The deaths of Ada Lovelace and Frederick Robertson, together with her estrangement from Anna Jameson and William Lovelace, left Annabella in a position of emotional isolation. Philanthropy, assuredly, brought many acquaintances and admirers into her life. Her relationship with Parthenope and Florence Nightingale had deepened to the point where Lady Byron would become a recipient and proud transmitter of what amounted to Nightingale’s news bulletins from the frontline, at the height of the Crimean War. But professional colleagues – women like Arabella Lawrence in Liverpool, Mary Carpenter in Bristol, Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Jesser Reid (founder, in 1849, of Bedford, London’s first women’s college) – were themselves energetic reformers with lives of their own. These collaborations were of a warm but practical nature, focussed upon ways to rectify injustice and improve social conditions.
It was, then, a rare treat for Annabella to find that her plans with Henry Crabb Robinson to found a new magazine, The National Review, were assisting the development of a friendship that allowed her to speak freely about the one subject of which she never grew tired. Discussing Lord Byron with his widow, an intrigued Robinson enquired about the poet’s own dark brand of religion. If only she could have turned her husband away from his Calvinistic beliefs and towards her own faith in a forgiving God, Annabella sighed. Did Robinson wonder that she still, after all these years, shrank from reading Byron’s 1822 play (it was partly based on Goethe’s Faust), The Deform’d Transformed? The play distressed her, she explained, because she read into it her superstitious husband’s belief that lameness marked him out – from the first moment of his birth – as cursed by God.*
Byron Ockham’s period of tuition by Lieutenant Arnold proved to be short-lived. In the summer of 1855, the young man headed north from Brighton to take a job screening coal in Sunderland. (As a child, Ockham had been greatly excited by the descent into a Midlands mine arranged by Charles Noel and his tutor.) By December, he had returned to London and signed up to a five-year contract riveting metal plates on to the iron flanks of the Great Eastern, the massive steamship being built at Millwall under the direction of Isambard Brunel and his engineering partner, John Scott Russell.
To an anxious grandmother, the last hope for establishing Ockham in a respectable life lay in ensuring that he had proper lodgings. Conscious that Louisa and Robert Noel were returning from Dresden, Annabella offered them her grandson as a paying lodger for three months. The case was becoming a desperate one, she confessed to Louisa on 26 June: ‘now or never will he form desirable connections. The ball is thrown into the air – who is to catch it?’
The Noels did not step forward to catch it, and it is unlikely that Byron would have accepted such a restricting proposal. By 6 September 1856, only the viscount’s sister and faithful confidante knew that he was living on the Isle of Dogs, where J. Aker’s favourite pastime was to run up different flags in front of his lodgings – Russian one day, American the next – in order to cause a bit of a stir. He was saving hard with a friend, in order to buy a small schooner. He also had plans – shades of his grandfather! – to buy a bear cub. Nothing, however, was said to Byron’s sister about the fact that her brother was hoping to marry Mrs Low, the divorced daughter of his East End landlord. (Conscious of his title and responsibilities, Mrs Low turned him down.)*
Unsurprisingly, Lord Ockham’s twenty-first birthday was not marked at Horsley by the traditional family celebrations for an eldest son.
Lady Byron’s generosity was legendary among those whom she loved. Always on the move, Annabella looked upon her various homes chiefly as useful places in which to provide a refuge for any friends who were poor, unhappy or simply undergoing a time of crisis. In the autumn of 1855, the hard-up De Morgans were offered the loan for as long as they wished of a country house. Making a similar proposal in 1856 to another, much younger couple, Annabella offered George and Louisa MacDonald part of Aford House, her new residence at Ham Common, out beyond Richmond. They should have their own entrance and come and go as they pleased, she promised, but they must never feel excluded from her personal domain. ‘When socially disposed, you will invite yourself,’ their new friend instructed them. ‘My house has often been called Liberty Hall.’*
Annabella was writing primarily to George, the 31-year-old author of ‘Within and Without’, a poem that Lady Byron admired for its intimations of an afterlife. MacDonald went on to write a book – if a personal intrusion can be excused – that held me spellbound when I was a child. ‘I have been asked to tell you about the back of the North Wind,’ the book began.† I doubt if I was the only reader who wept when I reached the moment when Diamond, the boy-hero, is found, stretched out upon his little bed in the hayloft from which the capriciously beautiful North Wind used to carry him away on extraordinary adventures. ‘I saw at once how it was. They thought he was dead,’ MacDonald wrote (as the tale’s narrator). ‘I knew that he had gone to the back of the north wind.’ And that, as MacDonald’s admirers learn to accept, was the best place that any moderately unhappy and imaginative child could hope to be.
The friendship began in 1855, when Annabella wrote an admiring letter to the author of ‘Within and Without’. Soon after this, Lady Byron confessed her personal
