Annabella’s ongoing fears about her excitable daughter’s capacity for mental strain proved justified. In February 1835, Mrs Somerville wrote – mother to mother – to ask if it were better that the lessons should stop. During her last visit, Ada had passed from evident fatigue to extreme agitation. Her face had undergone a curious change.* Anxiously, Mrs Somerville hoped that she herself had not been pushing Miss Byron beyond her capabilities.
Mrs Somerville remembered all too well the tragic death of her own firstborn daughter, aged only twelve, under circumstances of excessive academic pressure. But Ada now intervened, imploring Mrs Somerville not to abandon her. She was not ill, she pleaded, only nervous and frightened, and more now at the prospect of losing such a treasured friend:
In a few weeks I dare say I shall be quite strong (particularly if I see a good deal of you). When I am weak, I am always so exceedingly terrified, at nobody knows what, that I can hardly help having an agitated look & manner, & this was the case when I left you. – I do not know how I can ever repay or acknowledge all your kindness, unless by trying to be a very good little girl & showing that I profit by your excellent advice. I feel that you are indeed a very sincere friend, & this makes me very happy I assure you.
Ada’s plea was effective. Her dreaded banishment did not take place; instead, a change of pace and scenery was briskly enforced. In April 1835, Ada wrote to Mrs Somerville from Brighton, where she was enjoying daily visits to a nearby riding school. Riding – and especially soaring over a delicious little jump – was the best exercise imaginable, a newly ebullient Ada declared, ‘even better than waltzing’. As for mathematics, she was prepared to slow down: ‘I have made up my mind not to care at present about making much progress, but to take it very quietly . . .’
Ada kept her word. The subject of mathematics was not raised again until the autumn of 1835.
By the autumn of 1835, however, a great change had taken place. The worryingly unconventional Miss Ada Byron had become an outwardly most respectable married woman.
* Expounding upon Italian painting to a septuagenarian Mrs Somerville in the 1850s, the art historian Anna Jameson was silenced with a scowl: ‘Mrs Somerville,’ Mary’s husband informed their loquacious visitor, ‘had rather talk about science than art.’ Dr Somerville’s irritation was understandable: his wife was attempting to conduct a conversation with another visitor. Maria Mitchell, America’s first professional woman astronomer, had come to pay her respects (H. V. Morton, A Traveller in Italy (Methuen, 1964), pp. 482–4).
* Both Pascal and Leibniz had produced forms of calculating machines over a hundred years earlier, but those mechanical devices were intended to perform specific arithmetical tasks, and were operated by hand. Babbage’s machine, operating autonomously, was designed to produce a long series of numbers from the setting of a very limited number, functioning upon the repeated use of differences. Most importantly, it was designed to print out the result.
* The curious expression ‘eating its own tail’ can be applied both to the Analytical Engine, a model of which is currently being built in the UK, and to Difference Engine 2, of which a model is on display in the Mathematics Gallery at London’s Science Museum. While plans were allegedly being drawn for the Analytical Engine during the autumn of 1834, mathematicians and computer scientists incline to believe that Babbage was discussing Difference Engine 2 with Mrs Somerville. My suggestion that it could have been the Analytical Engine is, perhaps, wishful thinking.
* This reference to a startlingly altered face crops up again and again in Ada’s later medical history. See the appendix on Ada’s health on pp. 475–6.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A
DA
’
S
M
ARRIAGE
(1835–40)
By the spring of 1835, when Ada had just turned nineteen, Mrs Somerville regarded her almost as a daughter, a substitute for her first and long-departed child. Mary was well aware of Ada’s intense but mercurial nature and her delicate physical health. (The two were, as she soon realised, closely entwined.) Mrs Somerville also knew how profoundly anxious Lady Byron was about her only child, and how fearful for her reputation.
If only a husband could be found for the young woman, some special man who would cherish and understand this rare, eccentric girl. But where was a mother to find such a paragon? Annabella had not taken to the smoothly eligible youths who swarmed around her daughter in the year of Ada’s debut at court. Ada, to be fair, had not helped herself. An engaging lack of concern for how she dressed attracted censorious comment. The folly of her runaway affair had caused a scandal, whispers of which had even crossed the Atlantic. Her enthusiasms – whether for maths, for riding, or for music – were always too fervent and extreme. Clearly not cut out to become a bishop’s wife or even a conventionally well-behaved lady of the manor, Miss Byron now stood in real danger of joining Mary Montgomery, relegated in her maturity to the position of a clever semi-invalid, one who was forever socially dependent upon the indulgent care of
