how could he do it without warning them that the Bible was ‘mistaken’ and the text ‘interpolated with fables’: William Lovelace to AINB, n.d. but seemingly July/August 1845, DLM transcript.
their happiness, ‘if happy they are, will soon be at an end’: Hobhouse’s Diary, 3 June 1846 (see note on p. 487).
‘a man of fashion’: Harriet Beecher Stowe supplied this description of Lovelace, a man whom she had never met, in Lady Byron Vindicated (Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1870), p. 443.
Would such behaviour get her into ‘a scrape with the other lady-guests’: AAL to Charles Babbage, 18 November 1846, BL, Add MS B37192.
‘the repeated & unjust condemnations of Lady Lovelace’s husband during this series of years’: AAL to Lord Fortescue, 22 June 1846, LKC.
Secretly, however, Ada knew that her odious mother-in-law’s claims to be terrified of her eldest son: Lady Hester King Sr’s self-justifying explanation of her mistreatment of William Lovelace seems never to have got beyond the drafted memorandum that is in the Locke King archive at Brooklands.
Chapter Twenty: Vanity Fair (1847–50)
Promising that the debt would be paid off: AAL to Henry Currie, 1 May 1848, Dep. Lovelace Byron 168.
Lady Byron viewed atrocious social conditions at home as a call to arms: AINB to AAL, 25 February 1848, LP. Her contribution to funds in the Irish famine, together with her philanthropic work in Leicestershire, is clearly identified in the 1860–1 correspondence of Harriet Martineau, at a time when Martineau was gathering material to write a biography of Lady Byron (Martineau Papers, 125–30, CRL).
Greeting an embarrassed Lady Byron in 1851 by doffing their caps in gratitude for the ‘many sums of money’: Leicester Journal, 16 June 1851.
Calming herself, Annabella asked for news of the Rathbones’s good friend Dr Beecher: AINB to Elizabeth Rathbone, 17 January 1846, HRC, Byron, box 5.6.
Lovelace told his 12-year-old heir that ‘the poor’ had thankfully become ‘too poor to cause trouble’: WL to BO, 26 April 1848, Dep. Lovelace Byron 167, fols. 3–4.
Further evidence of how far Lovelace was removed from social reality surfaced: WL to AAL (n.d., but probably c.1848), DLM transcript.
‘You will,’ the artist’s proud sitter promised a once-again absent Ada on 6 January 1850, ‘be very gay’: WL to AAL, 29 December 1849 and 6 January 1850, Dep. Lovelace Byron 164, fols. 1–40.
‘A friend, to whom I had early communicated the idea, entertained great hopes of its pecuniary success’: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (Longman, 1864), p. 353.
her first known reference to ongoing discussions with Babbage about ‘Games, and notations for them’: AAL to Charles Babbage, 30 September 1848, BL, Add MS B37192. All quotations from Ada’s letters to Babbage in this chapter are from this collection.
‘You say nothing of Tic-tac-toe’: AAL to Charles Babbage, 18 October 1849, ibid.
‘A heart like Hester’s, I never did find, and never shall find again upon earth’: Sir George Crauford to Lady Hester King Sr, 12 April 1848, LKC.
there was ‘nothing to forgive’: Sophy Tamworth’s brother had succeeded their father as Baron Scarsdale in 1837. AINB to William Lovelace, 28 February 1849, Dep. Lovelace Byron 67, fols. 125–7.
‘peculiarly appropriate to this young lady’: AAL to AINB, 20–22 April 1847, Dep. Lovelace Byron 43, fols. 3–8.
‘excellent stuff in that child’: Anna Jameson to AINB, 28 June 1847, Dep. Lovelace Byron 75.
Such behaviour was absolutely unacceptable in ‘families of my circle’: AAL to AINB, 28 April 1848, Dep. Lovelace Byron 43, fols. 25–8.
‘remarkably well, & wonderfully happy’: AAL to AINB, 15 October 1848, Dep. Lovelace Byron 43, fols. 60–6.
In an undated December letter from the following year: AIK to AAL, December 1850, WP, Add MS 54091.
‘I have reasons’: Marilyn Thomas, The Cleric and the Lady: The Affair of Lady Byron and F. W. Robertson, Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table, vol. 2008, no. 2, p. 404.
a ‘free and easy tone’ that leaned towards ‘downright impertinence’: William Lovelace to AINB, 27 November 1846, DLM transcript.
Byron was ‘never alone’ with Annabella’: AAL to AINB, 6 November 1848. All the quotations given here about the children are from DLM’s transcripts. Nothing – other than Lady Byron’s controlling habits – was deduced from them in her Life of Ada. The originals are in Dep. Lovelace Byron 43.
‘the real and more lasting effects’ of sisterly friendship: AAL to AINB, 15 October 1848, Dep. Lovelace Byron 43, fols. 60–6.
‘a very clever but wild young fellow’ had been given ‘no chance of starting well in life’: Alice E. J. Fanshawe (ed.), Admiral Sir Edward Gennys Fanshawe, GCB: A Record. Notes. Journals. Letters (Spottiswoode, 1904), p. 264.
Chapter Twenty-one: The Hand of the Past (1850–1)
‘The mountain air & mountain life does wonders’: AAL to AINB, 23 September 1850, Dep. Lovelace Byron 43, fols. 126–8.
William, who ‘is anxious to know as soon as possible. He hopes you will not say us Nay . . .’: AAL to Anna Jameson, 9 February 1850, Bonn University Library, Germany.
The name of this mystery lover had better be supplied to her at once: AAL to Woronzow Grieg, 27 June 1850, MSBY Dep c. 367, folder MSBY-9.
‘rents are half paid, and we are in some difficulty . . .’: AAL to AIK, 25 August 1850, Dep. Lovelace Byron 67.
she asked Charles Babbage to arrange for a private inspection of ‘the diamonds’ at the ‘Exhibition d’industrie’, adding that this ‘would help me’: AAL to Charles Babbage, 23 July 1850, BL, Add MS B37192.
Truly, they had believed the Hen still to be at Brighton: AAL to AINB, 19 August 1850, Dep. Lovelace Byron 43.
The autumn tour began: The account of the autumn tour and the discussions of Newstead are taken from the Lovelaces’ copious letters to Lady Byron, in Dep. Lovelace Byron 43 and 46, transcribed by DLM and partly published in Betty Toole, Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers (Strawberry Press, 1992), pp. 366–71.
‘I am threatened with proofs by an eager ardent avis’: WL to AINB, 23 September 1850, DLM transcript.
‘Some very thorough remedial measures must be pursued’: AAL to Charles Babbage, 1 November 1850, BL, Add MS
