did. What they did most likely do is have many walks together discussing subjects that surely included mathematics, philosophy, Babbage’s Engines and – perhaps – poetry. Part of the terrace at Ada’s country home Ashley in Somerset became known as ‘Philosopher’s Walk’, as it was there that Ada and Babbage were reputed to have walked while having their discussions.

By the summer of 1851 Ada’s health was beginning to take a serious turn for the worse. She had never been very strong during her life, and the mid to late 1840s had been a period for her of intermittent illness, and she often suffered from nervous exhaustion and general debilitation almost as a matter of course. By the summer of 1851, however, Ada began to suffer from the first signs of uterine cancer. This initially manifested itself in frequent bleeding which, to start with, was painless. Ada knew she was not well, but at first she remained optimistic. On July 24 1851 she wrote to her husband William:

Now as to my health: I do not agree with you that the progress is
slow.
When we consider that I have
not
been quite
2 months
under treatment, for a most serious complaint which had existed (more or less) for upward of a year, – I think we cannot call the present state other than
very
satisfactory. Not only is there an improvement in
nerves
& in general health which is obvious to everyone, & is most of all felt & known to myself – but the
local
condition is no longer
vicious
. Dr Locock explained to me yesterday how threatening & how morbid it
had
been.

He said that tho’ now there is still an extense deep seated
sore
, yet it is a
healthy
sore.

Within a month she started feeling less positive about things (the ‘healthy sore’ would turn out to be malignant), as in this letter she wrote again to her mother on Saturday August 16 1851:

By the bye, Dr Cape said last time, that my complaint, such as it
was
, must have injured my
mind
, & greatly impaired its power & its clearness; because that for
months previous
, there had been as it were a continuous
current drawn off
from the Brain. I often feel great
confusion
& difficulty in
concentrating my ideas
; & also if I could only
perceive one
idea at a time. At other times I felt also as if I were
dulled
&
indifferent
.

He tells me that death would have been by
total
failure of
mind
; in short the successive
fading
first of everything
human
, & then everything
vital!
Give me a
spasm
to kill me
at once
, sooner than such a dreadful fate…