The immediate effect of Medora’s introduction as her rival and half-sister upon Ada was to make her take up the challenge to show herself, uniquely, as the heir to Byron. Writing to her mother after the first revelation of incest, Lady Lovelace had declared her intention of surpassing her father’s achievements: ‘I think he has bequeathed this task to me! . . . I have a duty to perform towards him.’ What that duty might be, she remained unsure. For a time, Ada considered becoming a poet. Writing to Mary Somerville’s son, Woronzow Greig, on the final day of 1841, she represented herself as a swashbuckling breaker of convention.
You know I am a d—d odd animal! And as my mother often says, she never has quite yet made up her mind whether it [be] Devil or Angel that watches peculiarly over me; only that it is one or the other, without doubt! – (And for my part, I am quite indifferent which) –
For a couple of high summer months, Lady Lovelace played the daredevil. William, busy supervising his grand building projects, raised no objections to behaviour that caused one admirer to describe his wife as an elusive ‘will o’the whisp’, forever eluding capture as she sped along her way. In America, however, the New York Times had harsh words to say of a woman who rode about in fashionable Hyde Park with married men. Ada’s riding companions were Sir William Molesworth, owner of the respected Westminster Review, and Frederick Knight, a Somerset landowner who had newly returned from Italy. Today, such behaviour seems almost laughably tame; back in 1841, when a woman was still forbidden to watch parliamentary proceedings without a husband planted at her side, such a bold wife – and Byron’s daughter, to boot – attracted censure.
Mathematics was never far from Ada’s mind. In June 1841, she confessed to Augustus De Morgan that her studies had been neglected during her stay in Paris. She wished to resume work: ‘I am quite in a fuss about my mathematics, for I am much in want of a lift at the moment’ suggests that abstract thinking offered Ada a welcome refuge from her confused emotions.
The new link to William Molesworth (his wife would become one of Ada’s closest friends) was connected both to this wealthy and scientifically minded gentleman’s interest in Babbage’s unbuilt machine and Ada’s own persistent wish to help that mechanical monster into existence. She kept up a regular correspondence with Babbage throughout the summer, while making increasingly frequent reference to Charles Wheatstone, the rotund and quietly charming inventor of the first electric telegraph, with whom Ada regularly discussed her scientific projects. By August 1841, Ada was addressing both Babbage and Wheatstone by their surnames alone. In an age that frowned upon gender equality, this marked a rare level of egalitarian professionalism.
Ada had kept faith with Augustus De Morgan throughout her hectic summer. An almost daily correspondence between them was maintained from August to late November, during which Lady Lovelace strove to narrow the gap between her deficiencies and her aspirations. On the one hand, she now felt confident enough to recommend and send Gabriel Lamé’s Cours de Physique to her tutor; on the other, she was still struggling to apply differential and integral calculus to the subject of accelerated velocity (‘It has interested me beyond anything.’).* On 15 August 1841, conscious that she would never lure De Morgan away from the metropolis, she arranged to come up to London from Ockham for a lesson at Gower Street, before her family beat their annual two-month retreat to remote Ashley Combe. By 14 November, while still at Ashley, Ada was so deeply immersed in mathematics that a pleased Hen, writing to William Lovelace, joked that he should send ‘love to the Bird when you can insinuate it between two problems’.
Annabella’s seemingly light-hearted message arrived at the end of a series of cryptic bulletins despatched from Ashley Combe to De Morgan, during which Ada informed her tutor of sudden and private plans to visit London.
My intended journey to Town is only on particular business. And by the bye it is not to be known that I am going. My mother even has no idea of it; and I do not wish that she should.
The first visit, announced on 27 October, was deferred; on 10 November, it was reset for the following day, ‘in consequence of letters unexpectedly received’. Again, Ada enjoined discretion to De Morgan (‘I do not wish my journey to be known’). Once again the trip was delayed.
On 14 November, a hasty visit to London was rescheduled for the third time. Writing to her mother from Somerset on the same day, Ada made no mention of her travel plans. Instead, she confined herself to talk of Byron Ockham (‘a true scion of the Parent Stock’) and her son’s vivid wish (aged five) to become a workman rather than a lord of leisure. Such an ambition, at a time when the local workforce was helping to
