The Age of Wonder (14 page)

Her brother Jacob refused to allow her to train as a milliner, although she was encouraged to learn just enough to be able to deal with the household clothes and linen. Her father had once hoped to give her ‘something like a polished education’, but her mother insisted that, given the family situation, it should be practical and ‘rough’; she would not even allow her to learn French, in case she developed ambitions to be a governess.
⁴¹
Similarly, little Dietrich was denied a dancing master. Anna also observed that it was ‘her certain belief’ that had William read less, he would never have stayed away in England.
⁴²
When Jacob insisted that an extra servant girl be hired, she was given Caroline’s room and bed to share. For Caroline, ‘her destiny now seemed unalterable’. She was to be the family housekeeper, a spinster and permanent maidservant.
⁴³
She later decided to destroy all the journals referring to her private feelings during these years of misery. She did not want to write in the fashionable Romantic mode of the personal confession. ‘After reading over many pages,’ she wrote to Dietrich, ‘I thought it better to destroy them, and merely write down what I remember to have passed in our family at home, and abroad.’

In fact much remains of her inner life: as much perhaps as in the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. This dramatic rejection of the record of her childhood unhappiness was really a prelude to continuing revelations of frustrations in adulthood. ‘By what is to follow,’ she explained, ‘[Dietrich] may also see how vainly his poor Sister has been struggling through her whole life…wasting her time in the performance of such drudgeries and laborious works as her good Father never intended to see her grow up for.’ This was the ultimate cause, she came to think, of the ‘mortifications and disappointments which have attended me throughout a long life’. But all this was in retrospect, nearly sixty years later.
⁴⁴

In the summer of 1764, apparently without warning, to Caroline’s astonished delight her brother William-‘let me say my
dearest
brother’-reappeared in Hanover.
⁴⁵

4

What had happened to him in the interval? From his intermittent letters to Jacob, and things he subsequently told Caroline, it is possible to reconstruct the outline of his adventures, though with many gaps. Against all expectation, he had not remained in London, or gone back to his friends in Kent, but had boldly struck into the remote north of England. Surprisingly he used his military contacts to obtain the post of civilian music master to the Durham militia, which was stationed under the Earl of Darlington at Richmond in Yorkshire.
⁴⁶
This was as much a social engagement as a military one, and Herschel was soon completely independent, working as a freelance musician and music teacher in Leeds, Newcastle, Doncaster and Pontefract, and as an organist in Halifax. Little is known about these posts, except that he was constantly on the move, frequently lonely, and sometimes weeping with homesickness.

Every so often Jacob received letters from William with varied English postmarks, and written-with remarkable versatility-in German, French or English as the mood and subject took him. These letters were also covered in mechanical diagrams, and frequently shifted without a break from words to musical notation. They give a sense of Herschel’s mind switching with extraordinary agility between different modes of expression and zones of thought-literary, mechanical, musical, philosophical.
⁴⁷

From Yorkshire on 11 March 1761 he wrote in a fit of melancholy for which he chose slightly faltering English: ‘I must tell you a certain anxiety attends a vagrant life. I do daily meet with vexations and trouble and live only by hope. Many a restless night have I had; many a sigh and-I will not be ashamed to say it-many a tear.’ But a fortnight later he was writing from Sunderland in sprightly French about two pretty girls he had just met-one of them ‘
la plus belle du monde, la Beauté elle-meme personnifée
’-whose accomplishments included excessive blushing, flirting and playing the guitar. Sadly they only met once, though Herschel later confessed that they corresponded for over a year-another indication of his loneliness, perhaps.
⁴⁸

He chose German for his philosophical reflections. All of these were thoughtful, but many of them gloomy: the stoic doctrines of Epictetus, the optimism of Leibniz (’not the least credible nor feasible’), the origins of evil, the nature of sin, the ethical (rather than the intellectual) necessity for Christian religion in European society. ‘In all ages there have been philosophers who have had thoughts
above their religion,
and have been true Deists’-but it was ‘impossible’ in the present state of education for ‘a whole nation to be true Deists’. William himself described God memorably, in German, as ‘the unknowable,
must-exist Being
’.
⁴⁹
With this formula he was able to set aside, for the time being at least, the problem of a personal Creator.

He had thought often about the ‘immortality of the soul’, but said (to Jacob at least) that he preferred not to draw any conclusions. His unchar-acteristically pious explanation seems to disguise a scientific reservation that there was no ‘intelligible’ data on the matter: ‘My feeble understanding is not capable of pushing so far into the secrets of the Almighty;
and as all those propositions have something unintelligible about them,
I think it better to remain content with my ignorance till it pleases the Creator of all things to call me to Himself and to draw away the thick curtain which now hangs before our eyes.’ In fact ‘pushing far into secrets’ was always Herschel’s natural instinct and delight.
⁵⁰
Perhaps music provided a way of pondering these questions, and at this time he composed an oratorio based on Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
though the manuscript score has not survived.
⁵¹

Another way would be astronomy. For the glowing exception to these dark truths about human life was always the life of Nature, already an endless source of clarity and consolation for Herschel. ‘If one observes the whole Natural World as one, one finds everything in the most Beautiful Order; it is my favourite maxim:
Tout est dans l’ordre!
’
⁵²

Riding between musical engagements, from one remote provincial northern town to another, often crossing over the moors alone at night, he found himself studying the panoply of stars overhead as he had done as a boy. He became well acquainted with the moon, and would later write that at this time he had intended ‘to fix upon the moon for my habitation’.
⁵³
He also later told several tales about these lonely rides, one being how on one occasion he was reading so intently that when his horse stumbled and threw him, he somersaulted over its head and landed upright still holding his book in his hand, a perfect demonstration of the Newtonian law of ‘circular motion’.
⁵⁴

Herschel now began to explore further the work of James Ferguson (1710-76), a man after his own heart who had started life as an illiterate Highland farm-labourer, and had become one of the most distinguished practical astronomers and demonstrators. His
Astronomy Explained
(1756) ran to numerous popular editions, and he later vividly described in his
Autobiography
(1773) how he fell in love with astronomy. He would take a blanket out into the fields after work, and lie on his back measuring star distances and patterns with beads on a string held up over his head. He then transferred these, by the light of a stub of candle on a stone, to his first paper star-maps, spread out beside him on the grass. He said he imagined the ecliptic (the sun’s curving path through the heavens) like a high road running through the stars. Gradually he taught himself astronomy and built his own telescopes. He later invented various devices for projecting constellations during his lectures, and his ‘Eclipseon’ for showing the various movements of the solar system.

Living in lonely bachelor lodgings, Herschel spent more and more time reading about stellar theory. He followed Robert Smith’s
Harmonics
(1749) with his
Compleat System of Opticks
(1738), which contained illustrated sections on astronomical observations.
⁵⁵
He began to be preoccupied with various cosmological problems: what was the relation between music, mathematics and star patterns? Was there life on the moon? What was the structure and composition of the sun? How far away were the nearest stars? What was the true size and shape of the Milky Way? Many of these problems would emerge in his earliest scientific papers, and would continue to fascinate him for the rest of his life.

He was approaching thirty, and to all appearances he was alone and adrift in a foreign land. But he was not disorganised or depressed. Much of his father’s military discipline, and his own professionalism, now stood him in good stead. He worked immensely hard, with an energy and determination that never left him. His musical appointments were increasingly important, regular and better paid. At Halifax he was conducting an orchestra, playing the organ, giving singing lessons, and composing his own music. He was also learning Italian.

After a period of physical weakness in his late teens (which Caroline had anxiously remarked on), William had grown into a tall, commanding figure, with a high, intellectual forehead, and very striking dark eyes. Outwardly at least, he was cheerful and sociable. It is evident that he made friends wherever he went. At one concert he was joined by the Duke of York, brother of the new King George III, who accompanied him (rather badly) on the violoncello. On another occasion he was invited to conduct one of his own symphonies at St Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh. At the reception afterwards, he chanced to meet the philosopher David Hume, and was promptly invited out to dinner.
⁵⁶
There was something about Herschel’s mixture of intensity and innocence that simply charmed people. And talented German exiles were, of course, popular.

Herschel was brought back to Hanover by a combination of circumstances. His work at Halifax had led to the first really serious opportunity of his career: the possibility of being appointed the organist of the new Octagon Chapel at Bath, when its building was completed. Bath was fast becoming the most fashionable city in England-nearly ready for Beau Brummell-and all kinds of other musical work would obviously be available there. Herschel immediately thought of his brothers, Jacob and Alexander. He had heard too that his father Isaac was ill, and not likely to live much longer. There may also have been worries about the younger children under Jacob’s care-Caroline and little Dietrich.
⁵⁷
At all events, the prodigal son suddenly reappeared in Hanover in the summer of 1764. He arrived saying he had just observed an eclipse of the sun as he rode over the Luneburger Heath.

Caroline was then fourteen, and her appearance following her illness must have shocked him. But there was little that he could do for her immediately, and after an absence of nearly seven years his visit to Hanover lasted a mere fortnight. It was a sober reunion. Isaac, obviously failing, could not persuade him to remain, and instead William spoke of future plans for his brothers as musicians in England. Nothing was said of Caroline at this point. William must have known it was the last time he would see his father alive.

Caroline remembered William’s departure after his flying visit with grief and frustration. It was the day of her first communion, and William had particularly admired her appearance in a new black silk dress. But she was sent to church by Jacob, and not allowed to see William off. She never forgot that moment. ‘The church was crowded and the door open. The Hamburg Postwagen passed at eleven, bearing away my dear brother…It was within a dozen yards from the open door; the postillion giving a
smettering
blast on his horn. Its effect on my shattered nerves, I will not attempt to describe, nor what I felt for days and weeks after.’ She walked home alone, ‘in feverish wretchedness’, wearing her new dress and painfully aware that she was carrying the bouquet of artificial flowers that her elder sister Sophia had worn on her ill-fated wedding day.
⁵⁸

Their father died of a stroke in 1767, but William did not return for the funeral. He would not come back to Hanover for another eight years.
⁵⁹

5

William was offered the organ post in August 1766, and officially moved to Bath in December of that year. Before the chapel was opened he found a lucrative position in the famous Pump Room Band, run by the impresario James Linley. The Pump Room and Theatre was then the very height of fashionable entertainment. Linley’s daughter, the singer ‘Angel’ Linley, later became a star at Drury Lane, and married the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Early on, Herschel had a quarrel with Linley over orchestral arrangements in the Pump Room, which got into the newspapers and caused a brief but diverting scandal in Bath society. The disagreements were minor-the appointment of singers, the provision of music stands-but there was some suggestion that Linley was exploiting Herschel as a German outsider. What was remarkable was the sudden revelation of Herschel’s fiery temper and determination when roused. Far from conceding to Linley, he took out a series of advertisements against his concerts in the
Bath Chronicle.
He referred openly to Linley’s ‘low Cunning and dark Envy’, and set up a competing programme with a rival diva, the Italian singer Signora Farinelli. This proved a great success.