The European tour offers poignant evidence of Lady Byron’s feelings for her late husband. In England, she had paid anonymous visits to Harrow, to the deserted house at Piccadilly Terrace and even to Newstead Abbey, where the emotional experience of standing for the first time in Byron’s own private rooms, back in 1818, had almost overwhelmed her. Arriving in Switzerland, Lady Byron arranged a sailing trip on Lake Geneva, within eyesight of the shuttered villa where her husband had spent the summer of 1816. In Genoa, the city from which Byron had set out for Greece, his final adventure, Annabella rented an elegant palace. Here, Ada’s tutor in singing and drawing was selected precisely because Signor Isola claimed to have known and felt affection for Lord Byron. When the party of travellers moved on to Turin, they took Isola along with them. Annabella declared that Ada needed to continue her drawing lessons, but Isola’s primary role was to talk with his employer about Byron, and his life in Italy.
Such nostalgic indulgence was always camouflaged by Lady Byron’s interest in a higher cause. A second sentimental visit to Switzerland during this same extensive pilgrimage was ostensibly undertaken solely in order to settle Tom Noel as a young teacher at Dr Emmanuel Fellenberg’s celebrated school.
While Tom Noel failed to fit into Hofwyl’s demanding regime, Annabella swiftly established a warm relationship with the school’s creator. A voluminous correspondence commenced, in which Dr Fellenberg’s French addresses to ‘Milady’ were matched by Annabella’s stately responses in her own tongue. Plans were swiftly laid for Tom’s younger brother, Edward, and little Hugo Montgomery to complete their schooling at Hofwyl.
It would be hard to overstate the influence of Emmanuel Fellenberg’s enlightened and progressive school upon Annabella’s future life as a reformer. Recommended to her by Harriet Siddons, herself an ardent educationalist, Hofwyl provided the model for the schools through which Annabella, in her mid-thirties, decided to provide practical knowledge and technical skills to the poor. As at Hofwyl, which she had also heard praised by Henry Brougham, she would raise her pupils up to become teachers and spreaders of learning for a class to whom it had hitherto been denied. Thrillingly ahead of the times when Annabella paid her first visit to Fellenberg’s country academy in 1826, Hofwyl showed her how to start using her great fortune for the public good. It became the mainspring for her lifework.
Little record survives of Ada’s feelings about her travels, other than some drawings, along with anxious reports to her mother’s friends in England on the subject of Lady Byron’s failing health. Hofwyl had proved inspiring, but the tour reawakened an unforeseen storm of emotion and grief in Annabella. The near loss of Harriet Siddons to a severe attack of ‘brainfever’ seemed to be the final blow from a remorseless fate. Returning to England in the autumn of 1827, Lady Byron managed a month of supervising Ada at Bifrons (Miss Stamp had gone on holiday) before she herself altogether collapsed. The gravity of her illness is apparent from the fact that Ada, composing in February one of many worried little notes, expressed relief that her mother could now manage to scrawl in her own hand the simple words ‘much better’. Two months later, Ada admitted that there had been times when ‘I really thought . . . you could not live.’
While travel had brought Annabella to what seemed to be her deathbed, it fired her precocious 11-year-old daughter with further dreams of escape. On 3 February 1828, Ada excitedly revealed her newest project. She was teaching herself to fly.
I am going to begin my paper wings tomorrow and the more I think about it, the more I feel almost convinced that with a year or so’s experience & practise I shall be able to bring the art of flying to very great perfection. I think of writing a book of Flyology illustrated with plates . . .
The following day, having joyfully conveyed the news that Miss Doyle’s niece Fanny Smith was looking forward to flying alongside her when she next visited Bifrons, Ada set out the next phase of her plan. Once she had mastered the art of flight, she would become a ‘carrier pigeon’, an airborne messenger who would transport her mother’s letters across the skies. As an extra incentive to the recovery of her health, Lady Byron learned that her wish to become godmother to Puff’s new kitten was granted. Puff, so she learned, had become especially bold of late, hiding up the chimney, when not crunching bird bones beneath Ada’s bed.
In part, Ada was making an endearing attempt to comfort an ailing mother to whom she now frequently signed herself off as ‘Carrier Pigeon’ or even ‘Your affectionate Young Turkey’. Nevertheless, as her flying schemes grew ever more elaborate, it became clear that Ada wished her aerial aspiration to be treated seriously. Writing to Annabella at the spa of Tunbridge Wells on 2 April, she requested a scientific book about bird anatomy. A bird’s wings, as Ada explained, offered an ideal model for her own paper constructions. Five days later, Ada’s plans had taken a further leap. She was going to build a flying machine.
I have got a scheme about a . . . steamengine which, if ever I effect it, will be more wonderful than either steam packets or steam carriages, it is to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steamengine in the
