PART THREE
Visions
‘I hope to bequeath to the Generations a Calculus of the Nervous System’
ADA LOVELACE TO WORONZOW GREIG,
15 NOVEMBER 1844
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
T
HE
E
NCHANTRESS
(1843–4)
‘Science is no longer a lifeless abstraction floating above the heads of the multitude. It has descended to earth. It mingles with men. It penetrates our mines. It enters our workshops. It speeds along with the iron courser of the rail.’
MICHAEL GARVEY,
The Silent Revolution (1852)
Towards the end of 1843, having worn herself down the previous summer in her heroic endeavour to promote Charles Babbage’s unbuilt machine, Ada Lovelace suffered an unusually grave lapse in her health. Writing to Sophia De Morgan – and entreating her not to tell Lady Byron – Ada confided that learning she was not pregnant had, nevertheless, offered great solace. ‘I don’t the least mind all I have suffered,’ she wrote. ‘I think anything better than that.’
Of all her family roles, motherhood was the one that Ada least relished. She had been admirably supportive of William’s sisters, while vainly striving to improve relations between her husband and the unremittingly hostile Lady Hester King. As a daughter, she had proved affectionate and loyal throughout Lady Byron’s painful tussles with Medora Leigh and her quasi-keepers, the Beaurepaires.
As a mother, however, Ada was both negligent and capricious. True, she had written in an uncertainly dated letter to her mother about how tears had ‘rushed’ to her eyes as she watched little Lord Ockham stepping carefully through a dance with his sister. Eager to believe that she had detected signs of genius in her small daughter, Ada had also predicted that the gifted Annabella, aged seven, would become a great artist.
Such moments of tenderness were rare. From the time of embarking upon her translation of Menabrea, Ada’s mind was focussed upon her own scientific career. Writing to Charles Noel in Dresden in August 1843 about finding a teacher for the Lovelace family, Ada was far more interested in obtaining the latest scientific information from Germany (the admired heartland of scientific study) ‘as to the microscopical structure and changes in the brain, nervous matter, & also in the blood’, than in the academic credentials of Herr Kraemer, Charles’s candidate for her children’s tutor.
Nevertheless, there was no denying that a competent instructor was required to take care of three small children whose parents’ Unitarian beliefs prohibited young Viscount Ockham and his siblings from attending conventional (Anglican) schools. The thing to impress upon Herr Kraemer, as Ada explained to her cousin Robert at careful length, was that he would be working for ‘a completely professional person’. As such, she herself was unable ‘(were I even fitted by nature, which I am not), to associate much personally with my children, or to exercise a favourable influence over them by attempting to do so’. While there would be no regular or frequent association with the Lovelaces themselves, Kraemer would receive instructions on what principles to deliver his lessons, with special attention to the inculcation of religion based upon solid Unitarian foundations (‘subject of course to our more special direction than perhaps in any other matter’) and well-balanced habits of empirical observation.
It is not perhaps surprising that Dr Kraemer would prove unable to meet such a demanding standard. Hired in the autumn of 1843, his peremptory dismissal was hastened by the fact that Lady Byron had found a more suitable candidate. Summoned to join her mother in October at the genteelly unfashionable resort of Clifton (Brunel’s great suspension bridge had not yet linked Clifton to the thriving port of Bristol), Ada heard Annabella’s proposal. Presented in Lady Byron’s quiet but always decisive tones, Dr William Carpenter sounded ideal.
It was Annabella’s philanthropic work that had brought her into contact with the Carpenters. Dr Lant Carpenter, a leading Unitarian educationalist who suffered from depression, had drowned in 1840, while travelling around Europe on a prescribed health tour. At the time Annabella arrived at Clifton, his widow and eldest daughter Mary were both working at the celebrated Bristol school inaugurated by the late Dr Carpenter. Mary, then aged thirty-six, would later become one of Annabella’s closest allies and a co-trustee of her papers, while her first cousin, Harriet Martineau, would become one of Lady Byron’s greatest champions. In the early autumn of 1843, however, Lady Byron’s interest was focussed more sharply upon Mary’s younger brother.
Handsome, clever and highly ambitious, the Edinburgh-educated William Carpenter had already made his name as the author of Principles of Human Physiology, an account of developmental theories of life which paid prudent tribute to ‘our continued dependence on the Creator’. Recently married, young Dr Carpenter was a rising academic in need of a steady income and secure accommodation. That was where the Lovelaces came in.
Anxious to see her unruly grandchildren given a sterling education while Ada concentrated on her burgeoning scientific career, Lady Byron intended Carpenter to act both as tutor and watchdog, one who would ensure that her daughter was not pushing herself beyond her strength. What Lady Byron did not factor into her plans was the effect that Ada’s celebrated parentage and charismatic personality was likely to have upon a socially insecure academic who – as William Lovelace would later remark – was excessively susceptible to the charms of a pretty woman.
‘I like to please people’s eyes and indeed ears and all their faculties as much as I can,’ Ada jauntily informed her mother in an undated letter that was probably written a year or two before meeting Dr William Carpenter. The effect of this flirtatious streak in Ada’s nature was predictable. Dr Carpenter, arriving with his wife for a first interview at Ashley Combe in late November 1843, was flattered by the rapidity with which the young Lady Lovelace (‘more delightful than ever,’ her doting husband wrote to the Hen after Ada’s return from Clifton on 1 November) took him into her confidence, both about her children and
