In the summer of 1838 – that same summer in which the King sisters and her mother were all out of the country – Ada lost this most cherished of all her connections. Mrs Somerville’s health had been impaired by fifteen years of living in a damp house near a smog-shrouded river. A shortage of money contributed to Dr Somerville’s decision, in 1838, to quit his medical post and exchange cold, expensive England for a warmer, more affordable life abroad. Martha and Mary accompanied their parents on the family’s journey to Italy, a country where Mrs Somerville’s gender offered less impediment than in Victorian England to her recognition as a woman of preeminent intellectual achievement. Mary made only a couple of brief returns to Britain, where her son Woronzow Greig, having married a charming and pious Scottish girl in 1837, continued to work as an attorney.
Mary had gone and Ada was bereft, not only of a woman who had become close to her as a second mother, but of a magnificent tutor, without whom she was lost. In 1839, she began to put pressure on Charles Babbage to come to her rescue.
In February 1840, at a time when Babbage was in especially low spirits about the future of his unbuilt Analytical Engine, Ada showed the first hint of her secret and immense ambitions. If Mr Babbage would only hurry up and find her a new teacher, the world might benefit from the results.
I hope you are bearing me in mind. I mean my mathematical interests. You know this is the greatest favour any one can do me. Perhaps, none of us can estimate how great. Who can calculate to what it might lead . . . Am I too imaginative for you? I think not . . .?
Babbage took his time in looking, but he did not let Lady Lovelace down. The wonder was only that it had occurred neither to Lady Byron nor to her daughter that Augustus De Morgan, the brilliant mathematical logician who had recently married Sophia Frend, might be able to take Mrs Somerville’s place.
By October 1840, the new arrangement had taken shape. De Morgan had not only rejected the idea of payment, but he had willingly taken this most unconventional student under his personal wing. The boost to Ada’s confidence and energy proved to be immense. Writing to her absent mother that month, she boasted that she felt ‘wonderfully altered as to courage’. Better than this: ‘I am absolutely afraid of nothing. I never was so bold & full of nerve at any time in my life.’
There’s no doubt that much of Ada’s new-found elation stemmed from her new connection to the witty, brilliant and empathetic Augustus De Morgan, the very teacher whom she craved. (‘Never was a better hit than that,’ she rejoiced to Lady Byron.)
It’s possible that some of Ada’s new-found confidence also derived from the fact that Lady Byron – that ‘merry old hen’ who had been clucking about nothing but educational reforms and Ada’s need to be more closely involved in the field of good works all summer long – was once again safely out of the country. For the present, the Hen’s relentless interest in reform, Ada and even her grandchildren had been unexpectedly cast in the shade by a new and enthralling link to Annabella’s own Byron-haunted past.
* Both of the Combe brothers, Andrew and George, were ardent phrenologists. George was by far the better known of the two, but Annabella preferred his gentler and more modest sibling.
* The choice of title (although taken from a valid claim through ancestry) must have caused Prime Minister Melbourne to smile a bit. It remains a mystery why the well-read and discreet Lady Byron should have chosen to attach to her own daughter and son-in-law the name of Samuel Richardson’s notorious libertine.
* Locke King, drawing up a peevish retrospective record of injuries done to him, his wife and his mother, identified 1838 as the year in which ‘my sisters were so ill natured to Louisa [his wife] that I could not go on & intended to speak to them but he [William] said oh no doubt but let me send for them & Ly King [Ada] will talk with them & they will make peace . . . I was not allowed to see them unless I would promise to say nothing of the past . . .’ (Peter Locke King, undated note in the Locke King family archive at Brooklands Museum.)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A
MBITIONS AND
D
ELUSIONS
(1840–1)
Charles Babbage, by 1840, was a disappointed man. His uncompleted Difference Engine had passed into the control of a government that showed no faith either in it or in its infinitely more complex and dynamic successor, the Analytical Engine, upon which Babbage had expended all of his considerable inventive genius. On the Continent, he was justly regarded as a genius; in England, his career had utterly stalled.
In Italy, the far-sighted Charles Albert, King of Sardinia (father of the future King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II), encouraged the setting-up in the autumn of 1840 of a scientific conference in Turin. Babbage, formally invited by his elderly admirer and fellow mathematician, Count Giovanni di Plana (Mary Somerville, now settled in Italy, had acted as intermediary), would explain the significance of his revolutionary invention.
Bringing with him as interpreter Fortunato Prandi (one of the Young Italy group focussed around the exiled Giuseppe Mazzini in London), Babbage was treated with gratifying respect at that September conference.* The contrast to the indifference shown to the inventor in his own country was poignant. Charles Albert, a stickler for etiquette, permitted Babbage to remain seated in the royal presence. The king even – this was an unprecedented honour – allowed Mrs Somerville’s brilliant friend to present the queen with a
