Officially, the 1834 tour took mother and daughter to observe spar-cutting at Ashby, ribbon manufacture at Coventry and the operation of Jacquard looms at a Matlock mill. (Here, Annabella demonstrated her own keen interest in technology by making a careful drawing of one of the machine’s innovative punch cards.) In Derbyshire, where they inspected the roaring furnaces and kilns of Stoke-on-Trent, the travellers stayed with Florence Nightingale’s parents. A visit to Doncaster was entirely unconnected to the town’s celebrated racecourse. Unlike her sporting parents, Lady Byron detested racing. ‘The risk to man and beast – the desperate gambling among the spectators – the futility of the object – press upon my mind in a painful manner,’ she wrote in an undated letter to Mrs Siddons.
Unofficially, the tour enabled Lady Byron to make a quiet evaluation of her daughter’s state of mind. Writing to Harriet Siddons from Harrogate, Annabella sounded reassured. The worries of 1833 were at last beginning to recede, she remarked in an oblique reference to Ada’s attempted elopement with William Turner. As Ada grew calmer, her mother’s own health began to improve. ‘I feel my intellect reviving . . .’
Ada’s own skittishly active mind required livelier fodder than factory inspections. Yawning her way through a sleepy summer month at Buxton Spa in the company of Lady Gosford and her daughters, she decided to pass on some of her newfound mathematical knowledge to the countess’s eldest child. While Olivia Acheson, Lady Gosford’s younger daughter, was humoured with affectionate notes about ponies and cats (‘Livy’ had inherited the now venerable Puff), her older sister Lady Annabella (‘my dear little Friend’) was treated to a gruelling course in Euclid. Trying to encourage a reluctant pupil (‘You are going on as well as possible’), Ada could not resist the temptation to lecture.
My dear Annabella. You must pardon my scolding! You know as a master, I am bound to tell truth! After studying your Prop[osition] for some time, I have come to this conclusion: either that you do not understand what you have written about, or that if you do understand, you certainly have not expressed your meaning. So try again, and do not be at all discouraged, for it requires much practice to explain with clearness, & I assure you I was not ‘born’ with the power . . . attend to my orders pray. Let me hear as soon as you can.
Poor little Annabella; it was patently a relief when her stern teacher turned to the less taxing subject of music, begging the Acheson girls to look out for a harp in the attics of Worlingham, the charming Norfolk house where they now spent most of each year, together with Lady Gosford. Annabella had not been exaggerating her daughter’s passion for music: ‘I am now so excessively fond of my harp & my hour’s practice,’ Ada informed her small pupil, ‘that it is a much greater merit in me not to practice for three hours a day, than it is to practice steadily for one.’
Keen to mentor, Ada knew herself to be still essentially a beginner. While delivering a course that she spoke of publishing as a mathematical correspondence (in the style of Jane Marcet’s educational conversation books), Ada paid acknowledgement to the patience of her own tutors: ‘indeed I think I am making great progress,’ she advised little Annabella from Fordhook on 26 November. ‘Mr Babbage and Mrs Somerville are very kind indeed to me. The latter generally enquires with interest “how my pupil” is going on.’
It must have been an urgent need for medical attention (Lady Byron had fallen into one of her recurrent declines in health) that caused a temporary move from Fordhook to a house in Wimpole Street in the autumn of 1834. It was during this time that Ada found herself present at a couple of remarkable conversations between Charles Babbage and Mary Somerville.
Hot competition from the harp had not lessened Ada’s enthusiasm for Babbage’s invention. On 1 September, she rapturously described it to Dr King as ‘a gem of all mechanism’. By November, she was copying out some of Babbage’s notes and even borrowing some of the plans for his Engine from his son, Herschel. (Herschel was his father’s chief draughtsman.) On 28 November, Ada sat in on a discussion between Babbage and Mrs Somerville about the straitened inventor’s lack of financial backing and Babbage’s fears that Robert Peel, the new prime minister, would do even less for him than Peel’s predecessor, the Duke of Wellington. (Babbage was correct.) The fact that this information went straight back to Wimpole Street, where Annabella carefully recorded it, suggests that the ever-prudent Lady Byron was still weighing up the merits of herself investing in Mr Babbage’s ill-fated Engine.
On 15 December, Ada returned to Wimpole Street with far more exciting news. That night, her mother’s diary recorded a thrilling discovery that Babbage had made. It was ‘in the highest department of mathematics – I understand it to include the means of solving equations that hitherto had been considered insoluble’.
Frustratingly, we don’t know precisely what the conversation had involved. Just possibly, Ada had witnessed Babbage’s long-nourished plans for a contraption which would perform more complex tasks than Difference Engine 1 (which could most simply be described as a long line of gears designed to produce a calculated figure). That autumn, or so Babbage latterly recalled in his autobiography, plans had been drawn up from the inventor’s own notoriously messy diagrams for machinery that would enable the final figure to be fed back into
