A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (19 page)

August 12 was the last day Babbage saw Ada. Also, after that day, letters Ada ostensibly wrote cannot definitely be attributed to her, as Lady Byron very likely had part in their composition as she had in her youth. Babbage himself stated that Ada had no control of her house or life from that day forward.

One man who was allowed to visit, however, was Charles Dickens. It is difficult to know how well Ada knew Charles Dickens’s work, but she was at least evidently familiar with his novel
Dombey and Son
, which had been published recently, in 1848. Dickens, born February 7 1812, was a few months short of being four years older than Ada. On Thursday August 19 1852, a week after Babbage saw Ada for the last time, Charles Dickens went to visit her and to read to her.

Ada and Dickens were friends from when she first entered London society, though it is impossible to trace the friendship because Ada’s letters to Dickens have not survived. Ada did, however, write to her husband (most likely in 1842, but the letter is undated) to express her delight in Dickens’s
American Notes,
which were published in October 1842. As she wrote to William:

I am as happy as possible & in great spirits. I have read a quantity of Dickens’s
American Notes
, which would delight even you.

There is so much elegance and refinement in all his jokes; such real wit, such original ideas & comparisons, & such profound remarks, & always kindly and high moral tone, that he cannot but captivate the impartial I think in this work.

Dickens had been part of Ada and Babbage’s circle since the late 1830s. Five of his letters to her are contained in Dickens’s collected letters. They suggest a good friendship but not an emotionally intimate one. It is clear, though, that Dickens sometimes called on Ada in London. Ada, Babbage and William sometimes attended dinner parties at Dickens’s home at Devonshire Place. Babbage may perhaps have accompanied Ada if William wasn’t available. They lived within a mile from each other and William was often at one of his country houses, Ockham or Ashley to deal with his tunnels.

Ada most likely got to know Dickens through Babbage. From the years 1839 to 1851, Babbage and Dickens lived only a few hundred yards from each other; Dickens in his large house on Devonshire Terrace in Marylebone Road, and Babbage in Dorset Street.

Dickens was most certainly not of a scientific disposition or frame of mind, and had little or no technical knowledge of Babbage’s work. But he had no problem understanding the benefit to mankind and freedom from mental drudgery that a calculation machine would bring. Writing from Broadstairs, Kent, to his brother Henry Austin on December 20 1851 about the soaring costs of the modifications to his new house in London’s Tavistock Place, Dickens was ruefully and ironically to comment that the bill submitted by the builder was ‘too long to be added up, until Babbage’s Calculating Machine shall be improved and finished… there is not paper enough ready-made, to carry it over and bring it forward again.’

A crucial theme in Dickens’s novel
Little Dorrit
(1857) is how the cold and indifferent workings of the law and government bring human misery. The tenth chapter of the first part of the book, entitled with transparent irony ‘Containing the Whole Science of Government’, focuses on a Government department dedicated to never getting anything done. Dickens calls it the ‘Circumlocution Office’.

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office… Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving –
how not to do it
…. Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be – what it was.

One of the most put-upon victims of the Circumlocution Office is an inventor called Daniel Doyce. Dickens describes him as a ‘a quiet, plain, steady man’, who ‘seemed a little depressed, but neither ashamed nor repentant.’

We are told that a dozen years earlier, Doyce has perfected ‘an invention (involving a very curious secret process) of great importance to his country and his fellow creatures’. But instead of winning praise from officialdom for what he has done, from the moment Doyce approaches the Government for help with funding, he ‘ceases to be an innocent citizen, and becomes a culprit. He is treated, from that instant, as a man who has done some infernal action.’

Dickens’s imagination got by perfectly well, most of the time, without needing to use real people as the basis for all the characters he created. The similarities between Doyce and Babbage, though, are too striking to be ignored. The description of Doyce’s appearance is a good fit to Babbage to begin with (‘… a practical looking man, whose hair had turned grey, and in whose face and forehead there were deep lines of cogitation’) and even the timing of when Doyce ‘perfected’ his invention (‘a dozen years ago’) which after all is an entirely free choice on Dickens’s part, seems to have been chosen very deliberately to allude to Babbage’s work. As for the account of the invention itself, its ‘great importance to his country and his fellow creatures’ also seems to point directly at Babbage, as does the ironic account of Doyce’s plight voiced by another character, Mr Meagles:

‘… [H]e has been ingenious, and he has been trying to turn his ingenuity to his country’s service. That makes him a public offender, sir.’

And what Doyce says about how inventors such as he are treated at home compared with abroad could easily have been words taken down pretty well verbatim from some lament Babbage might, in a self-pitying mood, have made at one of Dickens’s numerous dinner parties at Devonshire Terrace, over the turtle soup, the turbot or the roast lamb.

‘Yes. No doubt I am disappointed. Hurt? Yes. No doubt I am hurt. That’s only natural. But what I mean, when I say that people who put themselves in the same position, are mostly used in the same way – ‘

‘In England,’ said Mr Meagles.

‘Oh! of course I mean in England. When they take their inventions into foreign countries, that’s quite different. And that’s the reason why so many go there.’

On the day when Dickens visited Ada to read to her, there is no record of Lady Byron being present. However, William was on this occasion. Ada had asked Dickens to come to read to her the death scene from
Dombey and Son
, in which little Paul Dombey dies. As William wrote, Ada ‘expressed a strong wish to see Ch. Dickens – the passage about the death of the boy in his Dombey on the shores of the ocean had struck her & she wished him to know her sympathy and I wrote to him to hasten if he would see her alive.’

The passage where little Paul Dombey dies, was, by 1852, already one of the most famous in Victorian literature. The novel is about how the cold, unfeeling, haughty businessman Mr Dombey – the embodiment of nineteenth-century man, steely arrogance and pride – is slowly softened by the reviving, refreshing fountain of feminine life represented by his daughter Florence, who grows to be a woman and is older than her brother Paul. In this scene, she is ‘Floy’. In many ways, the novel echoes many aspects of Ada’s life: masculinity stubbornly repressing the female spirit and refusing to see anything in women except ornamental charm and intellectual inferiority.

Little Paul is about five years old when he dies:

Sister and brother wound their arms around each other, and the golden light came streaming in, and fell upon them, locked together.

‘How fast the river runs, between its green banks and the rushes, ‘Floy! But it’s very near the sea. I hear the waves! They always said so!’

Presently he told her the motion of the boat upon the stream was lulling him to rest. How green the banks were now, how bright the flowers growing on them, and how tall the rushes! Now the boat was out at sea, but gliding smoothly on. And now there was a shore before him. Who stood on the bank – !

He put his hands together, as he had been used to do at his prayers. He did not remove his arms to do it; but they saw him fold them so, behind her neck.

‘Mama is like you, Floy. I know her by the face! But tell them that the print upon the stairs at school is not divine enough. The light about the head is shining on me as I go!’

The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old fashion – Death!

Oh thank
god
, all who see it, for that older fashion yet, of Immortality! And look upon us, angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean!

Ada and Dickens evidently discussed life more generally at this meeting. William wrote that Ada spoke to him afterwards of ‘the comfort she had derived from the concurrence of their ideas about the future.’ As George Orwell pointed out in his long essay on Dickens, Dickens seems almost unaware of the future and it seems more likely that ‘future’ is William’s euphemistic term for what they really discussed – her death.

Ada at that moment had only a few months to live. The appalling diagnosis, which one of her doctors, Dr West, gave, has survived:

Lady Lovelace’s disease is cancer; the final symptoms of which appeared between eighteen months and two years ago; consisting not in pain but in frequent and alarmingly profuse haemorrhages. In December the haemorrhages ceased but pain began to be experienced, which has increased in frequency and intensity up to the present time; and coupled with which there has been an advance of the disease: an extension of it to other organs. A condition such as hers is thus a very grievous one; there is not merely a local disorder increasing daily in a situation in which surgical dexterity can effect nothing, but the blood itself is poisoned, and our remedies cannot reach to that. The duty of the physician is thus a very sad one; as the highest success which he can hope to attain is to secure not recovery, but euthanasia.

The medical science of Ada’s day could do nothing to cure her, and unfortunately nothing much to alleviate her suffering either.

The hypodermic needle had not yet been invented, and the only way to administer opiates was orally, which made them much less effective than if they were directly introduced into the bloodstream.

On Wednesday August 25 1852, just six days after visiting Ada and reading to her, Dickens wrote a letter to his friend the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts about the visit.

The night before I left town (last Saturday) I had a note from Lord Lovelace to tell me that Lady Lovelace was dying, and that the death of the child in
Dombey
had been so much in her thoughts and had soothed her so, that she wished to see me once more if I could be found. I went, and sat alone with her for some time. It was very solemn and sad, but her fortitude was quite surprising; and her Conviction that all the agony she has suffered (which has been very great) had some good design in the goodness of God, impressed me very much.

By ‘last Saturday’ Dickens may be referring to Saturday August 14 rather than the Saturday (August 21) preceding his writing of this letter. There is a slight implication in what Dickens says that he went to read to Ada on the same day when Lord Lovelace told him how ill Ada was, but in fact he did not read to her until five days later, on Thursday. The fact that Dickens evidently did not know Ada was dying suggests that perhaps they had not seen much of each other for a while.

William, Lord Lovelace, 1850.

On August 30 her pulse stopped for ten minutes, but still she did not die. Her agony increased, and she was incoherent where she had previously been resigned, and feared she would be buried alive. Previously an agnostic, she now begged her religious mother and William to pray for her. Lady Byron wrote it was ‘the best moment she has had’, it appears that she meant ‘that her father had sent her this disease, & doomed her to an early death! She spoke of it as cruel, & unjust of God to allow it.’

On September 1, at Lady Byron’s prompting, Ada confessed her sins (whatever they were) to William. He walked out of the room devastated and remained silent about what was revealed to him until his death. William’s handwriting was normally like a pigeon’s scrawl, and yet, in very clear handwriting he wrote that if he was absent it should be known that ‘Lady Byron is the mistress of my house’. And Ada was no longer,
‘Our Bird.’

Ada still had much pain to suffer before she died on November 27 1852, after suffering appalling pain that was only partly relieved by the laudanum and by a new drug, chloroform.

Lady Byron and Ada’s husband William were at her bedside when she died – he was allowed in at this stage.

A week after her death, Ada was laid to rest next to her father in the small church in the village of Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire, close to Lord Byron’s ancestral home of Newstead Abbey. The father and daughter – whose lives were almost exactly the same length, now lie side by side in a tomb that has been permanently sealed since 1929.