A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (18 page)

But what a dreadful fate is an insidious painless disease, that undermines before one knows it.

On October 15 1851, Ada wrote to her mother:

I have been very unwell, & am getting better again; But still everything seems difficult & troublesome … But I do dread that horrible
struggle
, which I fear is in the Byron blood. I don’t think we die easy. I should like to ‘drop’ off, gently, but quickly, some 30 or 40 years hence
.

Ada would of course have been only too aware that in a few months she was about the reach the age of Lord Byron when he died. Yet despite that letter she had written to her mother, Ada tried to remain positive. Writing to her son Byron, Lord Ockham, on the same day when she wrote the just-quoted letter to her mother, Ada pens a letter that has a calm and affectionate maternal tone and gives no indication of how ill she knows she is. Presumably she wanted to keep the truth from Byron. She wrote the letter on Great Exhibition stationery. Byron was in the navy, aboard the ship
HMS Daphne
. Ada missed him a great deal. By all accounts Byron, unlike his grandfather, was not much of a letter-writer.

Dear Byron, This day has closed our Great National Exposition after a career of glory & success unequalled almost in the history of human enterprise.

We have seen one or two newspaper notices of the Daphne having gone to Vancouver’s Island, but we have not heard from you now for many months…

We have heard (thro’ officers of the
Champion
) that you were very well thought of there; & you were mentioned as a ‘
heaven-born sailor’
.

Pray continue yr heavenly career.

Most Affectly yrs

A.A. Lovelace

Ada underlines in this letter the name of the ship the
Champion
but not the
Daphne
, perhaps because it was a less familiar ship to Byron than the one he was sailing on.

Ada went with Babbage to the Great Exhibition, which took place at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in London, from May 1 to October 15 1851. It was, at the time, the greatest exhibition of culture and industry that had taken place in history, and it was immensely popular and hugely profitable. It started a trend in such exhibitions that lasted for about a century. There was, for example, an
Exposition universelle
held in Paris in 1855 and four more during the nineteenth century.

The unclear references she often makes in her letters to her state of mind may reflect the fact that in order to get relief from her physical pains, she often took laudanum – a powerful combination of opium and brandy – whenever she felt unwell. This drug definitely had on occasion a negative effect on her mental state, and she may have written some letters under its influence. This has led certain uncharitable commentators to suggest that she went mad or was regularly intoxicated.

Her ill-health persisted. She wrote to her son Byron from her London home at 6 Great Cumberland Place on Saturday November 15 1851, this time not leaving him under any illusions about her condition, though she starts the letter by reminding him that ‘we have not heard from you for very many months’.

My health is at present very delicate and infirm, & I am obliged to be chiefly in Town; for surgical advice, & to lie up on the sofa almost entirely.

Slowly but surely and inexorably, the cancer took hold of her, causing her at first intermittent pain, then gradually worse and worse pain. For example, in a letter Ada wrote to her mother on Tuesday December 30 1851, Ada wrote:

I am going on well, excepting that I had an
awful
night from pain. I am now obliged to give up sleeping in bed altogether, &
to be dressed,
& lie on a sofa or else
outside
my bed. In this way, I get
intervals
of sleep, from being able to rise & to move about freely, without risk of catching cold. I am going on perfectly well. It is
expected
there will be a great deal of trouble from pain.

By the end of the year 1851, though, there was really nothing about Ada’s health that she could be optimistic about. The pain from her cancer visited her more and more frequently, yet mercifully the pain was not continuous, and during her times of relief from it she was almost back to her old optimistic and positive self, despite her feelings of physical weakness. By now Ada spent most of her time on the sofa in her London home and was pushed around by servants in her invalid chair when she wanted some fresh air. William was not often with her at this time.

Writing to her mother on Sunday January 10 1852, Ada notes:

It will be a long while before I shall have even average nervous energy. Everything is fatigue.

Yet in a burst of optimism, or perhaps to reassure Lady Byron, she adds:

But I am never in bad spirits, which is surprising.

On February 28 1852, her illness appears to be in remission but she adds:

There is still some
uncertainty
forever, & possibility of relapse. As I am certain I could not get thro any more severe illness, I shall not feel confident just yet…

It has been a very bad case… It is to me dreadful to know what the human frame
can
suffer, especially when I reflect there are even
worse
agonies than I have suffered.

Ada’s life was made even more difficult by her having money worries due to the losses she had incurred in horse races. Finally, Lady Byron relented and told her lawyer that she would consider paying Ada’s debts but that first Ada needed to supply a list of all the monies she owed.

In April 1852, Lady Byron’s lawyer Stephen Lushington went to see Ada. He was a long-standing close friend of the family and had helped Lady Byron deftly through her separation from the defiant Byron, and had later married a close friend of hers. A formidable campaigner against slavery and capital punishment (1840), he was both a judge and Privy Counsellor. Lushington was shocked to see how ill Ada looked. She was weak, frail, much thinner than was healthy and was doing all she could do to cope with pain by taking laudanum and opium. Ada gave the discreet Lushington a list of the money she owed. (He was to spend the last two decades of his life on Lovelace’s estate, dying in 1873.)

Lady Byron looked over the list carefully. She thought a hairdresser’s bill questionable and also asked Lushington why Ada was spending money on opium. Lady Byron herself indicated that she thought mesmerism would be better. Here, as often during Ada’s last year, it is puzzling that neither William nor Lady Byron spent much time with Ada. Ada had servants to look after her, but Lady Byron especially, and William too to some extent, seem to have felt that they didn’t want to spend much time with Ada when she was so ill. There is no clear evidence that explains why Lady Byron and William behaved like this, though certainly Lady Byron felt that Ada’s illness was to some extent visited on her because of what Lady Byron saw as Ada’s misbehaviour in her life. In particular, Lady Byron, herself a hypochondriac, seems to have both hated and feared illness. But Lady Byron may also have believed Ada’s illness to be a just punishment for the nature of the friendship Ada had had with John Crosse.

Ada had got to know John Crosse through his brother Robert, a scientific showman who enjoyed putting on elaborate demonstrations for the benefit of fee-paying audience. She may have had an affair with Crosse. It appears that all the letters John Crosse wrote to Ada were destroyed by Lady Byron after Ada’s death, and that Lady Byron paid John Crosse to return to her the letters Ada had written to him. However, given her failing health and later death from ovarian cancer, sexual affairs seem to be unlikely after the mid 1840s, around the time she met John Crosse.

The truth of the matter was that by the start of 1852 Ada was fatally ill, and that her illness would subsequently turn into an agonising death. When writing to her mother, however, she tried at first to downplay how ill she was, partly because she knew how unsympathetic her mother could be towards illness suffered by anyone else.

However, as she got more and more ill, which she did in the early months of 1852, there seemed little point concealing from her mother just how unwell she really was.

Babbage was friends with her all this time, as he had been since they had first met in 1833, and he was deeply concerned about her health and her prognosis: indeed, he was far more concerned than Lady Byron was.

In another letter to her mother which is undated, but was written on a Monday evening some time early in 1852, Ada wrote the following terrible words about her suffering:

When I find that not only one’s whole being can become merely one living
agony
, but that in that state, &
after
it, one’s
mind
is gone more or less, – the impression of
mortality
become appalling; & not of mortality merely, but of mortality in an
agony
&
struggle
…

The more one suffers, the more appalling is it to feel that it may all be only in order to ‘
die like a dog
’ as they say…

Mary Somerville was to observe: ‘I never knew of anyone who suffered such protracted intolerable agony.’ Sometime around the middle of August 1852, though the definite date is not known, Ada wrote to her mother in the familiar mixture of optimism and pessimism:

Tolerably comfortable now, & being let down
very easy
. I begin to understand
Death
, which is going on quietly & gradually every minute, & will never be a thing of one particular moment.

Ada tried to use what drugs she could to relieve her condition. She may even have taken cannabis. Her mother, on her part a keen follower of exotic new ‘sciences’ such as phrenology, suggested phrenomesmerism. Both Babbage and Faraday wrote sceptically about this and antagonised Lady Byron for life. Ada, however, knew her mother well and dutifully gave it a try. She wrote a letter to Lady Byron early in 1852, in effect answering her mother’s query about the efficacy of mesmerism to deal with very severe pain:

I have heard a great deal about Cannabis from Sir G[eorge]. Wilkinson who is very familiar with it. It is not a thing to trifle with, but the effects… are
very definite.
I have got back to my old friend
Opium
and thankful enough. It seems mesmerism is powerless when I have my
real
pains, & not merely some slight cramps.

In happier times Ada, Lord Lovelace and their good friend Sir George Wilkinson had indulged Lady Byron in another one of her foibles – she was hardly alone in these, Augustus de Morgan was apparently taken by clairvoyance and spiritualism, as was his wife Sophia – and had visited a phrenologist called Deville. He claimed to be able to read the skull for personality traits. She was underwhelmed by the experience, especially when Deville felt Wilkinson’s intellect rated higher than Lovelace’s or hers.

The disease continued slowly to destroy Ada’s body. On Friday May 7 1852, Ada wrote to her son Byron:

My dearest Son. I am quite a cripple & an
invalid
…

I am sadly distressed to think that during the few weeks
you
are likely to be with us, you will have a
sick Mama
, whom I fear a handsome active young fellow like you, will regard as a bore. Yet I think you are too good, & too aware of my
affection for you
& of my anxiety to see you again to be otherwise than my
affectionate son
, whether I am ill or well.
I
resign myself to my present state & I trust will others.

Your most
affectionate
Mother

Lord Lovelace had originally condoned and even contributed financially to Ada’s betting, and perhaps even encouraged it, but when he could no longer deal with the money side, he threw himself on Lady Byron’s mercy in the hope she would help out. His attempt was charmless, but he could not have made a more serious mistake. Lady Byron had intended William to be Ada’s protector in the way that Byron had singularly failed to be. Instead of providing a comfortable moat behind which her fragile daughter would be safe, he himself now came to her with the appalling evidence she needed to see that he had aided and abetted in her ruin.

She quickly regained her daughter’s trust by helping Ada pay off a pawn shop that had a diamond from her husband’s family. Soon the control Lady Byron had had over her daughter in her youth was re-established. As Ada’s illness got worse and worse, Lady Byron moved into Ada and William’s house at 6 Cumberland Place, on August 22 1852, ostensibly to look after her but in fact to boss her (and him) about.

She dismissed Ada and William’s servants at Great Cumberland Place, replacing them with servants of her own. Lady Byron discouraged William from visiting Ada too often, even though it was his own house. However, by all accounts William stood up to his formidable mother-in-law in this respect, though he did leave a note saying that in his absence Lady Byron would be master of the house.

Babbage is known to have visited Ada one last time at Great Cumberland Place on Thursday August 12 1852. After this visit, Lady Byron did not allow Babbage to visit her any more. Lady Byron and Babbage appear to have had a row that day. Ada wanted Babbage to be the executor of her will and gave him a letter to give him legal authority to do this. Fatefully he agreed to do so for his dying friend, earning Lady Byron’s eternal wrath. He had agreed to insert himself between her and her daughter without being consulted, something she resented violently. Like all Ada’s attempts to escape her mother’s influence, this one was doomed, too. The letter turned out to lack sufficient legal authority to empower Babbage.

On August 12 Lady Byron also told Ada that John Crosse would no longer be allowed to visit her. He and Ada were clearly still close friends. But Ada took her own subtle, last revenge on her mother, and stipulated that she was to be buried next to her father. William wrote; ‘She walked about the room on my arm for a time, speaking almost with satisfaction of the posthumous arrangements & simple inscription to the effect that she was placed by his side by her own desire.’ She also stipulated during this time endowments to various people, including the nurses, although it wasn’t clear where the money might come from.