Back in the autumn of 1840, Ada Lovelace felt no such fears. Woronzow Greig heard only that she had never been so happy. Annabella, out in France, was told that Mr De Morgan was a wonderful teacher, the answer to her daughter’s prayers. No two people could suit each other better, Ada announced, blithely oblivious to the fact that Mr De Morgan had been happily married for just two years to one of Lady Byron’s most cherished friends. (Perhaps it is not surprising that Sophia De Morgan’s memoirs would later portray her husband’s protégée in a less than flattering light.)
It seemed, during that halcyon autumn of 1840, as though the nearly 25-year-old Ada had discovered a perfect balance. Down in Somerset, she broke away from her studies only to ride up the hills flanking Ashley Combe, in order to enjoy a long, wild gallop across the empty heathland of Exmoor. When at Ockham Park or St James’s Square, she cheerfully relinquished the children to the care of Hester and Charlotte. It was really so much better for them as well as herself, she explained:
. . . the less I have habitually to do with children the better for them & me. When my sisters are with me, I see far more of the children & am of much greater use . . . because then there is some one exclusively devoted to them, under my direction & superintendence.
Viewed from the comfortable distance of her study, Ada’s son Byron Ockham, at the beginning of 1841, remained his mother’s firm favourite: ‘His affable, communicative, manly & I may say elegant manners, charm people much,’ Ada wrote to Louisa Barwell, a childcare specialist in whom her mother placed great faith. Little Annabella, meanwhile, remained in the doghouse, a noisy little girl who was notable only for her ‘vile’ chubbiness. (Ada, slender as a reed herself by now and fiercely energetic, had come to share her whippet-thin husband’s view of weight as a symptom of indolence.)
Writing to Babbage during this same January week – and reminding him to humour her new passion for ice-skating when he visited Ockham – Ada reverted to a more engrossing topic. The results might occur ‘many years hence’, but she wanted to talk ‘most seriously’ about her plans to offer him valuable assistance.
You have always been a kind & real & most invaluable friend to me; & I would that I could in any way repay it, though I scarcely dare so exalt myself as to hope however humbly, that I can ever be intellectually worthy to attempt serving you.
In January 1841, Babbage was still aglow from his recent autumn visit to Turin. Unconscious of the disappointments to come, he felt no present need for help. He had not reckoned upon Ada’s persistence. On 22 February, Lady Lovelace wrote again. From hinting at the ‘great good’ likely to emerge from what she saw as ‘the possible (I believe I may say the probable) future connexion between us’, she proceeded to issue commands. Mr Babbage was instructed to visit her London home to discuss plans: ‘the sooner the better’.
Ada Lovelace was entering one of her mercurial phases. It’s hard to guess how De Morgan felt on being informed that mathematical forms reminded Ada of the fairies she had read about in fiction. It’s equally difficult to imagine how Ada’s mother felt on receiving a letter (it had been written on 6 February 1841) that demanded serious consideration for ‘one of the most logical, sober-minded, cool, pieces of composition (I believe) that I ever penned; the result of much accurate, matter-of-fact, reflection & study’.
Ada Lovelace’s letter to her mother was not logical; neither was it sober, nor cool. Ada had often speculated upon what her goal in life might be; now, so it seemed, she knew. Thanks to her incredible powers of intuition, reasoning and concentration, she foresaw the time when this ‘scientific Trinity [would] make me see anything, that a being not actually dead, can see & know . . .’ A ‘vast apparatus’ had been put into her power. All that remained was for Lady Lovelace to direct it over the next twenty years (the time scale had increased to thirty before the end of the letter) ‘to make the engine what I please. But haste; or a restless ambition, would quite ruin the whole.’
So far, so fairly peculiar. It was when Ada proceeded to the bold declaration that ‘I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus’ that her letter appeared to enter the realms of lunacy. Something had evidently tipped the always fragile balance of Lady Lovelace’s dancing, quicksilver mind. What was it that had taken place?
The most likely cause for Ada’s bizarre demand to be seen as superhuman was that she felt an imperative need to stake her claim to superior powers. Her role as Byron’s only surviving child, the heir to his legendary genius, was under challenge from a usurper. By February 1841, Lady Byron was living in Paris, where an intrusive cuckoo – a rival daughter – had found snug lodgings in an agreeably well-feathered nest.
Elizabeth Medora Leigh was back in the picture and telling strange tales about her parentage. Was it possible that Ada herself was no longer unique?
Medora had returned at a moment when Lady Byron found herself – for once in an exceptionally busy period of her life as a reformer – frustratingly underoccupied.
Reform is seldom a glamorous subject, but it was one in which Lady Byron, by 1841, possessed few peers. It was a role which, as she would ruefully observe in later years, was made more difficult by her social position. (‘The services which I am so willing to render are not asked . . . A Right Honourable wall surrounds me.’)
Such difficulties were heightened by the fact that Annabella’s formidable administrative skills went hand in hand with
