A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (6 page)

There are no weeds in her mind; it has to be planted. Her greatest defect is want of order, which mathematics will remedy. She has taught herself part of Paisley’s Geometry [presumably Batty Langley’s
Practical Geometry
1726, dedicated to Lord Paisley], which she liked particularly.

Despite everything, in this respect it seems that Lady and Lord Byron were in complete agreement who their grown-up daughter should be. When Byron had asked from Greece for a description of his daughter’s character just before his death, he had added:

I hope the Gods have made her anything save poetical – it is enough to have one such fool in the family.

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When in 1837 Benjamin Disraeli, a novelist before he became one of Britain’s most famous politicians, based the heroine of one of his novels
closely on Ada, such was Ada’s celebrity due to the fame of her father’s separation from her mother that he could take it for granted readers would recognise his portrait of her. Disraeli named the Ada character ‘Venetia’ – the eponymous name of the novel – and the Lady Byron character ‘Annabel’, with only a slight change of spelling of the original.

Having begun his novel in traditional nineteenth-century style, with a lengthy description of the ancient, ivy-draped country house, Cherbury, in which the drama, such as it is, takes place, Disraeli continues:

This picturesque and secluded abode was the residence of Lady Annabel Herbert and her daughter, the young and beautiful Venetia, a child, at the time when our history commences, of very tender age. It was nearly seven years since Lady Annabel and her infant daughter had sought the retired shades of Cherbury, which they had never since quitted. They lived alone and for each other, the mother educated her child, and the child interested her mother by her affectionate disposition, the development of a mind of no ordinary promise, and a sort of captivating grace and charming playfulness of temper, which were extremely delightful.

As far as is known, Disraeli never met either Ada or Lady Byron. Nonetheless, Disraeli’s romantic take no doubt reflected the views of the chattering classes of the time, who’d all read Byron’s lampoon of his wife:

Lady Annabel rose from her seat, and walked up and down the room, speaking with an excitement very unusual with her.

‘To have all the soft secrets of your life revealed to the coarse wonder of the gloating multitude; to find yourself the object of the world’s curiosity, still worse, their pity, their sympathy; to have the sacred conduct of your hearth canvassed in every circle, and be the grand subject of the pros and cons of every paltry journal, ah, Venetia! you know not, you cannot understand, and it is impossible you can comprehend, the bitterness of such a lot.’

If that wasn’t purple enough, Disraeli continued with gusto his baroque relief of a wronged woman pining for death to release her from her heartache.

‘I have schooled my mind,’ continued Lady Annabel, still pacing the room with agitated steps; ‘I have disciplined my emotions; I have felt at my heart the constant, the undying pang, and yet I have smiled, that you might be happy. But I can struggle against my fate no longer. No longer can I suffer my unparalleled, yes, my unjust doom. What have I done to merit these afflictions? Now, then, let me struggle no more; let me die!’

Lady Byron, though, had no intention of dying as a result of the year she had spent with Byron. There was far more sport in enjoying her money and rest cures. Nonetheless, Disraeli’s novel does suggest that Lady Byron had a point when she picked remote places for Ada to reach maturity. Far removed from fashionablesociety and its gossip, there was no risk that anyone would cause Ada to be upset, or ask questions, by referring to the shadows of the past.

Ada turned thirteen on December 10 1828 and entered a new phase of her life. Her governess Miss Stamp, whom she liked so much, was leaving the employ of Lady Byron at the end of 1828. Instead of hiring another governess, Lady Byron decided, for the time being at least, to make use of various of her friends to develop Ada’s mind, enhance her studies, and exercise a good moral influence over Ada.

Then, early in 1829, Ada became very ill. She was bedridden until the middle of 1832. The illness had a profound effect on Ada and she lost her dreamlike insouciance and gained focus. She continued her studies with great ardour for the three years when she was bedridden. Lady Byron took care to ensure that Ada did not try to do more than her health permitted, but she now worked hard and was frequently very tough on herself and her educational failings, even though Ada precociously mastered German on her own.

If ever Ada came close to being Lady Byron’s aristocratic mini-me, it was now. Ada reports on occasion that she has gone for a few turns in her wheelchair, and the tone she adopts towards her studies and herself is often indeed serious and even self-chastening. On occasion she is even not adverse to making sneaky comments about her mother.

To her cousin Robert Noel, who had joined their Grand Tour, Ada writes in flawless German.

27 August 1830

I thank you for your letter, and especially for your beautiful handwriting. I am reading Schiller’s translation of Macbeth which I find very interesting because I have never read the play in English. Maybe when I have [read] this work I can obtain one of the books you have so kindly recommended. Miss Doyle and I are reading German together and like the lame and the blind we assist each other.

Her recovery was painfully slow, however. Barely able to move or write, she had lost her appetite for activities such as riding or imagined ones such as flying.

I don’t think you would recognise me, that is how much I have changed since you saw me; I am getting stronger step by step, and with the help of crutches I can go for walks. I lost my taste completely for riding and flying and such, but I feel well enough to play a little piano which give me great pleasure, and if you would be so kind to send me some light pieces of German music, I would be very happy. I especially like the waltz. I hope to hear from you again, even though I cannot write a letter twice as long as you would like me to. Miss Doyle sends her best regards and I do also, my dear cousin.

A. Ada Byron

The next part of Ada’s upbringing is chronicled by a particularly fascinating document, a short biography of Ada (written in about 1847, the precise date is not known) by Woronzow Greig.

Ada Lovelace (née Noel Byron), 1832.

Ada had got to know her future biographer when she and her mother moved to Fordhook Manor in 1832. She was now sixteen, overweight from having been bedridden for three years, but the time was rapidly approaching when she would be expected to enter London society and find an aristocratic husband. It was time for the oyster shells of her childhood to open and filter in the outside world.

Fordhook was in Ealing, today, a suburb of London. But at the time when Ada and Lady Byron lived at Fordhook, Ealing was a separate village, located about eight miles west of the centre of London, and popular with wealthy people who wanted to escape the smells and bustle of the capital, yet remain within easy access to London.

It was – possibly unintended by Lady Byron – a witty literary choice that might have amused libertine Lord Byron. One of the manor’s claims to fame was that it had been the home of the writer Henry Fielding (1707-1754), the creator of immortal, wordy but entertaining and somewhat bawdy novels such
Joseph Andrews
(1742) and
Tom Jones
(1749). These novels were written some decades before the 1830s, when the drawbridge of middle-class morality had come down and started greatly inhibiting what could be said in respectable print about sex. It was not until the last decade of the nineteenth century that writers again dared pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable, such as Thomas Hardy, with his sensuous novel
Jude the Obscure
(1895), though its furore led Hardy to abandon novel-writing.

Lady Byron gave Ada more leeway at Fordhook than Bifrons but recruited three friends no less to help supervise Ada’s education and demeanour. Ada referred to the three women as the ‘Three Furies’ and, resenting their presence in her life deeply, she did all she could to escape their influence. Her success rate was low. Greig wrote ‘As Ada grew older the interference of these ladies became more insufferable, but every attempt to resist it was [illegible] by Lady Byron.’

Born in 1805 and ten years older than Ada, Greig was the son of Mary Somerville. Ada and Lady Byron got to know Mary through Dr William Frend, a by that time ancient Cambridge mathematician who had been Annabella’s tutor when she was young, and whom she had recruited to teach Ada mathematics, too. (Frend was no stranger to avant-garde thinking; a convert to Unitarianism, he had taught his daughter Sophia Hebrew and philosophy, and been one of the tutors of the influential economist Robert Malthus.)

Born on December 26 1780 as daughter of Captain (later Vice-Admiral) William Fairfax, Greig’s mother Mary Somerville was another female genius, a Scottish science writer and polymath, who mastered mathematics, astronomy and other sciences later in life.

Mary had been brought up in Scotland with her brother who was three years older than she was. A sister was born when Mary was seven, and a second brother when she was ten. The two brothers were given a good education but, in keeping with the ideas of the time, little need was seen to educate girls so Mary’s parents provided virtually no education for their daughter.

As a young child what little education she did receive was from her mother, who taught her to read but didn’t consider it necessary to teach her to write. When Mary was ten years old she was sent to a Miss Primrose’s boarding school for girls in Musselburgh (a few miles east of Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth) but only because her father considered her somewhat of a brute. The school in Musselburgh neither gave Mary a happy time nor a good education. She spent only one year there and, on leaving, felt (in her own words) ‘like a wild animal escaped out of a cage’.

After this Mary returned to her home and began to educate herself by reading every book that she could find in her home. Far from encouraging Mary in her voracious reading, members of her family such as her aunt criticised her for spending time on this unladylike occupation. In order that she might learn the correct skills for a young lady, Mary was sent to a school in Burntisland where she was taught needlework.

However, one member of Mary’s family did encourage her educational ambitions. When visiting her uncle in Jedburgh near the English border Mary told him that she had been teaching herself Latin. Far from being cross, her uncle encouraged her and the two would read Latin before breakfast while Mary stayed with him in Jedburgh.

When Mary was about thirteen, the family rented a house in Edinburgh where they spent the winter months, the summers being spent in Burntisland. Mary balanced her life between the social life expected of a young lady at this time and her own private study. She did learn many skills that were seen appropriate for a young lady. In addition to the needlework, she learnt to play the piano and was given lessons in painting from the artist Alexander Nasmyth, then in his thirties, an outspoken supporter of the French Revolution and friend of the famous Scottish poet Robert Burns.

In fact it was through Nasmyth that Mary first became interested in mathematics. She overheard him explaining to another pupil that Euclid’s
Elements
formed the basis for understanding perspective in painting, but much more, it was the basis for understanding astronomy and other sciences. This comment inspired Mary to study Euclid.

There was another quite different reason why Mary became interested in studying algebra. She read an article on the subject in a woman’s magazine belonging to a friend. Her younger brother’s tutor was able to provide Mary with algebra texts and help introduce her to the subject. Mary became so engrossed in mathematics that her parents worried that her health would suffer because of the long hours of study that she put in, usually during the night. Her father believed (not uncommon at the time) that ‘the strain of abstract thought would injure the tender female frame’.

In 1804, when Mary was twenty-four years old, she married a distant cousin, Captain Samuel Greig. Mary and Greig went to London but Mary found that her husband did not understand her desire to learn. As she put it, ‘he had a very low opinion of the capacity of my sex, and had neither knowledge of, nor interest in, science of any kind.’

Samuel Greig died three years after the marriage. By this time Mary had given birth to two sons – one was Woronzow Greig – and on the death of her husband she returned to Scotland with them. She now had a circle of friends who strongly encouraged her in her studies of mathematics and science.

In particular John Playfair, then professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, encouraged her and through him she began a correspondence with a former pupil of Playfair called William Wallace. In this correspondence they discussed the mathematical problems set in the
Mathematical Repository
and in 1811 Mary received a silver medal for her solution to one of these problems. At this time Mary read, among other things, Sir Isaac Newton’s famous
Principia
(1687).

In 1812 Mary Greig married William Somerville, an inspector of hospitals. William was the son of her aunt Martha and her husband Thomas Somerville in whose house she had been born.

Unlike her first husband, William was interested in science and also supportive of his wife’s desire to study. By the time Ada and Lady Byron met Mary, she was well on her way to becoming not only one of the greatest female mathematicians in the world, but one of the greatest mathematicians of either sex.