Arabella Lawrence had known about Ada ever since she despatched young Miss Lamont to Kirkby Mallory as a governess, back in the summer of 1821. Now, visiting Mortlake during her holiday breaks, Lawrence was quick to realise that her pupil disliked rules and thrived upon imaginative stories. History was consequently taught, not by rote, but according to whichever period Ada might suddenly find appealing. Debate was never discouraged. Laughing at her own ‘disputation habits’, Ada blamed her relish for a good argument on ‘the quiet & unvaried life I have necessarily led for the last year and a half’.
But Lady Byron worried about such capriciousness. Constantly peering over Ada’s shoulder, while adding comments to the young invalid’s pencil-written letters, she asked Miss Lawrence to help her to control this argumentative tendency in her daughter. It came (she felt) too close to disrespect. Ada continued to tease. How restful it would be over the holidays with Miss Lawrence to decide everything for her, she wrote: ‘it will be so nice . . . and I shall have no trouble in making up my mind about anything’.
It was while her daughter was still bedridden that Annabella decided to introduce Ada to her father’s poems. A first copy of every new poem and play her husband produced had been provided to Lady Byron by John Murray (at her own request) every year since 1816. The works she chose to read aloud to the poet’s own child upon this momentous occasion were strangely chosen. ‘Fare Thee Well’ was understandable, as were the romantic lines about Greece which Lady Byron selected from The Giaour. But why would Annabella have singled out ‘The Satire’, Byron’s vicious demolition of their old family friend, Mrs Clermont, for the ears of his ailing and sensitive daughter?
Ada’s response was disappointing. To Annabella (who loved to write verse herself), all the glory of her late husband lay within his work. To Ada, while she expressed polite enthusiasm for The Giaour, Byron’s enchantment derived entirely from his legend. The father she already admired was the glowing hero of the ‘hidden’ portrait (that shrouded image behind its alluringly mysterious green curtain): an image of which only her mother seemed to imagine that an inquisitive and intelligent girl of fourteen might remain unaware.
Lord Byron was much in Annabella’s thoughts in 1830. Thomas Moore’s newly published Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: with Notices of his Life had done no favours to Byron’s widow. But what distressed Annabella most was Moore’s assumption (it was based upon his subject’s own notoriously volatile letters) that the Byron couple’s separation had been arranged and controlled by Annabella’s parents. Lady Byron’s dignified response was bound – with the consent of John Murray, Moore’s publisher – into the second edition of Moore’s book. Her ‘Remarks’ included a letter from Stephen Lushington, in which the now-eminent lawyer stated that it had been Lady Byron’s own account, not that of her parents, which had led him to advise her against a marital reconciliation.
What hovered, unspoken, behind the careful phrases in a letter from Lushington which Annabella had solicited and personally revised, was the question of what it had been, precisely, that Lady Byron had divulged to him. Annabella would never publicly accuse her sister-in-law of incest. She must have been aware, nevertheless, that by including Lushington’s letter within the ‘Remarks’, she was giving new life to a half-forgotten but deliciously scandalous tale.
Towards the memory of Byron himself, Annabella remained supportive and loyal. On 2 August 1831, she revealed to Robert Noel her plans to send his younger brother Edward out to Greece. The connection was never explicitly stated, but it is clear that, by purchasing from its Turkish owner a 15,000-acre estate on Euboea (modern Evia), where Edward and a German friend intended to set up a school on the Hofwyl model, Lady Byron was following what she believed would have been her late husband’s wishes. Byron would have applauded the establishing of a family connection to Greece (one which survives until this day).*
‘The vagrant is located at last. I have bought Mr Duval’s house,’ Annabella announced to Harriet Siddons on 29 August 1831. Duval’s home was Fordhook, a gentrified and bay-windowed farmhouse in which the novelist Henry Fielding had once lived. Situated amidst flat fields to the east of Ealing Common, Fordhook was conveniently close to Acton Lodge (where Mary Montgomery frequently visited her brother Hugh).
Dr Fellenberg’s renowned school had not done quite so well by the temperamental Edward Noel as Lady Byron had hoped, but Annabella still chose the Swiss establishment for her model as she moved on from making loans to the co-operative schools which focussed on technical education for the poor, to set up her own new school at Ealing. The difference that set Annabella’s project apart from the co-operatives, from Hofwyl and even from the school (one she greatly admired) set up at Cheam in 1826 by Dr Charles Mayo and his sister, was the focus upon constant occupation, and upon character development rather than any religious doctrine. It was one of the most remarkable features of Lady Byron’s educational system that it was open to all creeds, or even none.
Ealing Grove was a bold venture, one which would become Lady Byron’s most influential educational monument. There were many
