* Mrs Follen had also helped Harriet Martineau with her article about Lady Byron, back in 1860, negotiating a payment by Mr Fields at The Atlantic Monthly of $2 a page. (Martineau Letters, CRL, University of Birmingham.)
* On 15 February 1886, one Henry Carlisle begged Lady Dorchester to return the letters that she had loaned to Abraham Hayward, of which Hayward ‘would gladly be rid’, as the letters were now causing ‘trouble’ from Lord Wentworth. The mystery of why Lady Dorchester’s father, Lord Broughton (formerly Sir John Cam Hobhouse), ever came into possession of the Byron–Melbourne correspondence remains unsolved. (Lovelace Byron Papers).
* Byron had to wait until 1969 to be granted his place in the abbey.
† John Paget created this celestial image for Blackwood’s (January 1870).
* Madame de Boissy’s uninhibitedly malevolent letters about both Lady Byron and Mrs Stowe were to Madame Emma Fagnani (whose husband, Giuseppe, she had commissioned to paint twinned portraits of the late Lord Byron and herself). They are great fun to read and are in the Byron papers held at HRC, Box 7.15.
* The house overlooks the Chelsea Physic Garden. Building work had been supervised in Ralph’s absence by the avuncular Augustus Byron, one of Lord Wentworth’s staunchest allies.
* As later with Astarte (privately published for Ralph Lovelace in 1905), Leslie Stephen’s advice to Ralph leaned always towards the vindication of Augusta Leigh. It was Stephen, in both cases, who persuaded Ralph to omit the most self-incriminating and confessional of Mrs Leigh’s letters to Lady Byron and Mrs Villiers.
* Relations between Ralph and his father had not been improved by William Lovelace’s demand in 1867 for £80,000 to renounce his technical ownership of Lady Byron’s Wentworth estates. They had worsened when he refused to allow his son to inhabit either Ashley Combe or Ockham during his own lifetime. By 1893, Ockham, rented out to Lady Norbury for almost two decades after Dr Lushington’s death, had fallen into terrible disrepair. Ralph and his wife would spend a fortune, and many years, restoring Ralph’s beloved childhood home to habitable use. (Ashley proved to have been only a little less neglected.) Meanwhile, the couple remained at their comfortably modern home in Chelsea.
* ‘Despotic’ was a word much used of Lady Byron by her later detractors, including Mrs Langley Moore. It had first appeared in an 1888 letter, in which the elderly Anna Jones remarked to Ralph that Lady Byron was ‘despotic’ about the accuracy with which her own words should be reported to future generations. That description was one that resonated with the 49-year-old recipient, as he began to reflect upon his grandmother’s firm supervision during his early life.
† Henry James had become a firm friend of both Ralph and Mary Lovelace. In 1909, he and John Buchan (whose wife was Mary Lovelace’s niece) would be asked around to Wentworth House by Ralph’s widow, in order to attest the value of certain letters due to be deposited at the British Museum. Buchan, shocked by what he read, wrote in his later memoir of the ‘ancient indecency’ at which his cooler colleague (who had of course seen most of the ‘incest’ letters already) had apparently turned not a hair.
* In 1972, the collections were separately placed on loan to the Bodleian Library (as the Lovelace Byron Papers) and to the British Library (as the Wentworth Papers).
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Miss Annabella Milbanke: ‘a fine child’ in her adoring parents’ view.
2. Annabella Milbanke as a muchcourted heiress, and as Byron would have first seen her.
3. Comte d’Orsay seems to have painted little Ada Byron before he met her father at Genoa in 1823. He captures her lively charm.
4. Ada’s beloved Persian cat, Puff, drawn by her mother with an accompanying tribute in verse.
5. Lady Byron commissioned this handsome portrait of Ada in the year of her marriage. Ada disliked both it and the artist.
6. Lord Byron. Annabella’s mother was so delighted by Thomas Phillips’s portrait of her future son-in-law that she purchased it for herself. It was how the 25-year-old author of Childe Harold wished to be seen.
7. George Anson Byron (8th Lord) was Ada’s ‘sweet cousin’. She looked upon George as a brother. He married a Nottinghamshire heiress.
8. Lady Melbourne, here in her splendid prime, was Byron’s most worldly advisor. She was also the mother-in-law of Lady Caroline Lamb and the aunt of Annabella Milbanke.
9. Augusta Leigh, half-sister to Lord Byron.
10. Byron’s ‘Mignonne’, Elizabeth Leigh, better known to us as Medora, the daughter of Augusta.
11. As a young man, Ada Lovelace’s future husband modelled his appearance upon Lord Byron. Like him, William King also travelled to Greece.
12. Lady Hester King, the mother of William, was a cold and unhappy woman. Even Ada Lovelace failed to pierce her armour.
13. Ada was especially fond of her sweet-natured sister-in-law, Hester, Jr.
14. Ada helped to facilitate Hester’s marriage to the kind and devoted Reverend Sir George Crauford.
15. Lord Lovelace’s exuberant creation helped to ruin him. Ada never inhabited her special Mathematical Room in the tower above the moat. The Lovelaces’ daughter nicknamed Horsley Towers ‘Glum Castle’.
16. Charles Babbage was of an age to have been a father figure to Ada. Their relationship was both fiery and playful.
17. The remarkable Mary Somerville furthered Ada’s mathematical education and became a second mother to her. The close connection continued through Ada’s daughter into the next generation.
18. The unbuilt Analytical Engine stood at the heart of Ada Lovelace’s professional friendship with Charles Babbage.
19. Antoine Claudet made a series of daguerreotypes of Ada and her children in the 1840s. Ada was fascinated by this technique of early photography.
20. Lady
