Jacquards' Web (18 page)

Ada’s accident of birth gave her a very special kind of life: it put her into the public spotlight from the moment she was born. In
1837
, when Ada was twenty-one, Benjamin Disraeli, a novelist before he became a politician, could base the heroine of his novel
Venetia
on Ada and take it for granted that his readers would recognize the portrait.

Ada was raised by her mother, Lady Byron, born Annabella Milbanke. Annabella was a rich, spoilt, bossy, manipulative, but self-possessed and intelligent woman who had managed to tolerate married life with Lord Byron for just over a year. Byron’s reasons for marrying Annabella are still rather a puzzle—indeed, many who admire his poetry would probably find it difficult to believe he was ever married at all. His most likely reasons for entering that state were that he hoped his wife’s family’s money would help to free him from his habitual indebtedness (it didn’t) and because he was hoping Annabella would provide him with a son (she didn’t).

Annabella and Byron were married on
2
January
1815
, in her parents’ manor house in the small town of Seaham, on the north-east of England. Things did not go well even during the honey-moon, during which Byron slept with a loaded pistol by his bedside. He also took care to inform his doting wife that he felt as though he were ‘in hell’. For a couple of years prior to his marriage he had been having an on–off affair with his half-sister, whose name was Augusta. Ada herself, the fruit of a brief period of mutual affection between Byron and his wife near the start of the marriage, was christened Augusta Ada when she was born on
10
December
1815
, but the ‘Augusta’ was soon dropped. By then her mother had started to suspect, apparently justifiably, the sexual nature of the liaison between Byron and his half-sister.

This liaison was still continuing even after the marriage. Ada was only a few weeks old when Annabella, sick of Byron’s unstable moods, debts, and infidelities, took the child and fled from her husband’s London house in the middle of the night. Byron never saw his wife or his daughter again.

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Byron was incapable of extending lasting love to anyone apart from himself, and even here he often faltered. If the real nature of his feelings towards his daughter seems an enigma, this is only to say that the real nature of all his feelings appears similarly enigmatic. It is not even clear whether the love he claimed to have for Ada was a genuine love or the kind of sentimental, remote, ‘poetic’ fondness he applied to many people he rarely saw, including the two illegitimate children he is definitely known to have fathered.

The mystery is hardly solved by the stanza, quoted at the start of this chapter, from the Third Canto of Byron’s autobiographical poem
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
. In this part of the poem, Byron sets down his feelings about Ada when he was sail-ing away from England after the failure of his marriage. There is evidently some fatherly affection here, but it also sounds as if father is not altogether unhappy to be leaving his daughter behind and rather relishes the prospect of being relieved from the more practical aspects of fatherhood and consequently being able freely to pursue his own agenda overseas. Lady Byron, however, fear-ing that if Ada ever left Britain, Byron might find the girl and kidnap her, only took Ada on a tour of Europe after Byron died, on
19
April
1824
, of swamp fever at Missolonghi, Greece. He was thirty-six.

Ada inherited Annabella’s love of learning and confidence in her own opinion. Fortunately, the excellent education her mother arranged for her to have at home tended to temper, though not remove, a tendency Ada had towards overconfidence in her intellectual abilities.

The usual educational opportunities open to girls in the early nineteenth century were limited, to put it mildly. Even middle-class and aristocratic girls were usually only taught such skills as were necessary for overseeing the management of the households they could one day expect to manage. Many professional educators, even female ones, actually regarded women’s minds as inferior to men’s at a fundamental biological level. Foreign 125

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literature, especially French plays and novels, were seen as particularly dangerous to women, possibly because it was feared it would open up emotional possibilities to women beyond the narrow path of marriage and life as a placid ornament.

Annabella’s zeal as an educator stemmed from the unusually broad education she had herself received as the only daughter of wealthy, liberal, forward-thinking parents. She had studied history, poetry, literature, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, drawing, and dancing. Annabella was adamant that Ada would also benefit from a high-calibre education. Annabella was rich enough, and confident enough, to get what she wanted.

Yet while Ada was lucky in the education she received, she had scarcely more ground for optimism than any other intellectually enthusiastic woman of her day as regards finding an outlet for her mental energies after her education was completed. At a time when most human brainpower was comprehensively squandered, with intelligent working-class men as well as women obliged to live lives of drudgery and penury, toiling at monotonous work in filthy, noisy, and unhealthy conditions, Ada was fortunate only in belonging to a class that did not need to labour in such a fashion.

Otherwise she had been born with the most severe of handicaps for anyone who wanted to live the life of the mind: she was female.

For a woman of Ada’s day and social class who wished to lead a mentally fulfilling life, the opportunities were close to non-existent. There was generally little alternative but to marry, produce children, and live for one’s husband. Annabella, to whom Ada was in thrall for much of her life, was conscious of how disastrous her own marriage had been. She was determined Ada would marry an aristocrat who could offer Ada a secure, comfortable domestic life. Ideally, Annabella wanted Ada to marry into the
older
aristocracy. There was a snobbish appeal at the time for titles that were more than a century old.

Annabella, rich, influential, and strong-willed, was used to having her wishes obeyed. Ada’s yearning to lead a life of the 126

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mind, readily expressed even in the letters she wrote as a teenage girl, was thus doomed from the start. She was destined to spend much of her life aching to use her mind, but confronted with the day-to-day reality of children, nannies, servants, running a household, and dealing with a husband’s whims. While not as oppressive and destructive of the intellectual life as the need to earn a living by spending twelve or more hours a day minding a dangerous and noisy machine that emitted clouds of dust, Ada’s daily routine remained an endlessly frustrating one.

Faced with the reality of the limitations on a woman’s role, middle-class or upper middle-class women confronted oppressive obstacles to making any real progress in advancing intellectual careers. Some, such as Jane Austen, the Brontës or—later in the century—George Eliot won careers for themselves through successful authorship. When they did, the reality of their struggle was likely to be a key subject of their books; Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
(
1847
), for example, is largely autobiographical in its account of the predicament of an intellectually gifted young woman forced to deal with the rigid limitations of life as a governess.

It was also true that, occasionally, enormous talent along with a stroke of good fortune might give a woman an opportunity to escape the bonds of domesticity. Mary Somerville, the close friend of Annabella and Ada who achieved international renown as a mathematician and scientist, first became interested in mathematics when she amused herself by solving the often challenging mathematical puzzles that were frequently published in Victorian embroidery magazines. The fact that such puzzles were published in such magazines at all is somehow curiously pathetic, as if the editors were all too aware of the wasted intellectual energies of their female readers and were trying to do what they could to give them something more weighty to think about than household chores and, well, embroidery.

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Ada Byron met Charles Babbage for the first time on Wednesday
5
June
1833
at a party in London. He was one of many scientists there. Annabella noted in a letter to a friend that the party pleased Ada more ‘than any assemblage of the grand monde’.

Babbage was forty-one years old at the time; Ada just seventeen. Babbage’s wife Georgiana had been dead for six years. He had settled into an arduous, stressful, and often lonely bachelor life. It would be fascinating to know what he and Ada spoke about on their first encounter, but no account of the meeting or any relevant letters survive. We do know, however, that in a letter Ada wrote soon afterwards to her mother, she described her feelings for Babbage as a ‘fondness’ which is ‘by no means inconsiderable’.

Their friendship ripened quickly. On Monday
17
June
1833

Ada and her mother went to Babbage’s home. There, he demonstrated to them the working portion of the Difference Engine.

This was the completed one-seventh of the machine he displayed at his soirées. It amounted to the pinnacle of his efforts to build the machine.

Ada’s fascination with Babbage’s ideas is clear from her letters. She found witnessing the operation of the Engine—or at least the part that Babbage had been able to complete—one of the most remarkable experiences in her life. She continued to be in touch with Babbage, and she and her mother often visited him when they were in London.

About eighteen months after Ada first met Babbage, she was with him, her mother, and Mary Somerville on the evening of Monday,
15
December
1834
, when as we have seen Babbage used metaphors of poetic intensity to communicate to his guests his great excitement about his recent work on what turned out to be the Analytical Engine. The very fact that Ada became aware of Babbage’s work on the Analytical Engine in this way shows she played no role in
originating
the idea of the machine. But geniuses need committed, visionary, and passionate disciples if they are to make the most of their ideas. Ada was precisely such a disciple, 128

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and Babbage was fortunate indeed she had decided to follow him.

By all accounts Babbage continued to see her fairly often during the next few months. Her mother frequently made a third at these meetings, but not always, and the correspondence between Ada and Babbage does not give any grounds for suggesting that Ada ever made use of a chaperone when she saw Babbage.

One cannot in any case readily imagine someone as self-possessed and confident as Ada having much time for chaperones.

Ada and Babbage both had much to gain from their friendship. She would have been flattered by having the ear of one of the great intellectuals of her age; Babbage no doubt found her youth, beauty, and fascination with his work a gratifying diversion at a time when he was slaving away on his Engine without much tangible result.

The progress of their acquaintance can be followed in the surviving correspondence between them. This consists of eighty-five letters from Ada to Babbage and twenty-five letters from him to her. There were certainly many other letters that have been lost. The proof of this is that there are often references in the correspondence to other letters that have apparently not survived, while in
1853
Babbage wrote a letter to Lady Byron’s solicitor in which Babbage referred to an ‘extensive correspondence’ he had carried on with Ada ‘for years’. Indeed, even while I was researching this book, a small cache of letters from Ada to Babbage turned up in the storeroom of the Northumberland County Archive in the north of England. It is possible that more letters between them may yet materialize.

Did Babbage wonder whether Ada might possibly have made a wife for him? There is evidence that in the
1830
s Babbage put out feelers among a few of his acquaintances to enquire whether they knew of any lady who might be a suitable new Mrs Babbage.

Remarriage, at least at that time, was apparently not on his mind.

True, Ada was much younger than he was, but such age disparities between the man and the woman were by no means rare in 129

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his day. Surviving letters from Ada to friends offer evidence that she did not find Babbage unattractive, and she might have imagined (not necessarily correctly) that marrying him would have fulfilled her intellectual longings.

But if Ada herself had ever speculated about the possibility of marrying Babbage she would have known only too well that Lady Byron would never have entertained it. Annabella was adamant Ada would marry a landed aristocrat of the best blue blood, not a man of science, however wealthy.

On
8
July
1835
, after elaborate machinations by her mother, Ada married a Lord William King, a kind but not especially bright man who on the whole turned out to be a good and con-siderate husband.

William certainly fitted the bill when it came to blood of the right hue. His title was more than a century old; it dated from the early eighteenth century. Antique titles were much praised. Nor was Ada indifferent to William, who was good-looking in a fairly vapid way. Above all, he was rich, and had travelled enough in Europe to seem interesting, at least to start with. And then there was the physical side of marriage. Ada took to it with relish.

Several letters she wrote to William shortly after their marriage make clear how much she enjoyed love-making.

On marrying, Ada became Augusta Ada King. In
1838
, when her husband was elevated to the title of Earl of Lovelace by the young Queen Victoria, Ada became Countess of Lovelace.

Today, she is generally referred to as Ada Lovelace.

How did Babbage feel about Ada’s marriage? Annabella evidently thought he might have been jealous. She wrote Ada a letter asking ‘but has Babbage cut you since your marriage?’—