The Age of Wonder (35 page)

The paper completely overturned any residual idea of a stable, overarching, temple-like universe, created once and for all by the great Celestial Architect and decoratively ‘fretted with golden fire’, as Hamlet once mentioned. On the contrary, Herschel suggested, the whole universe was subject to enormous fluid movements and changes, over vast periods of time, and these could be observed in the degree of ‘compression’ or ‘condensation’ of nebulae, and the ‘comparative variety’ of size and structure of deep-space star clusters. Herschel’s crucial observation was that some galaxies were evidently older, and more evolved, than others. ‘We are enabled to judge of the relative age, maturity, or climax, of a sidereal system, from the disposition of its component parts.’ Nebulae and star clusters were in effect like ‘species of plants’, at various stages of growth and decay.

He explained this in his usual quiet, patient manner. ‘Youth and age are comparative expressions; and an oak of a certain age may be called young, while a contemporary shrub is already on the verge of its decay.’ The fundamental force at work was gravity, gradually over time compressing nebulous gas into huge, bright galactic systems, and eventually condensing into individual stars, ‘So that, for instance, a cluster or nebula which is very gradually
more compressed
and bright towards the middle, may be in the perfection of its growth.’ While another type of cluster, showing a more equal compression or distribution of individual stars, might be looked upon as ‘very aged, and drawing towards a period of change, or dissolution’.

This method of viewing the galaxies (’to continue the simile I have borrowed from the vegetable kingdom’) presented the entire universe in a new kind of light, with the most radical implications. ‘The heavens are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden which contains the greatest variety of productions, in different flourishing beds…and we can extend the range of our experience [of them] to an immense duration.’ In a garden we may live ‘successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering and corruption of a plant’. Just so, the universe presented ‘a vast number of specimens, selected from every stage through which the plant passes in the course of its existence’, but brought ‘at once to our eyes’, and viewed at one particular moment from the earth.
⁸⁷

In this paper, astronomy changed decisively from a mathematical science concerned primarily (for practical purposes) with navigation, to a cosmological science concerned with the evolution of the stars and the origins of the universe. The implications were slowly absorbed, most notably by the French astronomer Pierre Laplace, who published his first paper on what he called ‘the nebular hypothesis’ in 1796.
⁸⁸
But the revolutionary analogy, which made astronomy a life science with huge philosophical implications, was soon to be celebrated by Erasmus Darwin in the final book of
The Botanic Garden
(1791).

There were other, more personal forms of evolution. The year 1792 saw a decisive change in Herschel’s family life. At the age of fifty-three he rejoiced in the birth of his first and only child, his son John. The regime at The Grove became steadily more domestic and sociable. Annual summer holidays, previously unheard of, began, with trips to Cornwall, the south coast and Scotland. Although Caroline rarely participated in these, the arrival of this little child would eventually affect her life too, as much even as her comets.

For the moment, though lonely and isolated, Caroline was doing the best observational work of her career. Pierre Méchain wrote admiringly to William on 25 October 1789, ‘her renown will be held in honour throughout the ages’.
⁸⁹
She continued to find new comets. In 1790 she found her third and fourth, in December 1791 a fifth, and a sixth in October 1793. She herself reported this sixth comet directly to the Royal Society, and her reputation continued to grow fast in astronomical circles. Articles appeared about her work in a number of women’s journals, and a faintly scurrilous cartoon was published entitled ‘The Female Philosopher Smelling out a Comet’. The comet is depicted as a small child hurtling through the night sky, driven by a fart, while the female astronomer, peering through her telescope and clutching her hands in delight, remarks enthusiastically on the ‘strong sulpherous scent’ of the comet’s coma. But the depiction of Caroline, with her characteristic mass of curly hair, is surprisingly handsome.
⁹⁰

Her friendship with Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, continued to deepen, and he invited her to stay with him and his family at Greenwich, though she did not immediately accept. With his approval she had begun an updated
Star Catalogue,
which would eventually correct and supersede Flamsteed’s, and receive the signal honour of being published at the Royal Society’s own expense.

In November 1795 she ‘shared’ a comet with the German astronomer Johann Encke. Then in August 1797 she found her seventh. She was so excited by this last one that she did something unprecedented for her. After only one hour’s sleep, she had a horse saddled for her in Slough, and rode the twenty-odd miles into London at dawn, then crossed the Thames bridge, and appeared at Maskelyne’s observatory at Greenwich for a late breakfast. She gave him a precise memorandum of the comet’s position, which he confirmed that night.

At Maskelyne’s urging, Caroline wrote to Sir Joseph Banks in Soho Square pointing out that it was a truly historic day, since she had never previously ridden more than two miles beyond Slough. This letter, dated 17 August 1797 from Greenwich, has a light-headed, almost flirtatious tone, which was again quite new for Caroline.

Sir-This is not a letter from an astronomer to the President of the Royal Society announcing a comet, but only a few lines from Caroline Herschel to a friend of her brother’s, by way of apology for not sending intelligence of that kind immediately where it was due…Dr Maskelyne was so kind as to take some pains to persuade me to go this morning ‘to pay my respects to Sir Joseph’, but I thought a woman who knows so little of the world ought not to aim at such an honour; but go home, where she ought to be, as soon as possible.
⁹¹

It would appear that Caroline stayed on with Maskelyne’s family for at least two days. This gesture of independence was shortly followed by a radical change in her lodging arrangements. In October 1797 she moved out of her apartment at The Grove, and into lodgings up the road in Slough village. She also began a new ‘day book’, in which the first entry read: ‘1797, in October I went to lodge with one of my brother’s workmen (Sprat), whose wife was to attend on me. My telescopes on the roof, to which I was to have occasional access, as also to the room with the sweeping and observing apparatus, remained in its former order [at The Grove], where I most days spent some hours in preparing work to go on with at my lodging.’
⁹²

The exact significance of this move remains puzzling. To take lodgings with her brother’s chief workman clearly sounds like a gesture of defiance against Mary Herschel. The reference to being allowed only ‘occasional access’ to her telescopes almost suggests that Caroline was being excluded from The Grove against her will. Yet she continued to work successfully on her enlarged and corrected edition of the
Star Catalogue,
which was completed and submitted to the Royal Society the following spring, on 8 March 1798. Its subsequent adoption and publication by the Society was a recognition of outstanding professional merit. Significantly, this was partly achieved through Nevil Maskelyne’s good offices.
⁹³

Caroline wrote to Maskelyne, thanking him for all his support, in terms that begin conventionally enough. ‘I thought the pains it had cost me were, and would be, sufficiently rewarded in the use it had already been, and might be in the future, to my brother. But your having thought it worthy of the press has flattered my vanity not a little.’ However, she continued in a rather more provoking vein. ‘You see, Sir, I do own myself to be vain, because I would not wish to be singular; and was there ever a woman without vanity?…Or a man either? Only with this difference, that among gentlemen the commodity is generally styled ambition.’ She leaves the implication of that-does she have any particular gentleman in mind?-hanging in the air, and turns to publication details of her
Star Catalogue.

She ends her letter on a more intimate note. ‘Many times do I think with pleasure and comfort on the friendly invitation Mrs Maskelyne and yourself have given me to spend a few days at Greenwich. I hope yet to have that pleasure next spring or summer. This last has passed away, and I never thought myself well or in spirits enough to venture from home. If the heavens had befriended me, and afforded us a comet, I might, under its convoy, perhaps have
ventured upon an emigration
’. She had not forgotten Maskelyne’s original joke about her flying away on the comet of 1788; and perhaps she was also thinking of her first thrilling emigration from Germany with William long ago in 1772.
⁹⁴

Caroline’s move to lodgings in Slough can be seen as an assertion of professional independence, and even perhaps a recognition of rivalry with her brother. Her day book for the following summer suggests that she had established a steady but solitary routine. In July 1799 she entered: ‘My brother went with his family to Bath and Dawlish. I went daily to the Observatory and work-rooms to work, and returned home to my meals, and at night, except in fine weather, I spent some hours on the roof, and was fetched home by Sprat.’
⁹⁵
In fine weather, of course, she stayed on the roof all night.

But the move must also have reflected an increasing sense of loneliness. She later wrote poignantly about her feelings of solitude and isolation. Such a revelation is extremely rare in her
Memoir,
and it almost seems to have taken Caroline herself by surprise. In the second, revised version of the
Memoir
she writes about her brother Alexander’s unhappy love affairs, before he married. Unexpectedly, she adds a footnote: ‘…And I may here remark that I still was and remained almost throughout my long life without a Friend to whom I could have turned for comfort and advice when I was surrounded by trouble and difficulties. This was perhaps in consequence of my very dependent situation, for I never was allowed to form any acquaintance with any other but such as were agreeable to my eldest brother.’
⁹⁶
This is a surprisingly bitter remark, given Caroline’s correspondence with Aubert and Lalande, and above all her blossoming friendship with the Maskelyne family. Indeed, in summer 1799 she went to stay with them in Greenwich for about a fortnight.

When Faujas de Saint-Fond, the science writer and balloon enthusiast, on a long scientific tour of England and Scotland, visited The Grove at this time, he was encouraged to watch Herschel and Caroline working together on night observations. He saw nothing amiss, but on the contrary admired the constancy and ‘delightful accord’ of the brother-sister team working so closely together on ‘this sublime but abstruse science’. Caroline explained to him the unique system of communications between William, high up on the observation platform, and herself below at her desk with its shrouded candlelight, zone clocks and star atlases. To the original method of shouted question and answer-‘Brother, search near the star Gamma Orion’-they had now added a system of coded rope-pulls, hand signals and bells. Later they would add the flexible speaking-tube. Perhaps this was symbolic of their changing relationship.
⁹⁷

Herschel himself at last began to mention ‘my sister Miss Herschel’, or ‘my indefatigable assistant, Caroline Herschel’, more regularly in his Royal Society papers. She appears in his historic ‘The Description of a Forty Foot Reflecting Telescope’ (1795), and again in ‘A Third Catalogue of the Comparative Brightness of Stars’ (1797). But once again his own mind seems to have been elsewhere.

4

In 1791 Herschel had published a highly significant paper with the Royal Society, ‘On Nebulae Stars, Properly So-called’. For the first time he had observed an individual star with what he called ‘true nebulosity’, that is surrounded by a shining cloud of diffuse gas, even though it was already formed as a star. This observation caused him some dismay, because he had previously assumed that gas clouds were simply star clusters too far beyond our galaxy to be ‘resolved’ by his telescopes (even the forty-foot) into individual stars. The existence of true ‘nebulae stars’ suggested that perhaps most-or even all-gas clouds without resolvable stars were not distant star clusters after all, but simply nebulae much nearer than he had previously thought. ‘Perhaps it has been too hastily surmised that all milky nebulosity, of which there is so much in the heavens, is owing to starlight only.’
⁹⁸
He began to question his own extra-galactic theories, and wondered if all nebulae actually existed
within
the Milky Way. It therefore seemed possible-though he never stated this-that finally there were no other ‘island universes’ outside ours. It was a decisive retreat from his most radical thinking about the size and origin of the cosmos.

This theoretical retreat may have partly reflected a growing fear of radical science in England. When Erasmus Darwin published his long scientific poem in two parts,
The Botanic Garden
in 1791, he soon found that he had caused controversy by adopting Herschel’s galactic theories without caution or reservations. Drawing on Herschel’s earlier two papers on the ‘Construction of the Heavens’ (1785 and 1789), but ignoring the revisionist ‘On Nebulae Stars’ (1791), Darwin praised the great astronomer’s ‘piercing sight’ into the cosmos, and his liberating new concept of an evolving universe, with distant nebulae growing and expanding like plants.