The Age of Wonder (69 page)

Davy’s relations with his protégé would remain enigmatic and uneasy, until in 1825 Faraday was eventually proposed as Director of the Royal Institution. Here Sir Humphry Davy was forced to give his approval, and gravely sealed the appointment. So at long last Michael Faraday-modest, unworldly and utterly unlike his patron-was finally appointed to the position that would soon make him world-famous.

6

For John Herschel it was the shadow of his father, and the great forty-foot telescope, which seemed longest. By 1820 it was clear to John that his father was failing. William, now aged eighty-one, could no longer handle the larger telescopes, and was fretful and forgetful over his scientific papers. He grew petulant and anxious if his son was away from Slough too long, and uneasy when John and Babbage made their first extended Continental tour together, visiting France and Italy for four long months between July and October 1821.

In Paris they met the great Alexander von Humboldt, who inspired them with his tales of the South American forests and mountains, which he had visited during his legendary five-year expedition between 1799 and 1804. His
Personal Narrative
had been published in 1805, and translated throughout Europe. It included his visions of the great Amazon river, and his famous account of how he nearly died trying to climb the 20,700-foot Mount Chimborazo (he reached 19,309 feet). They were much struck by his dynamic philosophy of science: ‘To track the great and constant laws of Nature manifested in the rapid flux of phenomena, and to trace the reciprocal interaction-the struggle, as it were-of the divided physical forces.’
⁶⁰

Humboldt had become a central figure at the great Berlin Academy of Sciences, which Herschel and Babbage particularly wished to emulate. He knew and greatly admired William Herschel’s work, but was inclined to underestimate his son’s potential. ‘John Herschel appears to me inferior to the originality of his father, who was astronomer, physicist and poetical cosmologist all at the same time…The science of the Cosmos must begin with a description of the heavenly bodies and with a geographical sketch of the universe: or perhaps I should say with a true
mappa mundi,
such as was traced by the bold hand of William Herschel.’
⁶¹
But Humboldt, now fifty-two, treated the young men in kindly, avuncular fashion, told them how much he admired English science, and how he had heard Joseph Banks lecture in London shortly after his return from the round-the-world voyage of 1768-71. So the torch of Romantic inspiration was passed on.
⁶²

In Switzerland Herschel and Babbage made geology an excuse for adventurous scrambling in the Alps, and wanderings over the glaciers of Chamonix in the footsteps of Dr Frankenstein’s Creature. They also made meteorological studies of the mountain storms and cloud formations, and climbed everywhere with telescopes, thermometers, geological hammers and a ‘mountain barometer’, supposed to warn them of impending storms.
⁶³

On his return to Slough, John found his unconquerable aunt Caroline had become the sole person who could manage William’s daily regime, and understand his increasingly rambling scientific requests. She also helped John develop new sweeping techniques with the cumbersome forty-foot, and once again began acting as astronomical assistant, still able-to John’s admiration and amazement-to sustain long nights in the shed beneath the telescope scaffolding. When he formed the Royal Astronomical Society with Charles Babbage in 1820, their first Honorary Member was his aunt Caroline, and this gesture sealed the bond between them. John had strong views about science being open to women-the Society’s second Honorary Member was to be Mary Somerville.

At Slough, the old observations workshops were falling into disuse, and masses of equipment and unfiled papers accumulated. William retreated to his study or his day-bed, but occasionally sent Caroline on quixotic missions to recover sheets of calculations or copies of papers once sent to the
Philosophical Transactions.
She alone could do this, but it caused her endless frustration and heartache.

Ill health now came to plague both Herschel and Caroline. The long nights of observation had gradually stricken him with crippling arthritis, while she began to suffer from an eye infection that a local doctor (not James Lind) casually diagnosed as leading to inevitable blindness. After several terrifying weeks, spent largely alone convalescing in her darkened lodgings, fearing she would never be able to see the stars again, Caroline recovered and slowly began using her telescope once more. The experience shook her profoundly, and reminded her of her isolation. The disease was almost certainly ophthalmia, which was rife among poorer households in the Thames Valley at this period. Several years before, Percy Shelley, living nearby across the river at Great Marlow, had also caught it while taking food and blankets to destitute families, as part of one of his many philanthropic projects.
⁶⁴

In the last months of his life Herschel had become increasingly weak and immobile. Yet he was loath to give up his stars. During the summer he wrote in a trembling hand on a tiny slip of paper, one of his last surviving notes. ‘
Lina
-There is a great comet. I want you to assist me. Come to dine and spend the day here. If you can come soon after one o’clock we shall have time to prepare maps and telescopes. I saw its situation last night-it has a long tail.’ Caroline meticulously filed away this note, and years later annotated it in her neat, precise script: ‘I keep this as a relic! Every line now traced by the hand of my dear brother becomes a treasure to me.’
⁶⁵

Towards the end, William asked Caroline to unearth a copy of his late ‘Sidereal’ paper, together with a print of his forty-foot telescope, to present to a friend who had asked for a special memorial gift. Close to tears, Caroline hurried to his chaotic library of papers to find it. After a long, miserable, dusty search, she finally discovered it, but was then too upset to read it through: ‘
For the universe
I could not have looked twice at what I had snatched from the shelf,’ she recalled. She returned and put it into her brother’s hands. ‘When he faintly asked if the
breaking up of the Milky Way
was in it, I said “Yes!”, and he looked content. I cannot help remembering this circumstance, it being the last time I was sent to the Library on such an occasion.’
⁶⁶

On 25 August 1822, Sir William Herschel, knighted and recognised by learned societies around the world, died in his room overlooking the great forty-foot telescope. He was quietly buried in the little church of St Lawrence, Upton, where he had been married. Just as he had feared, his son John had been abroad and had not been at his deathbed. But on his return, at Caroline’s urging John wrote a long epitaph to be carved in marble above his father’s tomb, and had it translated into elegant Latin by the Provost of Eton. It contained a wonderful phrase: ‘
Coelorum perrupit claustra
’-‘He broke through the barriers of heaven’; or as a later friend translated,
‘He o’er-leapt the parapet of the stars.’
⁶⁷

Herschel’s long and distinguished obituary appeared in
The Times,
and across four columns in the September issue of the
Gentleman’s Magazine:
‘As an Astronomer he was surpassed by no one of the present age, and the depth of his research, and extent of his observations, rendered him perhaps second only to the immortal Newton.’ The magazine added punctiliously: ‘In these observations, and the laborious calculations into which they led, he was assisted by his excellent sister, Miss Caroline Herschel, whose indefatigable and unhesitating devotion in the performance of a task usually deemed incompatible with female habits, surpassed all eulogium.’ No doubt Caroline was pleased with that mention, though she doubtless objected to astronomy being referred to as a task ‘usually incompatible with female habits’.
⁶⁸

This obituary was immediately followed in the same issue of the
Gentleman’s Magazine
by a short notice of the death of one Percy Bysshe Shelley, son of the Whig MP for Horsham. ‘Supposed to have perished at sea, in a storm, somewhere off Via Reggio, on the coast of Italy…Mr Shelley is unfortunately too well-known for his infamous
novels and poems.
He openly professed himself an atheist. His works bear the following titles:
Prometheus Chained
[sic]…etc.’
⁶⁹
For good measure a London daily newspaper, the
Courier,
added: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.’
⁷⁰

The poet Thomas Campbell, who had interviewed Herschel at Brighton a decade before, wrote a long appreciation of his life in the October issue of the
New Monthly Magazine.
It included a summary of the way Herschel had changed the layman’s view of the cosmos: how the solar system was larger and more mysterious than Newton ever supposed; how the creation of the stars had taken place in inconceivable gulfs of time and space, and was still developing and unfolding; how our Milky Way was probably just one galaxy (or island universe) among millions; and how this galaxy-our beautiful home in space-would inevitably wither and die like some fantastic but ephemeral flower. Campbell carefully avoided raising any theological implications, and instead played wittily on the late, mad King George’s (perhaps apocryphal) remark: ‘Herschel should not sacrifice his valuable time to crotchets and quavers.’
⁷¹

Among many other honours, a new constellation was proposed,
Telescopium Herschelii,
The Telescope; and thus it appears in James Middleton’s beautiful
Celestial Atlas
of 1843, located 10 degrees above Castor and Pollux, close to where Uranus first swam into his ken.

Caroline now seemed strangely detached. Despite everything that John could urge, she took the surprising decision to return at once to Hanover, although she had not been there for nearly fifty years. She was now seventy-two, and set about briskly winding up her affairs, making John the executor of her Will.
⁷²
William had left her an annual £100 pension for life, but she immediately made it over to John in quarterly instalments. It was as if she wanted to bring the circle of her life in England to an abrupt close.

The one thing that would have kept her in England, she told John, was if she had been able to ‘offer of my service for some time longer to you, my dear nephew’ as astronomical assistant. But she felt too old and infirm to do this.
⁷³
She took with her to Germany a large, comfortable English bed, some astronomy books, and the beautiful seven-foot Newtonian ‘sweeper’ telescope which William had made for her all those years ago in 1786. ‘It shall stand in my room and be my monument-as the Forty-Foot is yours.’
⁷⁴

On 16 October there was a final reception for her at Bedford Square, London, hosted by Lady Herschel and John. Charles Babbage rode down from Cambridge, arriving at the very last minute. Caroline’s parting message to him, an unspoken one, was about John. ‘I could find no time for any conversation with [Babbage]; but just by a pressure of the hand recommended my Nephew (in incoherent whispers)
again
to the continuance of his regards and Friendship.’
⁷⁵

Caroline was destined to live on for another twenty-six years, her mind sharp and her memories vivid and sometimes bitter. ‘I did nothing for my brother,’ she once confided, ‘but what a well-trained puppy dog would have done, that is to say, I did what he commanded me.’
⁷⁶
She began to send the first version of her
Memoirs
back from Hanover in the year following William’s death, 1823. It was written up slowly, carefully withheld from all her German relatives and friends, and posted in secret instalments to John in England, with many hesitations and
caveats.
She wrote poignantly: ‘As my thoughts are continually fixed on the past, I was as it were
conversing
with you on paper, not choosing to trust them to anyone about me [in Hanover]. For I know none who would understand me, or whom it can concern what my own private opinion and remarks have been about the transactions that continually passed before my eyes. But there can be no harm in telling them to my own dear Nephew.’
⁷⁷

She and John corresponded regularly for the next twenty years. Very rarely she wrote about her personal feelings, but sometimes there were sudden glimpses, like clouds clearing on a good observation night. ‘I am grown much thinner than I was six months ago; when I look at my hands they put me so in mind of what your dear father’s were, when I saw them tremble under my eyes, as we latterly played at backgammon together.’
⁷⁸

She read all John’s Royal Society papers as they appeared, and took huge pleasure in his successes, as if her beloved brother were still alive. She kept him supplied with all the new technical books and papers published in German, and recommended he read the philosopher Schelling. ‘You must give me leave to send you any publication you can think of, without mentioning anything about paying for them.’ Like many old people, she was fierce if he did not reply to her letters immediately.

Caroline’s explanation for her generosity was characteristic. ‘It is necessary that every now and then I should lay out a little of my spare cash…for the sake of supporting the reputation of being a
learned lady
…for I am not only looked at for such a one, but even
stared
at here in Hanover.’
⁷⁹
She assembled and recalculated for John a huge new
Star Catalogue
of the 2,500 nebulae. Should he ever escape on the expedition he was starting to dream about, he could add to it while observing the stars of the southern hemisphere. Herschel and Babbage made sure she was awarded the Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal for this in 1828. It sports her name on a beautiful medallion showing William Herschel’s forty-foot telescope, and the Society’s motto
Quicquid Nitet Notandum
-‘Let Whatever Shines be Noted’.
⁸⁰
For herself there was now little chance of star-gazing: ‘Two or three evenings a week are spoiled by company. And
at the heavens is no getting,
for the high roofs of the opposite houses.’
⁸¹