To us, it may sound either as though Ada had gone mad or as though she had been burying her nose in the imaginative pages of that contemporary masterpiece, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.* But William Lovelace, as ambitious as the Hen for Ada’s success, had heard and approved his wife’s project; Greig, the legally trained, rational and sober-hearted son of Mary Somerville, neither questioned Ada’s sanity nor withdrew his services as her devoted researcher.
On 5 December 1844, Ada wrote again to Greig. His friendly invitation to a play was brushed away with a reminder that she had not set foot in a theatre for over two years. All Ada wanted from him at present was a means of access to that most un-woman-friendly treasurehouse of researchers: the Royal Society. Had she not earned the right? ‘I really have become as much tied to a profession as you are,’ Ada pleaded to the lawyer. ‘And so much the better for me, I always required this.’
A rare view for a woman to take of herself in the mid-nineteenth century, it was one in which Ada Lovelace was assisted by the quiet support, not only of Woronzow Greig, Charles Wheatstone, Lord Lovelace and her own mother, Lady Byron, but by the reassurance in 1844 that Michael Faraday, then regarded as the greatest scientist of the day, had confidence in her declared belief that she – Lord Byron’s daughter – had been singled out to act as ‘the High-Priestess of God’s earthly manifestations.’
Great things were evidently in store.
* Local insurrections had forced Edward and Fanny back to England from Euboea. Angry altercations began when Lovelace suggested that Edward could become a land agent like his brother, with no loss of social status. Things worsened when Fanny defended her husband’s right to be made a principal at his own school, rather than running one of the village schools set up by Annabella. The provision of a Warwickshire house at Leamington Spa (where Lady Byron owned property) did not lessen the touchy Edward’s sense that he had been insulted. The quarrel with Annabella was never patched up, but Edward, as a widower, became her younger grandson’s most respected advisor on family history.
* To Carpenter himself, Ada wrote of her daughter’s need of ‘a profession’ and suggested, presciently, that it might be that of an artist. (AAL to W. B. Carpenter, n.d. 1844, Dep. Lovelace Byron 44, fol. 16.)
* ‘I find myself in reading her notes at a loss in the same kind of way as I feel when trying to understand any other thing which the explainer himself has not clear ideas of.’ John Herschel to Charles Lyell, 15 November 1844, Royal Society, Herschel Letters, vol. 22. ff. 210–11. Herschel nevertheless had a very friendly correspondence with Ada (Dep. Lovelace Byron 172, fols. 1–29.)
* A book which Ada seems never to have read. It is not known whether she ever met Frankenstein’s creator, but these two remarkable women lived alongside each other in London’s small scientific world from 1822 to 1851. Mary Shelley died in London, just one year before Ada. (See www.mirandaseymour.com for a blog about possible connections.)
CHAPTER NINETEEN
T
HE
L
ADY FROM
P
ORLOCK
(1844–9)
On 14 November 1838, the Taunton Courier excitedly reported that Fyne Court, the home of Somerset’s most eccentric squire, had received a visit from the Earl of Lovelace and his lady, accompanied by a large party of their friends. In the absence of the owner, Mr Andrew Crosse, the callers were given a tour of the house and grounds. Apparently, they had been ‘much gratified’ by what they saw.
There was nothing novel about visiting country houses in the absence of their owners. Fyne Court was old, handsome and enhanced – if you liked that kind of thing – by a garden that featured crumbling follies, ponds, bridges and a serpentine lake (complete with grotto-style boathouse). Those were not the attractions, however, that had brought the Lovelace contingent of scientists, journalists and county folk out on a twenty-mile jaunt across Exmoor, in search of a lonely manor settled deep within the Quantock Hills.
Given the fact that Andrew Crosse grew up in an area that seems to have drawn the romantic poets to it like iron filings to a magnet (Wordsworth and Coleridge were living nearby when Crosse was in his early teens), and through the landscape of which they all roamed at will, it’s surprising that Mr Crosse’s name does not appear more frequently in literary history. Born at Fyne Court in 1784, Crosse was running the family estate by the age of twenty-one. A tall, ruddy-cheeked and deeply religious man (he bore a striking physical resemblance to his one-time Somerset neighbour, Robert Southey), Crosse was an amateur poet whose passion for science owed something to his upbringing (his father had been friendly with both Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley), something to a sympathetic master at his Bristol boarding school and much to the simple fact that he was himself a clever, well-off man living in an age when science had become a fashionable home pursuit.
By the time that Andrew Crosse married Mary Anne Hamilton in 1809, he was a man obsessed. Five years later, visitors found the once elegant ballroom of Fyne Court transformed into a gigantic electrical laboratory, containing its own power storage supply within the fifty barrel-sized glass Leyden jars that had been provided by a friendly fellow scientist, G. S. Singer. Above them in the gallery (from which Crosse sometimes personally regaled his guests with an organ recital), an elaborate apparatus for measuring atmospheric electricity was connected to long lines of copper wiring that were strung between the swaying branches of an avenue of majestic beeches (trees that still flank the approach to Crosse’s home).
History does not report what the inhabitants of the local hilltop village of Broomfield thought of Andrew Crosse, but the experiments that regularly took place at Fyne Court – especially
