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
