A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (4 page)

Annabella, Lady Byron, painted during her marriage (Charles Hayter).

As to Annabella’s demeanour on arrival at Halnaby; there is conflicting evidence about this. An old butler who was there among the welcoming party remembered that Annabella came up the steps of Halnaby alone ‘with a countenance and frame agonized and listless with evident horror and despair’.

A maid who had accompanied them on the journey, however, recalled her mistress as being as ‘buoyant and cheerful as a bride can be.’ In any event, that very same night, Annabella later recalled, Byron enquired ‘with an appearance of aversion, if I meant to sleep in the same bed with him.’ He often complained to Annabella, during the marriage, ‘it’s done,’ ‘it’s too late now’, and, ‘it cannot be undone’.

Byron grew a little calmer as the weeks wore on, but when living with Annabella he was always prone to terrible moods. Byron took Annabella to Six Mile Bottom and introduced her to Augusta. It was torture. Byron and Augusta often left Annabella alone, even all night, and sometimes Byron even taunted his wife that he and Augusta had ‘no need’ of her.

He liked to play off the women against each other. For example, on one occasion, according to Annabella’s testimony for a Deed of Separation from her husband, he threatened to ‘work them both well’ and lay himself down on the sofa, then ordered them to take it in turns to embrace him, while he made comparisons between them in gross language.

Strangely when Annabella finally suspected that her husband was having sexual relations with Augusta as well as with her, Annabella didn’t blame Augusta, telling herself (and, eventually, others) that Augusta submitted to Byron, but that Augusta was not gratified by his affection. Some biographers have even suggested that Annabella and Augusta had lesbian feelings for each other, for which there is no unassailable evidence.

Augusta, during the rest of her life, wrote Annabella hundreds of letters; Augusta was always weirdly fascinated by Annabella, and although Annabella didn’t reciprocate as keenly, she still had a great fondness for Byron’s half-sister. There were even some times of affection between Byron and Annabella. During one of these episodes in March 1815, or possibly late February, Ada was conceived.

In April 1815 the Byrons settled in London, in a house on 13 Piccadilly Terrace which they could not remotely afford, even though Lord Wentworth conveniently died on 17 April. From now on regular harassment by bailiffs and other creditors became part of their married life.

In the persisting absence of the dowry (estates such as her uncle’s took years to settle before funds would become available; it would take about a decade), Byron remained fearsomely in debt. While Byron and Annabella still managed to find time for occasional moments of passion and togetherness – Byron and Annabella both added her mother’s family name ‘Noel’ as a double-barrel to theirs upon the death of her uncle –, these moments were snatched more and more in the face of stress caused by debts, Byron’s emotional instability, and his sexual infidelity.

On Sunday December 10 1815, at 1 pm, Annabella gave birth to a girl, Augusta Ada, though soon Annabella preferred to call her only ‘Ada’.

Byron and Annabella had decided Augusta would be godmother. The very fact that Annabella agreed to this (she was not the kind of woman to be coerced into something so major) suggests that her sympathies for, and perhaps liking for, Augusta, were strong.

When Byron was shown his healthy new-born daughter, he reputedly said, ‘Oh! What an instrument of torture I have acquired in you!’

Annabella had by now decided that her husband had been her own instrument of torture for long enough. But she kept her intentions carefully secret, and on the night of Sunday January 14 1816, she went to bed with Byron as usual.

Early in the morning, Annabella wrapped herself and her month-old baby daughter up warmly. Without waking her husband, she stole out of their London house with baby Ada in the company of a maidservant and into a carriage that would take the three of them away from Byron and to Annabella’s parents.

Byron would never see his wife, or Ada, again.

4

Ada’s early life was spent in the public spotlight of a scandalised and titillated Britain, though her mother did her utmost to keep her out of its glare. To some extent, Lady Byron (as it seems appropriate to call her now, as she was known by this name to most of the world) was successful in this quest, though Ada was never truly out of the public’s mind.

Lady Byron had left the strange, wayward, selfish and fundamentally unhappy man she had mistakenly married. And now she found herself in a life she had never planned. Her entire upbringing and attitude to life had been focused on her at some point becoming a wife and a mother.

Lady Byron went to be with her parents in Leicestershire, who at that time were staying at a country house in the village of Kirkby Mallory. Strange to say, despite her having left Byron, for a few weeks the still-married couple exchanged fond letters with each other. Byron seems to have expected that Annabella would soon return to him with Ada.

And maybe that would have happened. But after a few weeks, during which Lady Byron had been reticent with her parents about why she had left Byron, there came a time – it’s not known when exactly this happened, but it would have been most likely some time in February 1816 – she told her parents about what had happened and just how Byron had behaved towards her. Her parents were furious and slowly turned her against him. She also received a note from Byron’s former lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, who proposed a meeting with Annabella.

At this meeting, Lady Caroline told Annabella that Byron had committed incest with Augusta. Lady Caroline, not known for mincing her words, convinced Annabella of the truth, if she still needed convincing after the peculiar cohabitation arrangement at Six Mile Bottom. After Lady Caroline’s visit it was also clear beyond doubt that Augusta and Byron’s incest with each other had become widely known and discussed, and beyond the borders of Britain as well as within them. Even worse, Lady Caroline told Lady Byron that Byron had indulged in homosexual acts while at Harrow.

There was only one respectable answer, and soon Lady Byron launched a legal suit against Byron for an official separation. As for Byron, he had the last laugh, in his poem
Don Juan
– written in
ottava rima
pentameters, whereas
Childe Harolde’
s Pilgrimage
had been written in Spenserian stanzas – with Donna Inez.

Her favourite science was the mathematical,

Her noblest virtue was her magnanimity;

Her wit (she sometimes tried at wit) was attic all,

Her serious sayings darken’d to sublimity;

In short, in all things she was fairly what I call

A prodigy – her morning dress was dimity [a sturdy curtain fabric]…

By now desperate for cash after flunking the marriage option, Byron knew he had to sell his ancestral home in Nottinghamshire, Newstead Abbey to settle debts and for his living expenses abroad. But in fact Newstead was not sold until December 1817, when Byron was fortunate to get the colossal sum of £94,000 (today £94 million) for it from a Colonel Thomas Wildman, a wealthy military officer who had been a classmate of Byron’s at Harrow. Though his financial worries were much reduced (they were never completely resolved), it would be unfair to Byron, though, to say that he forgot about Ada once abroad. During the eight years between his departure from England (he never returned) and his death, he frequently wrote to Augusta to ask her to ask Lady Byron for particulars about Ada, such as her upbringing, the colour of her hair, and so on. But he had no contact with her, or thoughts about her upbringing.

Lady Byron was adamant that Ada would be prudently educated. Most adults in the early nineteenth century regarded children as incomplete, ungrateful, savage adults – a view that Ada’s friend Charles Dickens would later challenge in his writings. Children were dressed like miniature versions of adults and children’s literature – such as it was – was meant for moral guidance. Lady Byron agreed whole-heartedly and was not going to sit by idly or let Ada mix much with other children who hadn’t been vetted. As a result, most of Ada’s childhood was rather lonely and spent in the company of older and not always congenial people.

Ada’s education started when she was only four years old. It was about as comprehensive as was feasible at the time. Not easy to please, Lady Byron was prone to firing the tutors and governesses that she recruited when she considered that they were not sufficiently helpful to Ada’s education. When there were extended breaks between tutors due to Lady Byron being unable to find one she considered suitable for her daughter, Lady Byron taught Ada herself.

In 1824, at the age of eight, a typical day for Ada looked like this:

Lady Byron imposed a strict discipline on Ada, who altogether was rather like the only girl in a school. Through a ticket-based system Ada was either given a reward or punishment. When Ada performed well, she had paper ‘tickets’ bestowed on her, but these tickets got confiscated when Ada did not meet Lady Byron’s expectations.

On the occasion that the ticket system failed to motivate her, she was placed in a closet until she promised to behave herself and work hard at her studies. Woronzow Greig, a mathematical and pedantic friend of Ada’s when she was an adult, recounted that Ada ‘acquired a feeling of dread towards her mother that continued until the day of her death’, Ada’s death that is.

Lady Byron, whom Byron once nicknamed the ‘princess of parallelograms’, was particularly keen for Ada to have a mathematical education. Lady Byron wanted to suppress Ada’s imagination – which Lady Byron saw as dangerous and potentially destructive and coming from the Byrons – and wanted to make Ada, as far as feasible, completely rational.

For Lady Byron, Ada was a constant reminder of her marriage and the failure of her life’s purpose. Ada, after all, was half Byron by blood, and it’s difficult to conclude other than that Lady Byron frequently found her irritating and even treacherous whenever Ada was behaving in a way that made her seem too much of a Byron. She had a particularly deep mistrust of Ada’s imaginative approach to science and Ada’s tendency to seek playful uses for science and mathematics.

Unlike Lord Byron’s savage nature, Ada’s was to be chained and guided towards goodness in the way she had laid out in her fateful letter to him after she had rejected his marriage proposal.

It meant, specifically, that Ada had to be very grateful for corrections she received from adults. As Ada herself wrote on September 7 1824:

I should wish that… you do not give me reward because I think the reward of your being pleased with me sufficient[,] besides when you do that I don’t do the good thing because I know I ought to do it but because I want to obtain the reward, and not because I know it to be right, and if I was encouraged in this, when I was grown up I should be a very disagreeable creature, and I should never do any good without I had a reward.

Ada wrote many such letters as, over time, Lady Byron grew into a woman extremely preoccupied with her health, and prone to following the strangest theories about good health. She was often away at various rest cures, which involved her doing such things as taking the waters in spa towns, and spending time with her aristocratic friends.

On other occasions, Ada was to keep Lady Byron informed with reports that were pleasing to her and showed that she understood the purpose of her upbringing. Thus, on Wednesday May 31 1826, ten-year-old Ada castigated vanity in a letter to her mother, who was staying on the sea in Hastings, in a place called Library House. She added: ‘I think it is well for me I am not beautiful.’

The next day she wrote again to keep her mother informed on what had occurred that day.

Library House, Hastings

1st June Thursday 1826

My dearest Mammy

No letter from Lady Tarn yet. Louisa [a visiting friend presumably] is a little better today. She was very much pleased yesterday with a box of the most beautiful things imaginable from Miss Noel. There were beautiful little wee wee baskets, one larger basket, and some pincushions in the form of little guitars, another carriage and Louisa is to have a dozen more carriages of different sorts.

Today I have been doing some Italian, and I have written about Arrowroot, and made out a little alphabetical list of all the things I am going to write about from
Bingley’s Useful Knowledge
there are two dozen different things I wish to write about, and I have been puzzling hard at a sum in the rule of three which I could not do, the question is if 750 men are allowed 22500 rations of bread per month how many rations will a garrison of 1200 men require?

I think by the time you come back I may have learnt something about decimals, I attempted the double rule of three but I could not understand it, however I will not give it up yet, the book does not teach as well as you do… My purse is getting on beautifully. It is for Louisa’s trade and though it is a coarse purple one, I have some thoughts of buying it and giving it to you.

Mrs Montgomery is very kind to me, and I am not
very
unhappy though of course I should be happier if you were here… I get up between six and half past six, breakfast at nine, dine at one, and sup at six. I hope I am not very troublesome… My watch is very useful to me here, I only wish I could wear it…. Have you got me a governess yet? …

I must now conclude. If you have too much to do, pray don’t write to me at all, I am dying to ride over on horseback to Battle to meet you on Wednesday. I wish above every thing that such an arrangement would be made.

Goodbye, yours affectionately

A. Ada Byron.

Likewise before, in her letter of September 7 1824, she reported her entire day to her mother:

My dear Mama. I got my fryed fish yesterday. Frank goes today, but he is still Gobblebook for he is reading Captain Hall. I have got a great deal of cold. How is Lady Tamworth. I hope she liked the needlebook…. Puff is on the sofa in the drawing room. I am ne[t]ting a purse. I am very sorry Flora is not here for I miss her more than ever.

The letter writing was carefully guided as well. For example, not all 1824-1826 letters (none before that date are known to exist) in the Lovelace-Byron collection at the Bodleian are in Ada’s own handwriting. Several are in the handwriting of one of her governesses presumably, and they frequently start with ‘Dear Annabella’. But even when the letter is in Ada’s handwriting (as indeed the ‘fryed fish’ letter is above) there are sometimes sentences that Ada’s governess either dictated to her or perhaps helped her to write by suggesting phrases.

What did Ada ask her mother about Byron? Throughout her life she herself seems always to have thought highly of him and to have wished she could see him. But the letters of her youth provide no clue. There is evidence, however, that Lady Byron simply made her father a taboo subject at home. For example, it is known that when Ada was a little girl she asked her mother whether a father and a grandfather were the same. When she asked this question – hardly a wicked one – she was severely rebuked by her mother.

As for Byron himself, despite his inconsistency in emotional matters, he does not indeed appear ever to have stopped caring about Ada and loving her in the way that seemed to suit him best – that is, from a distance. In a letter from Venice to his publisher John Murray on February 2 1818, when she was two, he wrote:

I have a great love for little Ada, and I look forward to her as the pillar of my old age, should I ever reach that desolate period, which I hope not.

A year later he writes on June 7 1819 from Bologna:

I have not heard of my little Ada, the Electra of my Mycenæ, but there will be a day of reckoning, even should I not live to see it.

He clearly hadn’t forgiven Annabella for the failed dowry and marriage and the forced sale of his beloved home Newstead Abbey. Electra plotted revenge (with her brother) against their mother, Clytemnestra, for the murder of their father, King Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War.

Whether Byron would have been King Agammnon to Ada’s Electra is another matter, at least if his illegitimate daughter Allegra was anything to go by. Allegra was born a little over a year after Ada on Sunday January 12 1817. She was the result of a brief affair between Byron and Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Mary Shelley, wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Allegra was born in the town of Bath, in England as ‘Alba’, and when she was a baby lived with her mother and the Shelleys. However, when Allegra was fifteen months old, Claire gave her to Byron. Claire was under serious financial pressure and the Shelleys did not want Allegra to live with them. Nor did Byron’s half-sister Augusta. So Claire journeyed to Italy to give the baby girl to the baby’s father, who had asked Claire to baptise the child ‘Allegra Byron’. Byron himself even discussed changing the spelling of Allegra’s surname to ‘Biron’.

Allegra didn’t live with Byron either, but with a succession of people Byron paid to look after her. But she did visit him on occasion. He wrote approvingly to a friend, ‘My bastard came three days ago… healthy, noisy and capricious.’

Byron liked the physical resemblance between Allegra and himself, but he hardly spent any time with her, and she only ever learned Venetian Italian, not English, because she was brought up by paid Venetian carers. In March 1820, he complained that Allegra was ‘obstinate as a mule’ and at the age of four, Allegra frequently had temper tantrums in front of Byron. She was packed off to be in the care of the nuns at the Capuchin convent in Bagnacavallo. They looked after her well, but in 1822, at the age of five, the little girl died, either of typhus or malaria.