Ada had been advised by Locock to use prescribed measures of both laudanum and claret to assuage her sufferings, but the clarity of her scientific writing shows how little impact that remedy had upon her intellectual powers, even when she spoke of drinking three glasses of wine for supper. Few people, not even a mother who had no taste for fanciful hyperbole, mocked Ada during her lifetime for her ambitious imaginings. Perhaps, knowing Lady Lovelace at first-hand, her friends and family understood – far better than we through the exalted medium of her letters – how much a young woman who was not yet thirty needed to create the image of herself as an indestructible and almost superhuman force. Armed with that prodigious ideal, Ada could combat the recurrent periods of intense physical pain that assailed her with ever increasing ferocity.
The almost daily shunting to and fro of Ada’s notes and Babbage’s revisions was still in play at the beginning of August, the month in which Richard Taylor’s volume was due to be printed. Reading over her notes once again, Ada reported to Babbage that she was ‘quite thunderstruck at the power of the writing’. It pleased her especially that there was no sense of the author’s gender. She was in agreement with her husband that each of the notes should carry the initials ‘AAL’, simply by way of an identity to connect to any future work. Ada, in 1843, had no doubt that there would be plenty of that.
Writing to her mother in an undated letter during this same summer, Ada stressed the relief that mathematical work had offered as an escape from ‘the tortuous & nefarious documents & affairs which have recently so painfully engaged much of our energy & attention’. The reference was to the fact that Medora, having finally obtained the deed, was still causing trouble. John Hobhouse made astonished note in his diary for 15 August that a young woman called Miss Leigh had contacted him, claiming to be Byron’s daughter and asking for money. (‘Can it be the daughter who eloped with Trevanion who married her sister?’ Hobhouse asked himself, indicating by his marked emphasis that he knew exactly what the rumour was.) Even Augusta herself was approached (‘I once more remind you that I am your child’), but without success, since Mrs Leigh had nothing left to give. Possibly, Annabella or Ada did help out. Somebody other than Barraillier must have provided the funds that kept Medora and Marie fed and sheltered in London until May 1844, when Medora finally managed to cash in the deed and returned to France.*
Back in August 1843, a proud Ada finally presented Lady Byron with the literary child she called her ‘firstborn’. Not aspiring to be either so eloquent or brilliant as his grandfather, he was nevertheless, so Ada believed, worthy of pride. At the very least, he bore testimony to ‘a most indomitable industry . . .’ A bold prediction followed. ‘He will make an excellent head of (I hope) a large family of brothers & sisters . . .’
Annabella could have asked for nothing more. It was all she had wished for. ‘Mother of Ada’, she cooed. Had Ada not demonstrated by her work that this maternal title might be ‘as good a passport to posterity (if I am to have one) as “the wife of Byron” ’.
It was just as the end of Ada’s intellectual labours came into sight that a new problem had arisen. The primary purpose of publishing her translation and the added notes had been to revive public interest in Babbage’s new invention and to secure enough of an investment for it to be built. It was completely without warning, at the beginning of August, that Babbage produced a preface of his own and declared his wish for it to be integrated with Ada’s article.
This was appalling news. No master of diplomacy, Babbage had seized upon the excuse of writing a preface – one which both Ada and the publisher read with growing dismay – to harangue the British government for having let him down. Such a public display of aggression threatened to undo all the benefits of Ada’s endeavours. Asked to reconsider, Babbage lost his temper. He would do no such thing. If Lady Lovelace didn’t like his preface, then Babbage would publish it with Taylor, while she, having requested the publisher to release her, could take herself and her precious work elsewhere.
Towards Babbage, Ada remained admirably calm and rational. Writing to her mother about him from St James’s Square on 8 August, she described herself as harrassed and perplexed. ‘We are in fact at issue,’ Ada admitted, adding that she had reached the conclusion that their friend was ‘one of the most impracticable, selfish, & intemperate persons one can have to do with’. A new and ‘very frightful’ crisis in her health could be directly attributed to the misery of being torn in two directions by Babbage and by the editors, while striving to keep the peace.
Two days earlier, Ada had gone so far as to inform Mr Babbage that his current course of action was ‘suicidal’. By the middle of the month, she had taken advice from William and her staunch supporter, Charles Wheatstone. Back at Ockham, Ada composed a fourteen-page letter (it was written on uncharacteristically large sheets, almost as if she meant to convey the impression of a legal document) to her recalcitrant colleague.
The degree of Wheatstone’s involvement remains unclear, but it seems likely that he supported the intriguing proposal that Ada now presented, with her husband’s approval. The letter began with flattery, reminding the touchy inventor that Ada’s only wish was to see Babbage’s genius given its due. On the matter of publication, however, she stood firm; there would be no withdrawal.
It was only after this that Ada proceeded to the plan that had perhaps been in the minds of herself, Lovelace and Wheatstone all along. How would Babbage feel about allowing Lovelace and
