Ursula Martin's Reading List

"Miranda Seymour’s biography of Ada Lovelace and Annabella Byron is based on thorough contemporary research in archives in Oxford and elsewhere, some of which have only come to light recently. It’s very well written, keeping track of the sometimes strained relationships among the extended Byron, Milbanke and King families, as well as of a Dickensian cast (including Dickens himself) of family friends, scientists, lawyers, divines, doctors and gamblers. It steers away from over-romantic presentations of Byron and his wife and daughter, and, unlike some earlier biographies, avoids the temptation of taking sides in the Byron marriage, or of rehashing earlier myths. It doesn’t shy away from the complexities of the lives of its subjects, but addresses them honestly and in a principled way. She was fascinated by him—a small child brought up by her mother, with a famous father she never knew—he had died during the Greek War of Independence when she was eight. In later life she sometimes compares herself to him. She once wrote “I shall in due time be a poet”, but that ambition was not fulfilled. She was well aware of the social status that came, not just from being Byron’s daughter, but, also through her mother’s family: Annabella was first cousin of Lord Melbourne, Whig politician and Queen Victoria’s first prime minister—Lord Melbourne’s wife, Caroline Lamb, was also one of Byron’s most public mistresses. Lovelace’s social status, and the sense of entitlement it brought her, offset some of the disadvantages of being a woman in predominantly male scientific circles. She was being taught all those things, by governesses, as was typical for young women of her social class, alongside elementary mathematics and science, which was not so uncommon either. Her mother Annabella had a passion for mathematics—Byron in Don Juan called her a ‘walking calculation’. She encouraged her daughter’s interests, sought out textbooks and tutors for her, and they both went to Charles Babbage’s evening parties in London, where he would show off working models of his inventions. The teenage Ada became intrigued by astronomy , seeing if the position of stars matched the predictions of the formulae governing their movement: this was the original motivation for her interest in studying calculus with De Morgan. “Lovelace’s social status, and the sense of entitlement it brought her, offset some of the disadvantages of being a woman in predominantly male scientific circles” It is sometimes said that her mother forced her to learn mathematics instead of poetry, but that’s a bit overblown. Her mother encouraged her mathematical interests: later in life Lovelace did aspire to write poetry, though what survives is not especially memorable. She was a very intelligent woman and pursued many ambitions and interests intensely at different periods in her short life. But mathematics was her passion in her late teens and early twenties, and that is when she became fascinated by Charles Babbage’s engines, and what they might be able to do. Yes, indeed. But it’s a biography, rather than a history of technology. It focuses on Lovelace and her mother and their interactions with the people around them, including scientists like Babbage, De Morgan and Mary Somerville. It doesn’t go so much into the bigger scientific or mathematical context of the time. Ada Byron was introduced to William, Lord King—later through the intervention of Lord Melbourne upgraded to Earl of Lovelace—through Mary Somerville’s family. The couple shared scientific interests. He wrote several papers on using data to improve agricultural production, at least one with the help of his wife, and later in life developed a somewhat eccentric interest in architecture. As to the supposed affairs, it’s hard to tell: they may have been no more than intense friendships with men who shared her scientific interests, though her husband certainly disapproved of at least one of them and the correspondence was destroyed. Yes. In the earliest biographies, Babbage or computing were hardly mentioned, and the focus was on the supposed wild daughter of Lord Byron. She was certainly interested in horses, and a bit of a daredevil horsewoman. As to the gambling, in the last years of her life she was a member of a syndicate of some kind, and lost a lot of money. It’s tempting to think that she might have had a sophisticated mathematical system, but my sense is that she was in a weak frame of mind and just got caught up in the excitement. The interest in horses continued with her daughter, who travelled in the Near East with her husband Wilfred Scawen Blunt, and introduced the first Arab horses to the UK."

"If you’re trying to understand Lovelace’s writings and scientific interests in their context you have to shift your mindset back to the mid-19th century and the intellectual currents of the time. Vestiges of Creation was published anonymously in 1844, written by a Scottish journalist called Robert Chambers, though he wasn’t revealed as the author for some 40 years. It was very controversial and very popular—and so there was much speculation as to who had written it, with both Prince Albert and Ada Lovelace among the suggested names. Vestiges was controversial because it was discussing ideas of evolution, natural history and theology in a way that prefigured Darwin’s later writings. Secord’s book unpacks the whole intellectual climate around it. What were the ideas? Why were they controversial? Who was reading it? What did they think of it? Why did people want to ban it? It’s a rich and complicated book, and perhaps one example will show how it sets Lovelace’s 1843 paper in context. Lovelace wrote, “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” Modern writers, notably Alan Turing, have interpreted this in the context of artificial intelligence . But for Lovelace, and Babbage, it concerned an intense theological debate: does the calculating machine challenge God or is it a creation of God, which will help us better understand His works? Since Babbage wanted to persuade the government to fund his machines, the latter, more conservative point of view was certainly more politic. In placing 19th century intellectual life in its context, Secord’s book is a reminder of the intensity of theological debate at the time, and how it affected scientific thought. Lady Byron was intensely religious: her daughter less so. As the connection to Lord Melbourne might suggest, mother and daughter were involved in social reform. They campaigned against slavery, and, before there was universal state education, founded schools for local children, run on the principles of the Swiss educational reformer, Johann Pestalozzi."

"It’s very easy to write a very dry mathematics or computer-science book, but here the authors aren’t setting out lists of mathematical facts, but looking at who was doing and using mathematics, and why, in an approachable way that presents context as well as achievement. In the earlier part of the century British mathematical education and research was transformed by reformers like Augustus De Morgan and Charles Babbage, who brought in new ideas from France and Germany. Popularisers like Mary Somerville brought ideas to the public in an approachable way. Later in the century, James Clerk Maxwell brought a new mathematical approach to physics, and the mathematical analysis of data was put to practical use by pioneers like Charles Farr and Florence Nightingale. Questions of genius and brilliance are a bit of an ahistorical constriction, and often complicated by present or past expectations of gender. At the time science was not as compartmentalised, or as professionalised, as it is today. There was an emerging community of scientists, with fluid boundaries between work in chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy or mathematics , and between what would now be considered research, and more explanatory material, such as Mary Somerville’s translations. Only a few were making a living from science, for example employed at Greenwich Observatory, or in the small number of universities. There was a public enthusiasm for science, with organisations like the British Association and Royal Institution , providing lectures open to women as well as men, though universities, and learned societies like the Royal Society , remained all male affairs. Lovelace’s correspondents included the scientific elite of the day: Babbage, De Morgan, Faraday, Florence Nightingale, John and William Herschel, Mary Somerville, Wheatstone and Whewell. Yes, indeed. And as well as the suggestion she might have written Vestiges , it was seriously proposed that she be appointed as a kind of scientific advisor to Prince Albert."

"I absolutely love this book. Sydney Padua creates a complete alternate reality where Lovelace stays healthy, Babbage builds the engine, and they use it to fight crime and have adventures: the Duke of Wellington, George Eliot, Brunel, Dickens, Boole and Lewis Carroll all get involved. So in one sequence Wellington turns up in their workshop, on his horse, to ask them to fix the economic crisis; they build a steam-powered economic model, which smashes through the wall of the workshop, does a dead-cat bounce, and then runs amok in London while chased —in a splendid two page spread—by Lovelace on a horse before crashing into the Bank of England. There are lots of jokes at the expense of quants, bank crashes, and the Black-Scholes equation. Underpinning it all is a huge amount of research, and an appendix with an articulate, readable and clear explanation of the engineering of the engine, with jokes and footnotes for good measure. I use some of Padua’s illustrations and animations in lectures, because it’s so nicely done. What she wrote was that if you could find a mathematical formula to represent musical composition, then the engine could “compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. The idea appears in Babbage’s notebooks as well: Sydney Padua uses Babbage’s notorious hatred of barrel-organs to make a joke at his expense about the engine being turned into a giant barrel-organ."

"Yes. I think one does often turn to novelists to get a sense of other people’s lives. It was written in 1871, but it’s written about a period 40 or so years before, the period when Ada Lovelace flourished. It’s about an intelligent woman trapped by the expectations and the circumstances of the society she finds herself in. She has this great belief in the intellectual project of Mr Casaubon, the clergyman she marries, and then her belief in that gradually dissolves. It’s about provincial society and how stultifying provincial society can be. When you read her letters, you see the sadness and—to some extent—misery of Lovelace’s later life. One of her early biographies has a lengthy appendix with a posthumous diagnosis of manic depression. Posthumous medical diagnoses are considered rather poor form for biographers these days. But she wasn’t actually the happy, crazy person of the Lovelace and Babbage book: that’s why it’s rather powerful because it recreates her as this person who does find fulfilment in all these crazy ideas. “She was thwarted by society’s expectations of her, her family’s expectations of her, and the expectations she had formed of herself” But, in reality, she was thwarted by society’s expectations of her, her family’s expectations of her, and the expectations she had formed of herself. That’s why Middlemarch sets the context and helps you understand what it was like to be Lovelace, if you like. And it also sets a context of the changes that technology was bringing. It’s a time of huge ferment with the coming of the railways, the coming of the telegraph, with old certainties being challenged. And that’s the world in which Lovelace lived. While Lovelace and her mother were passionate anti-slavery campaigners, they were not supporters of giving women the vote. As to frustration, she certainly writes, a number of times, of her ambition to make a major scientific or mathematical contribution. Towards the end of her life she was thinking about what she called a ‘calculus of the nervous system’, intended to be some way of modelling the workings of the brain, but there is no evidence she developed the idea. Perhaps she had in mind the calculus Babbage developed for representing the mechanisms of his engines, which he thought of as his finest work. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Throughout her life Ada Lovelace suffered from ill health, and was eventually diagnosed with uterine cancer. She was prescribed increasing quantities of narcotics, accompanied by alcohol to counter the side effects. This may explain the wild language of some of her private letters, particularly to her mother, where she made ambitious claims about her mathematical legacy. We don’t really know what form of legacy she was thinking of: textbooks and translations, like her friend Mary Somerville; or mathematical papers in her own right, like her teacher De Morgan; or unpublished but far-reaching innovations, like Babbage’s mechanical notation; or broader reflections, like Chambers’ Vestiges ; or even some form of ‘mathematical poetry’. Lovelace certainly had many advantages in pursuing her scientific interests: access to education and books; talent and ambition; support from husband and mother; and wealth and social standing. The greatest obstacle may have been a lack of mentors to work with her as intellectual equals, offering criticism as well as the flattery due to a countess; and reconciling her talent and ambition with her health problems, at a time when it was widely believed that good health was essential for mathematical exertion. Yes, although Eliot’s own life story was one of defying convention, in a way that Lovelace did not, for whatever reasons. Did she and Ada Lovelace ever meet? They were about the same age, but it seems unlikely. Did Lovelace meet the somewhat older Mary Shelley ? It’s circumstantially possible, but there is no evidence. Exactly. Coleridge was fascinated by mathematics. Shelley was obsessed with the powers of electricity, and that’s central to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Robert Southey and Humphrey Davy were friends. Lovelace wrote to her mother, “Will you give me poetical science?” It’s tantalising that only a page of the letter survives, so we don’t know the date or context. The phrase has been used to re-enforce sexist stereotypes, playing up Lovelace’s supposed imaginative and poetical contribution to the 1843 paper, and discounting her technical and mathematical ability. For intellectuals at the time, like Lovelace, there wasn’t much of a contradiction."