Sixteen years later, writing to a new friend, Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, Annabella explained that her project had simply been to offer a basic education, sound morals and clear personal goals to children who would always have to earn their own keep in life.
Today, this sounds unremarkable. Back in the 1830s, however, Annabella’s undidactic and humane approach was revolutionary. Everything about the programme of education that she described to Dr Blackwell proclaimed Lady Byron’s enduring abhorrence of the English public-school system that she believed had caused such damage to her husband. The banning of any form of religious teaching headed her list of directives for a scheme in which benevolence was united with discipline.
No creed. No scripture books. No continual sedentary indoor employment. No under-demand on any of these faculties. No over-excitement of feelings by prizes or other artificial stimulants. No definite boundary between work and play, the former as much as possible a pleasure, the latter not a contrast with lessons. No corporal punishment. No over-legislation.
Annabella’s school, despite the problem of finding male teachers who would consent to be controlled and supervised by a formidably demanding woman, was a success. Turning to her own daughter, however, Lady Byron sometimes forgot her policy of making work pleasurable. Ada, it was always understood, would not only learn, but excel. Aged fifteen, she spoke three languages. In basic arithmetic, she was advanced for her age, but no prodigy. In her knowledge of history and current affairs, however, coached by a mother whose knowledge of global politics had once so impressed young George Ticknor, Ada was precociously well informed. Granted the freedom to read as she wished during three years of extreme ill health, her exceptional powers of imagination had also flowered, unrestrained. ‘God knows I have enough of it, and a great plague it often is,’ Ada later told a mother who possessed no imagination (and who feared its liberating powers). A plague to its possessor, perhaps, but mathematics alone would never have enabled Ada Lovelace to become a visionary prophet of our own technological age.
By the summer of 1832, while mother and daughter were still settling into their new home at Ealing, 16-year-old Ada had recovered her health enough to accompany Lady Byron on a first jaunt to Brighton, favourite home of William IV, England’s sea-loving king. There, at long last, Ada was deemed well enough to indulge her cherished childhood dream: to ride upon a horse. At the beginning of that year, Joanna Baillie had praised Miss Byron’s ability to amble upon a docile mount across Fordhook’s two outlying fields; by August, in Brighton, Ada was able to boast to Selina Doyle’s illegitimate niece, Fanny Smith,* that both her riding-master and ‘Mamma’ were delighted by her equestrian progress. She could actually canter up the curving street to their hotel (Albion House in Preston Street)! What was more, she had been professionally advised that she now held her reins to perfection!
There was more. Not without triumph, Ada informed Fanny that she had just started taking guitar lessons from a Spanish count, a truly romantic exile who (so an admiring Ada thought) produced the sounds of an entire orchestra from his soulfully plucked strings.
‘[T]ake care to keep strait Dear,’ an anxious Lady Gosford counselled Ada on 13 September 1832. She was referring, not to Ada’s riding, but to an exuberant young lady’s need to be prudent.
Like many others in Lady Byron’s watchful circle of female friends, Mary Gosford was reassured when she learned that Ada’s new project – allegedly inspired by the allotment scheme that her mother was pioneering in Ealing – was to become a farmer. ‘Mamma encourages me very much,’ Ada reported to Fanny Smith. Mamma was considerably less delighted to learn from Selina Doyle, early in 1833, that her daughter’s ardent interest in the Ealing allotments had become a cover for secret meetings in a Fordhook garden shed, where she exchanged passionate embraces – and something more – with a young man who had been recruited to teach Miss Byron shorthand (for taking lecture notes).† Ordered to behave herself, Ada ran away and promptly showed up at her lover’s family home. His parents, fearful of angering so powerful a figure as Ada’s mother, just as promptly escorted the young lady back to Fordhook.
Years later, and plainly relishing a chance to shock one of her most susceptible confidantes, Ada boasted to Mary Somerville’s son that relations between the unnamed youth and herself went ‘as far as they could without actual penetration [the word ‘connexion’ was later coyly substituted in Woronzow Greig’s unpublished record] being actually completed.’ Miss Byron’s public disgrace had just been avoided, but enough people in Lady Byron’s own social circle knew what had happened for her daughter commonly to be perceived as damaged goods.* It is noteworthy that one of the first letters Ada would one day write to her future husband thanked him for overlooking her blotted past, and for a consequent debt of gratitude ‘of which I am so sure I shall never need to be reminded by you’.
‘Make amends to your mother before it is too late!’ Nanny Briggs scolded Ada on 6 March 1833. Two days later, Ada announced her reform to her mother by stating, with heavy underlinings, that ‘I am an altered person.’
Repentance proved shortlived. By 27 April, as a letter written a full year later reveals, Ada was already hatching plans to resume the affair.† When a scandalised and despairing Annabella announced that she herself had been appointed ‘by God forever’ to supervise and restrain her wayward daughter, Ada struck back. She was willing to be guided, but
