The Age of Wonder (34 page)

William Herschel and Mary Pitt were married on 8 May 1788, at the tiny parish church of Upton. Sir Joseph Banks rode down from London to be best man. In an inclusive gesture, Caroline Herschel was asked to be one of the two formal witnesses, and when William Watson volunteered to be the other one, Caroline gallantly agreed.
⁶⁸

Caroline’s last entry in her journal before the wedding is poignant in its determinedly matter-of-fact tone: ‘The observations on the Georgian satellites furnished a paper which was delivered to the Royal Society in May. And the 8th of that month being fixed on for my Brother’s marriage; it may easily be supposed that I must have been fully employed (besides minding the Heavens) to prepare everything as well as I could, against the time I was to give up the place of a Housekeeper which was the 8th of May, 1788.’
⁶⁹

There is no emotional outburst, no tears or recriminations. The only clue to the strength of Caroline’s feelings is the fact that she unconsciously repeats the date of William’s wedding in the same sentence, and suddenly invents that wonderfully imaginative phrase, ‘minding the Heavens’. It is such a tender and ironic description of her entire career: she is the housekeeper to the heavens. But she then seems to hurry it away-the career and the phrase-into a bracket. Caroline did eventually give one further indication of her feelings. It was an entirely silent one, yet was the most dramatic personal gesture she ever made. She completely destroyed her personal journals covering the whole of the next decade of her life. Her records do not begin again until October 1798.
^♣

The only person who may have glimpsed these journals before they were destroyed, or known something of their contents, was another woman, Caroline’s future editor Margaret Herschel, the wife of her nephew John. Though restrained by strong family loyalties, Margaret left one circumspect but highly sympathetic comment about the journals in print: ‘It is not to be supposed that a nature so strong and a heart so affectionate should accept the new state of things without much and bitter suffering. To resign the supreme place by her brother’s side which she had filled for sixteen years with such hearty devotion could not be otherwise than painful…One who could both feel and express herself so strongly was not likely to fall into her new place without some outward expression of what it cost her-
tradition confirms the assumption
-and it is easy to understand how this long significant silence is due to the light of later wisdom and calmer judgement, which counselled the destruction of all record of what was likely to be painful to survivors.’
⁷⁰

Over the years Caroline gave various quite different reasons for taking this extreme step. Mostly she passed it off by saying her journals were too dull to be of interest; or would not be understood; or else showed her lack of scientific achievement: ‘These books I thought it best to destroy; excepting some fragments which I some 4 or 5 years since sent to my Nephew as waste paper. For, in consequence of my employment at the Clocks and writing Desk, when my Brother was observing I had no other opportunity for looking out for Comets, but when he was absent from home, but this happened so seldom and my sweeps were so broken and unconnected that I could not bear the thoughts of their rising in judgement against me; and besides they contained nothing new but the discovery of 8 Comets and a few Nebs. & clusters of stars.’
⁷¹

At the very least Caroline must have felt that a highly successful scientific partnership was being endangered, one that was now increasingly recognised in the international community of astronomers. But perhaps she felt more, much more. Caroline cannot have forgotten that ten years previously she had given up her own future as a concert singer, when she rejected the offer of a solo appointment after performing arias from Handel’s
Messiah
in 1778.
⁷²

It is hard to believe that she did not feel deeply hurt, and even in some obscure way emotionally rejected, by her brother. But it is difficult to gauge the exact nature of these deeper feelings, and she may not have analysed them too closely herself. More immediately evident was her sudden loss of social status within Herschel’s household. During this period in England, and even more so in Germany, previously dependent women-and notably unmarried younger sisters-would expect to be incorporated and remain happily within the newly married household. Caroline’s new quarters above the workshops at The Grove were an acceptable adaptation, but her loss of managerial and social responsibility must have felt humiliating. This eventually led her to take the extreme step of abandoning her apartment altogether, and taking rooms in Slough village with the wife of Herschel’s head workman, Mr Sprat.
⁷³

Yet outwardly things went on smoothly. Fanny Burney saw them all at a reception at Windsor later that summer, and thought the situation more amusing than tragic. ‘Dr Herschel was there, and accompanied them [the Miss Stowes] very sweetly on the violin; his new-married wife was with him and his sister. His wife seems good-natured; she was rich too! And astronomers are as able as other men to discern that gold can glitter as well as stars.’
⁷⁴

When the French astronomer Jérôme Lalande visited The Grove observatory in autumn 1788 he was evidently charmed by Herschel’s whole circle, and wrote to thank him with characteristic exuberance: ‘
Je n’ai jamais passé de nuit plus agréable, sans en excepter celles de l’amour.
’ Caroline may have considered that an odd turn of phrase, in the circumstances. Lalande also reported that he had had an audience with King George III, who announced that he was immensely proud of the Herschels and pointedly remarked, while walking on the terrace at Windsor, ‘that it was better to spend money on building telescopes than on killing men’.
⁷⁵

Caroline’s spirits were lifted a little just before Christmas 1788, when on 21 December she discovered her second comet. This time it was moving through the constellation of Lyra, the Harp or Lyre. Although it eventually turned out that it had already been spotted by Charles Messier, this discovery produced much more correspondence than the first, and letters of congratulation-mostly still addressed to William, but sometimes sent directly to her-came crowding in from all sides: from Alexander Aubert, Sir Harry Englefield, Nevil Maskelyne and Jérôme Lalande in Paris. Thereafter Lalande became one of her most faithful, witty and faintly flirtatious correspondents, happily conforming, as he himself pointed out, to the archetype of a Parisian professor. He sent ‘a thousand tender respects to
la savante Miss,
of whom I frequently speak with enthusiasm’. But then Lalande liked a little Gallic hyperbole, as he also addressed William on the envelope as: ‘
Monsieur Herschel, le plus célèbre astronome de l’univers, Windsor, Angleterre
’.
⁷⁶

Sir Harry Englefield, a stalwart of scientific committees, adopted a bluffer, but no less satisfactory manner, writing to Herschel on Christmas Day: ‘I beg you to make my compliments to Miss Herschel on her discovery. She will soon be the Great Comet Finder, and bear away the prize from Messier and Méchain.’
⁷⁷

The most significant, and perhaps unexpected, of these correspondents was the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. Writing directly to Caroline from Greenwich Observatory on 27 December, he began a regular and increasingly confidential exchange of letters. Although he wrote formally to congratulate her, he then added a long, teasing speculation about the interesting possibilities of a close physical encounter with her new comet. He wondered whether Caroline would ever be tempted to ride off on it into space. Any true astronomer like her, he suggested, would consider ‘
without horror
the thought of our being involved in its immense tail’. However, he hoped she would not be tempted: ‘I would not affirm there may not exist
some
astronomers so enthusiastic that they would not dislike to be whisked away from this low terrestrial spot into the higher regions of the heavens by the tail of a comet, and exchange our narrow uniform orbit for one vastly more extended and varied.
But I hope you, dear Miss Caroline,
for the benefit of terrestrial astronomy, will not think of taking such a flight, at least till your friends are ready to accompany you.’

Then he added, formally enough: ‘Mrs Maskelyne joins me in best compliments to yourself and Dr and Mrs Herschel.’ Yet these lighthearted urgings that Caroline should refrain from departing into outer space perhaps disguised Maskelyne’s deeper concern about her unsecured position at Slough. Maskelyne was a family man himself, with an only daughter, Margaret, whom he doted on. Perhaps he understood Caroline’s anxieties better than many in the scientific world.
⁷⁸

3

When the great forty-foot was at last put into operation in spring 1789, Herschel’s first discovery was Mimas, one of the tiny innermost moons of Saturn, with a diameter of only 250 miles. This was a remarkable piece of astronomical observation, and promised well for the powers of the new monster instrument. Mimas is dominated by a single huge crater, eighty miles across and six miles deep, which was much later photographed and named ‘Herschel’, but only after the
Voyager
flyby of 1980.

Herschel gave a detailed description of the way he managed the fortyfoot in a series of papers delivered to the Royal Society, illustrated by careful drawings.
⁷⁹
He also described Caroline’s wooden shed, situated some fifty feet beneath his own platform, equipped with masked candles, star atlases, warning bells and zone clocks.
⁸⁰

The completion of the telescope had finally been achieved with grants totalling £4,000 from King George III, an unprecedented amount for the sovereign to spend on a single scientific project of this kind. It was in fact exactly the same sum that the Royal Society had invested in 1768 in the entire scientific team (excluding Banks) for Cook’s first three-year expedition to the South Seas. Like King George’s Library (presented to the British Library by his son), the forty-foot telescope at Slough became one of the glories of his reign. It quickly became a tourist attraction, and was eventually featured in a popular Victorian magazine as one of ‘The Wonders of the World’, comparable to the Colossus of Rhodes.
⁸¹

The doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes included it in his tour of famous sites outside London. In his book
The Poet at the Breakfast Table
(1872) he described how he had previously seen an engraving of the great telescope in a child’s encyclopaedia back at home in America. So when he rode down the London-to-Bath turnpike road its huge outline reared up over the trees at Slough ‘like a reminiscence rather than a revelation’. It seemed a strange, unworldly shape. ‘It was a mighty bewilderment of slanted masts, spars and ladders and ropes, from the midst of which a vast tube, looking as if it might be a piece of ordinance such as the revolted Angels battered the wall of Heaven with, according to Milton, lifted its mighty muzzle defiantly towards the sky.’
⁸²

But Herschel found the huge barrel of the forty-foot telescope unexpectedly difficult to prepare and manoeuvre in anything but perfect weather conditions. The vast surface of the metal speculum was far more susceptible to misting, oxidisation and distortion than those in his smaller telescopes. The one-ton mirrors were also alarmingly cumbersome to change, and Caroline remembered how both William and Alexander ‘had many hair-breadth escapes from being crushed’ when taking them in and out of the base of the telescope, even with the help of their workmen.
⁸³
By the end of 1789 it was evident that the forty-foot was going to take years, rather than months, to prove its worth.

Through the 1790s Herschel had an ever-increasing sense that he must justify his project, and that the forty-foot was becoming something of a liability. He recorded that in the five years between 1788 and 1793 he managed only seventeen nights of ideal observations, a disastrous statistic.
⁸⁴
Ironically, the elegant twenty-foot (much preferred by Caroline) continued to be better for deep-space stellar observations, being both more manoeuvrable and more stable. After Mimas, Herschel’s best discoveries with the forty-foot remained inside the solar system: he added two new moons to Saturn, five already being known. The forty-foot fared much better as a national scientific showpiece, attracting a large number of European visitors, among them the head of the Paris Observatory and astronomy professors from Berlin, Cracow and Moscow.
⁸⁵

The annual need to repolish the huge three-foot mirrors became a growing burden, and in September 1807 Herschel was nearly killed when the one-ton speculum slipped from its harness while being removed from the tube. Many years later, in 1815, he quietly published a paper entitled ‘A Series of Observations on the Georgian Planet’, in which he admitted the insoluble problems of condensation, manoeuvring and servicing which the forty-foot had brought him.
⁸⁶

Yet Herschel’s theoretical work now blossomed in an extraordinary and daring way. In 1789, the year of the Fall of the Bastille, he published a paper carefully dated ‘Slough near Windsor May 1 1789’, and gave it the deliberately anodyne title ‘Catalogue of Second Thousand Nebulae with Remarks on the Construction of the Heavens’. This developed his revolutionary 1785 paper ‘On the Construction of the Heavens’, and extended it with a striking analogy between the botanical cycle as observed on earth, and an organic or ‘vegetative’ cycle which appeared to be operating throughout the entire universe.