Writing to Mrs Somerville, out in Florence, Annabella attempted to reconstruct the past. Rumours (she wrote) might have reached the Somervilles out in Italy that Lady Byron had excluded Charles Babbage from her daughter’s home. Such gossip was ill-founded. Ada had ‘never hinted at any wish to see him’. This was untrue. Ada had specifically requested her mother to copy out a letter from Charles Locock in which the sympathetic doctor confirmed his patient’s eagerness to see Babbage. The wish had been there, but Annabella chose to draw a very fine line of distinction between the doctor’s letter and Ada’s own expressed desire. Mrs Somerville, while dutifully preserving Lady Byron’s letter, was prudent enough not to respond.
The fault lay on both sides. Annabella blamed Babbage for helping to lead Ada down from the sunny heights of science on which Lady Byron had yearned for her brilliant child to secure an enduring and eminent position. Babbage, for his part, felt that both he and the Wilsons had been badly treated. Like Lady Byron, Babbage was a man who did not easily forgive.
Talking to an admiring American visitor a full two years after Ada’s death, Charles Babbage became unexpectedly garrulous on the unexpected topic of Lady Lovelace’s hatred of her mother and her husband. Of Ada herself, Babbage apparently spoke with sad affection: ‘there was so much feeling in both his words and manner that I did not feel at liberty to question him as to the nature of the unhappiness of the life he was speaking of . . .’ So sombre and altered was Babbage’s manner at this point that the visitor, one Henry Hope Reed, was led to assume that the unknown lady at issue must have killed herself.
The interview (it appeared in an American journal several years after Mr Hope Reed’s death) is fascinating in what it reveals about Babbage himself. The problem with Ada Lovelace, Babbage informed his attentive visitor, was that she was ‘utterly unimaginative’. You could say anything you liked (‘all sorts of extraordinary stories’) and that ‘matter-of-fact mind’ of hers would accept them all as plain fact. Really, it was quite hilarious to see how solemnly the countess swallowed them down.
Henry Hope Reed took Babbage at his word. Yet it was Babbage himself who, while cumbersomely playful, entirely lacked the imaginative power which had enabled a visionary Ada Lovelace to foresee the possibilities inherent in his machine. Laughingly, Ada had complained to her mother of being plagued by far too vivid a mind. And yet, here stood poor Babbage in 1854, assuring a respectful visitor that the fancies and the games and the wit had all been on his side. Perhaps it was as well that Charles Babbage had never appreciated the gift of joy his own laborious jokes had proven to the dancing, quicksilver mind of his attentive Lady Bird, his glittering Fairy.
The third of Lady Byron’s relationships to be enduringly affected by her daughter’s death was her friendship with Anna Jameson, the loquacious Irish art historian to whom – over a period of ten years – Annabella had become as close as a sister. The reasons for their estrangement were several. It was a painful shock for Annabella to learn that her gambling-obsessed daughter had turned to Mrs Jameson for financial support and that Anna had provided it, all without a word to Annabella herself. Equal pain was inflicted when Mrs Jameson, while desperately endeavouring to restore herself to Lady Byron’s good graces, attacked the character of her dying daughter. Mrs Jameson loved Ada. It’s unlikely that she said anything intentionally cruel. To Annabella, however, during the testing final weeks of her daughter’s excruciatingly extended life, any word of criticism dropped acid upon an open wound.
A meeting between the newly estranged ladies took place during December 1852. According to a loudly distraught Mrs Jameson, the word ‘friendship’ was flung back in her face. To Elizabeth Barrett Browning (a woman who said her flesh crawled at the mere thought of touching Lady Byron’s hand), Jameson later confided (on 18 May 1856) that the shock of being exposed to Annabella’s ‘inexorable’ temper had almost destroyed her. Throughout 1853, nevertheless, Mrs Jameson struggled to mend bridges, while Annabella continued smilingly to deny – it was a technique that Lady Byron had honed to perfection – that her own feelings had ever altered.
On 23 January 1854, having expressed courteous regret at the reported death of Anna’s mother, Mrs Murphy, Annabella rejected the peace offering of a contribution to her own private Kirkby monument to Ada (for which, as she took care to point out, no donations had been solicited or desired). On 13 February, following a further cool exchange, Lady Byron remarked that, while chilled by Mrs Jameson’s ‘persistent attacks’, her own affection remained unchanged. Had she herself not confirmed, towards the end of 1852 (we can be sure that the meticulous Annabella had placed the copied original before her as she wrote), that she was ‘as ever your Friend’?
Anna Jameson’s last and fatal error was to express forgiveness, both towards Ada and to her mother. It was the offer of ‘forgiveness’ to herself that had made Lady Byron want to strike Augusta Leigh during their ill-fated final encounter. Extended by Mrs Jameson, whose assistance to Ada Lady Byron regarded as inexcusably disloyal to herself, forgiveness was an insult. Responding to it in that same icily courteous letter of 13 February, Lady Byron commanded ‘My dearest Mrs Jameson’, please, to leave the issue of who should forgive whom aside – and to allow Ada’s reputation to take care of itself.
You tell me you have ‘shielded the memory of Lady Lovelace from the cruel world.’ If the world is cruel, let it alone – if the ‘Repentance’ which is now by her own direction
