‘The little boy [Hugo, an orphaned nephew of Mary Montgomery] is a very nice child on the whole he speaks nothing but Italian and Spanish which I now perfectly understand.’
ADA BYRON AGED EIGHT, TO HER MOTHER,
7 DECEMBER 1824
Lord Byron was exceptionally angry to discover, early in 1817, that Annabella, advised by his own former legal counsel, Sir Samuel Romilly, had made their daughter a Ward of Chancery.* (Formally, Ada remained in Chancery until 1825, a year after her father’s death.) Nevertheless, he never doubted that his estranged wife would make an excellent and conscientious parent to little Ada. ‘A girl is in all cases better with the mother,’ Byron informed Augusta Leigh (by then the mother of seven) on 21 December 1820, ‘unless there is some moral objection.’
Claire Clairmont, having courageously decided to bring up Clara Allegra, her illegitimate child by Byron, as part of Percy Shelley’s bohemian household, was granted less respect. Byron liked Shelley and admired the poet’s wife, Mary, but the couple’s proclaimed aversion to monogamy presented the ‘moral objection’ of which he disapproved (in anyone other than himself). While Annabella was threatened with a lawsuit if she dared to expose young Ada to the dangers of continental travel, the Shelleys, in 1818, were commanded to arrange for little Allegra’s transportation from England to Italy, where Claire was tearfully compelled to surrender her maternal rights.
Byron’s caution about continental travel was well-founded. The Shelleys’ own baby daughter (another Clara) died of dysentery at Venice in September 1818. Their son William died of malaria in Rome the following summer. Clara Allegra – a child whose extraordinary resemblance to (of all people) Annabella was immediately noticed both by Byron and his valet, Fletcher – died of malaria or typhus in an Italian convent in 1822.* She was five years old.
Byron, from afar, expressed an erratic but fatherly interest in his legitimate child. His parting gift to Ada had been one of his talismanic rings. Further small gifts were despatched while off upon his alpine travels in the summer of 1816, followed in due course by a locket, inscribed, in Italian: ‘Blood is thicker than water.’ He asked for his daughter to be taught music (in which neither parent had any skill) and Italian (a language for which Annabella shared her husband’s deep love).
A taste for poetry, however, was to be discouraged in the child of the greatest poet of the age. Arriving in Greece in the autumn of 1823, and about to embark upon what would prove to be his last adventure, Byron made his feelings clear in a letter that entreated his wife (via Augusta) to provide him with a full report of their daughter, now almost seven years old.
Is the Girl imaginative? . . . Is she social or solitary – taciturn or talkative – fond of reading or otherwise? and what is her tic? I mean her foible – is she passionate? I hope that the Gods have made her anything save poetical – it is enough to have one such fool in a family.
Annabella delayed her response, possibly because Ada at the time was experiencing her first serious illness and her mother did not want to raise alarm. On 1 December, six weeks after her husband’s enquiry, Lady Byron sent him a miniature (the artist prided herself on having captured a perfect likeness of Ada’s profile), together with the details he required.
Her prevailing characteristic is cheerfulness and good-temper. Observation. Not devoid of imagination, but it is chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity – the manufacture of ships and boats etc. Prefers prose to verse . . . Not very persevering. Draws well. Tall and robust.
Annabella was never to receive Byron’s grateful response for a letter he described as her first kind action since the seemingly tender address to ‘dearest Duck’ that she had written even as she left him, back in 1816. The letter in which he expressed his gratitude – while fondly noting the similarities to his own boyish self in his wife’s account of little Ada – was still lying, unsent, on the poet’s desk at Missolonghi at the time that he died.
Possibly, Lord Byron’s very last thoughts were of his unseen daughter. William Fletcher, conveying the news of his master’s death to John Murray on 21 April 1824, was anxious to stress that Byron’s ‘pertickeler wish’ had been that his valet should carry a message to his wife and child. Lady Byron, so Fletcher later noted, had broken down in sobs during that harrowing visit, weeping until her whole body shook as she begged him – vainly – to recall what her husband’s final message to her had been. By the end of her own life, Annabella had convinced herself that some ‘unuttered’ tender words had been thought, even if they had not been spoken.
The cheerful docility mentioned by Annabella in 1823 marked the emergence of an endearing trait in Ada’s nature. Squabbles lay ahead, especially with a mother whose authority she often opposed, but Ada, throughout her life, would win affection by her good humour, her kindness and – unlike either of her parents – her quickness to forgive.
Ada had not always been so equable. Back in November 1821, when Lord Byron was renting a palace in Pisa, he heard that his 6-year-old daughter was thought to be ‘a fine child’, but one who possessed ‘a violent temper’. The news troubled him less than it did a mother who had witnessed her husband’s own ungovernable rages. What Byron began to fret about in Pisa was Ada’s isolation. Listing the members of her family who lacked siblings, he reached a disconcerting result. There were his own mother, Augusta’s mother, Augusta, he himself, Annabella and now young Ada: ‘Such a complication of only children . . . looks like fatality almost’, he brooded in his journal. Pride returned to comfort him. After all, ‘the fiercest Animals have the rarest number in their litters – as Lions – tigers – and even Elephants,’ Byron could not help adding, ‘which are mild in comparison.’
Initially, once Ada was weaned, she served only to remind her unhappy mother of the final weeks of a disastrous marriage. ‘My Child! Forgive the seeming wrong / The heart with-held from thee’, Annabella wrote in a private poem dated 16 December 1819 and guiltily entitled ‘The Unnatural Mother’. A month earlier, Annabella confessed that the first real evidence of Ada’s affection had come as a huge relief: ‘I had a strange prepossession that she would never be fond of me.’
The commencement of Lady Byron’s relationship with her daughter was not made easier by the first of many breakdowns in Annabella’s health. Back in 1816, following the tremendous strain imposed by her marital separation, she became nervous, unhappy and ill. It was a relief, then, after taking Ada off to Lowestoft to meet up with Mary Gosford and her own little girls during that summer, to bequeath her daughter to the care of Nurse Grimes and Lady Noel at Kirkby. Meanwhile, Annabella went to London to seek an independent abode in Hampstead, close to the sympathetic Baillie sisters and the intelligent, motherless daughters of their neighbour, a prosperous and pious Mr Carr. In the summer of 1817, Annabella made just one brief halt at Kirkby Mallory before setting off on a tour of the Lake District with Miss Sarah Carr.*
In September, following another hasty visit from her daughter, Judith Noel decided it was time to tweak her maternal conscience. Ada was declared to be missing her mamma. ‘She looked round the Bed and on the Bed, and then into the Closet – seemed disappointed and said “gone-gone”!’
The prod worked. Annabella returned home, to be rewarded with a scolding. Lady Noel possessed a notoriously sharp tongue, and it was one that Judith had not restrained on this occasion. Where would her daughter have been without Lady Noel’s support in her time of need? Did she ever pause to consider the pain her separation had caused, or the social embarrassment which had compelled Judith to remove from public view Phillips’s magnificently showy portrait of Lord Byron in order to nail it up in a box designated for the attic?† Her mother’s reproaches struck home. Filled with remorse, Annabella vowed to change her ways. It had become, so she guiltily wrote to Sarah Siddons’s widowed daughter-in-law, Harriet, her ‘dearest wish to prove a better child than she [Lady Noel] has yet found me’.
Most biographers and historians have adopted a stern view of Annabella’s behaviour during the first years after her separation from Byron. A fondness for mutton (‘divine mutton!’) has been cited by Doris Langley Moore as evidence, not only of her gluttony, but of her heartless greed. Her ever-increasing dependence on doctors – often while visiting agreeable spas – has been ascribed to self-indulgent hypochondria. More seriously, Lady Byron stands reproached, not simply of being an absent mother, but also of being a neglectful and ungrateful daughter.
The indictments are unjust. Through 1818 until Lady Noel’s death in 1822, Annabella spent at least a third of every year living with her parents at the isolated Leicestershire estate where Ada, spoiled by adoring grandparents and an indulgent household of servants, enjoyed a cherished country childhood. For Annabella, however, imprisoned at Kirkby, the life of a dutiful daughter offered little solace beyond the admiring company of the vicar’s daughter (rudely referred to by Lady Noel as ‘the Anna’).
Anna Jones offered a sympathetic audience to a frustrated young woman who was eager to be of use in the world beyond Kirkby’s confining walls. Escaping briefly to Seaham in the summer of 1818, and enjoying the company of Harriet Siddons’s young daughter, Lizzie, as her guest, Annabella rushed through her pet project for a much-needed local school, modelled after one that Harriet had successfully established in Edinburgh.* Back at Kirkby, and at her mother’s mercy, she was powerless. Driving out in her carriage with Miss Jones, an ardent young social reformer, she noticed evidence everywhere of the need for enlightened philanthropy. Several of the villages on the Wentworth estate were entirely dependent upon weaving for a living. The weavers were the people for whom Byron had spoken out in his first political speech, and now they were starving, put out of work by the thriving new mills of Derbyshire and of the North. Here, surely, was a way to bury her sadness through offering help to others while – it was always important to Annabella – undertaking something of which Byron would approve. But the estate belonged to Judith, and Lady Noel had grown too old and self-absorbed to concern herself with good works. Lady Byron, like her father, was Lady Noel’s dependent. Until her mother’s death, Annabella’s hands were tied.
Only an infrequent departure by Judith for an occasional health cure at Leamington Spa or Tunbridge Wells could open up a rare window of freedom. In January 1820, Annabella briefly joined the friendly Carrs and Baillies in Hampstead and, while there, found herself a future home: Branch Lodge. In May, she took Ada to Hastings, where the now intensely religious Mary Gosford was spending a quiet summer by the sea. ‘Hastings will be good for me,’ Annabella wrote to Harriet Siddons, before wistfully revealing her reason. ‘The place will be retired.’ Brighton, not Hastings, was where smart society spent its summer months. Four years after the separation, Lady Byron still shrank from placing herself anywhere that she might be noticed.
Towards the end of that year, Judith gradually declined into senility. Physically, however, she remained strong. By May 1821, Annabella had resigned herself to what threatened to become a lifetime of duty as a nurse-companion. But it was the news that her beloved Seaham was to be sold that seemed to break her heart. Writing to the always sympathetic Harriet Siddons, Annabella sounded near to tears. No more visits to help keep her little school in order; no more nostalgic strolls along that beloved beach; no more connection to the only place in which she and Byron had been, however briefly, alone and happy together. Contemplating the dreary years ahead of enacting ‘a calm performance of duty’ towards a decrepit parent, Annabella preserved just enough humour to smile at the doleful image she had conjured up of herself. While resolved to turn herself into a model of ‘sober-minded’ devotion, she feared it was too late for ‘a probability of complete success’.
Diversion offered itself in the form of Ada’s education. In the summer of 1821, Annabella’s daughter was five years old. Up in the Kirkby nursery, she was now cared for by a kindly and outspoken nanny named Eliza Briggs, who took a pleasing interest in Ada’s newest acquisition, a Persian kitten called Puff. Puff was a gift from her mother and – to judge from Ada’s adoring tales of Mistress Puff’s exploits and fairylike beauty – a much beloved one. Miss Lamont – fresh from Ireland and equipped with excellent references from an impressive young educationalist called Arabella Lawrence – was viewed with excitement by her pupil as a link to the larger world beyond her nursery’s iron-barred windows. Perhaps – who could tell? – Miss Lamont might even become a friend.
Arriving at a large country house in May 1821 for what seems to have been her first proper job, the governess immediately found herself trapped between the conflicting desires of two formidable personalities. Lady Byron clearly held the upper hand, but Ada, endeavouring to blossom into an autonomous being, was fighting her corner with a combination of charm, determination and active intelligence that inspired her novice tutor with a secret desire to cheer. Instantly in love with the child but terrified of annoying Lady Byron, her employer, Miss Lamont found herself walking a tightrope that offered no safety net.
Annabella’s own intentions for her daughter had already been made clear in the thank-you note ‘Ada’ addressed to her grandmother on New Year’s Day 1821. Written in Annabella’s own clear hand (Ada’s sole contribution was a wobbly ‘ADA’), the letter informed Lady Noel that the sky above Hastings was grey, while the sea below was yellow and white. Expressing gratitude for the useful Christmas gift of a knife and fork, Ada sounded as though she had sprung straight from a pedant’s manual on childcare. Consciously or not, Lady Byron seemed intent upon moulding her daughter into an extremely dull little girl.
Miss Lamont’s Kirkby journal, begun on 14 May of that same year, revealed a very different child. Ada had hailed her arrival with delight. She expressed a wish to start learning at once, and about everything possible. ‘She is brim full of life, spirit and animation,’ Miss Lamont remarked with pleased relief, ‘and is most completely happy.’
Pleasure was put at a premium under the rigorous schedule upon which Ada’s mother insisted. Each lesson must last precisely fifteen minutes. Good behaviour – demonstrated by obedience, application or simply sitting still – would be rewarded by a ticket. The emphasis upon sitting still was deliberate: Ada could no more stay still than a sudden streak of sunlight. (Miss Lamont was oddly reminded of a reindeer by the way her small charge dashed about; later, up in Hampstead, the old Baillie sisters would similarly fall under the spell of the lively, rosy-cheeked child they so loved to watch racing across the garden of Branch Lodge.)
It did not take long for the governess to realise how torn Ada was between bold defiance and the sincere desire to please a mother whom she evidently revered. Challenged by Annabella over her bold claim to sing far better than Mamma, the little girl refused to recant, but she wept when Lady Byron punished her impertinence with silence. Her sobs redoubled when Mamma further showed her disapproval by departing on a promised visit to Hinckley (Ada was enchanted by the local market town) with not a word of farewell.
Two weeks into Miss Lamont’s stay at Kirkby, the young governess had failed to establish ascendancy over her pupil. Short spells of solitary confinement completely failed to bring Ada to heel. Annabella, writing to Miss Lawrence in Liverpool on 30 May, expressed frustration. What was the use of a governess, when she herself was so often obliged to take her employee’s place – ‘as if I were the teacher’? Miss Lamont had failed to instil the desired attitude in her small charge: ‘a sense of duty, combined with the hope of approbation from those she loves’. Her period of trial would not be extended.
It seems that Arabella Lawrence – for whom Lady Byron felt respect – defended her protégée. Miss Lamont was permitted to remain at Kirkby – although only until 7 July – as an increasingly uneasy witness to the ongoing battle between a forceful mother and an increasingly assertive child. Ada was stepping up her demands for independence. On 11 June, Annabella compelled her to express regret for saying that she did not want to learn about figures. (‘I was not thinking quite what I was about. The sums can be done better, if I tried, than they are.’) Four days later, the little rebel declared that she cared less about arithmetic than in being told ‘every every thing’ about the cruel practice of beating donkeys. Out of Annabella’s sight, Ada built cities of coloured bricks and turned geography lessons into flights of fantasy. (Could the waves in Norway really surge higher than her own tall house?) Ada, not her mother, had gained control when her governess was persuaded to skip dull lessons to play to her upon the piano, to come and admire how she could gallop like a horse, and to hear how heartily she could bray to entertain her old grandfather: (‘à merveille!’ exclaimed an admiring Miss Lamont).
Signs of Ada’s rebelliousness appeared in the governess’s journal as regularly as Lady Byron’s instructions for their suppression. When a housemaid was summoned to imprison Ada’s fidgety fingers within black cotton bags, the young woman was greeted with a fierce nip. Despatched to a distant corner in disgrace, Ada sank her teeth into the dado rail. Released after tea, she was allowed into the drawing room, where a forgiving Lady Byron calmed the stormy little girl with soothing poetry. (It was a few months after this scene that Byron first heard about his daughter’s violent temper.)
Exhausting though Miss Lamont’s experience of teaching Ada had been, the governess departed from Kirkby Mallory in a state of bewitchment. ‘No person can be more rational, companiable [sic] and endearing than this rare child,’ she rhapsodised, before adding that Ada would do almost anything in order to win her mother’s praise.
Lady Noel died in 1822. The following year, Ada, together with her ageing grandfather, Nurse Briggs and Mistress Puff (the Persian cat), exchanged the grandeur of Kirkby Mallory for Annabella’s rented home in Hampstead. A portrait of Sir Ralph was left behind at Kirkby; instead, Annabella carried away the portrait of Lord Byron posing as an Albanian chief. Removed from its box, the famous painting was now hung, discreetly screened by a green velvet curtain behind which Ada – as it is frankly impossible not to suppose – occasionally granted herself a daring peep.
On 19 April 1824, Ada’s father died in Greece of fever, exacerbated by bloodletting. Death – he was only thirty-six – in the romantic cause of restoring Greece to independence transformed Byron’s reputation overnight. Later, Lord Tennyson remembered how, as a 16-year-old boy, he had solemnly chiselled the words ‘Byron is dead’ in a rock as a record of his own sombre emotions on hearing the news. At English country houses, Byron’s death was announced to guests with the solemnity due to a fallen hero.
Brought back to London from Missolonghi on the Florida, the poet’s body was laid out for a week in the room that a grief-stricken John Hobhouse had hired in order that final respects could be paid to his lost friend. The crowds who gathered in Westminster on the final two days, when public tickets were sold, were immense. They gathered again on 12 July, when the funeral cortège left Westminster, and they were present at every staging post along the poet’s three-day journey to rejoin his ancestors in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard in Nottinghamshire. At Newstead, the artist Cornelius Varley added a note to his new sketch of the abbey’s ruined arch that it had been executed during the year of Lord Byron’s death.
Annabella, informed of her husband’s death on 12 May by the new Lord Byron, reserved any visible signs of distress for the occasion of William Fletcher’s later visit, bringing no final tender message from her late husband. Byron had apparently spoken of Ada, but it was evidently on Annabella’s instructions that as little as possible was said about her father’s death to the little girl. Taken to inspect the Florida, Ada wrote about ‘Papa’s ship’ in a way that suggests she conceived him to have been the ship’s brave captain. Confusion was understandable, especially in a year when her mother’s good friend, who now held the Byron title, sailed for the Sandwich Islands in command of HMS Blonde.
At Hampstead, where she was taken into a church for the first time, Ada was more disturbed by the sense of imprisonment that she felt within a high-walled box pew than by regrets for a father she had never known. She yawned throughout the sermons and sighed for her lack of playmates. Other than the sedate Misses Carr and the ageing Baillie sisters, the most regular visitors to Branch Lodge were the briskly intelligent group of women who had been acquainted with Annabella since her youth. True, Ada had young Flora Davison (‘ma chère Flore’) upon whom to practise her epistolary skills, but Flora lived outside London. True, Miss Montgomery brought along a nice little nephew, Hugo, who had a nurse of his own, and whose shiny brown hair matched the fur trim of his Russian-style tunic. But what Ada wanted was a proper brother of her own. She lit upon the perfect candidate in the new Lord Byron’s son. Her own mysteriously absent father was now dead, while George Byron’s was sailing across some faraway ocean. George, too, must need an ally, a sister to comfort him. Besides, didn’t the two of them even share a name?
Young George had little chance to argue once his forceful cousin had determined upon him as her choice. On 9 September 1824, Ada offered her undying affection and sincere consolation to ‘my sweet George’ for his father’s absence, while reaffirming her own loyal devotion: ‘but no more about this at present for should your death take you from me though I do not feel it much now I should when it happened’. Undeterred by her cousin’s resounding silence, she tried again. Perhaps George would like to know her thoughts about love? (George was six; Ada almost eight.) Ada was eager to share her ideas. ‘I think the greatest happiness is in loving and being loved I dare say my love you will feel that.’
Ada was already displaying signs of having inherited her late father’s mesmerising volatility. After broaching (9 September) the subject of her sturdy little cousin’s possibly imminent death, she moved along without a blink on that same day to telling her mother about her recent enjoyment of a tasty meal of ‘fryed fish’, before again switching to the latest hunting exploits of the adventurous Mistress Puff. Ada had also invented a new word to describe her own passion for intensive reading: ‘gobblebook’.
‘Gobblebook’ signalled a marked change in Ada. She had become not only an eager reader, but a voracious learner. Although unequipped with a formal governess during her three years at Branch Lodge, it’s likely that Ada was being informally tutored by the clever ladies whose visits filled her letters at the time. If so, they did well by her. Ada started to ask probing questions about arithmetic, while trying her hand at writing in French. A letter addressed to Cousin George’s mother, now also known as Lady Byron, proudly announced her near perfect command of Spanish and Italian. Emotionally, too, Ada was making progress. She could understand her mother’s enduring affection for gentle Sophy Tamworth (‘Lady Tam’) well enough to connect it to her own sisterly devotion to little George.
The Baillie sisters would later remember Ada as a cheerful, energetic little girl, full of life and affection. Neither they nor her mother were surprised when she announced her plan to raise money (by making plaster casts of gems) to finance the painting of a portrait of her grandfather. The project was still in progress in the summer of 1825, when Sir Ralph died. Having dozed his last months placidly away at Branch Lodge, he was buried beside Judith in the windswept churchyard of their lost, but beloved, Seaham estate.
Sir Ralph’s death marked the last stage in his daughter’s transformation into Lady Noel Byron, a woman of thirty-three who was determined to make good use of the immense wealth and vast estates that she now possessed through Uncle Wentworth’s legacy.
A great injustice had occurred, however. It was one that Annabella acted swiftly to redress. In 1825, Lord Wentworth’s six grandchildren were left virtually destitute, thanks to the fact that he had refused to leave his fortune to their father, his own (fiercely resentful) illegitimate son. The children’s mother, Kitty Smith, was a sweet but ineffectual woman, long since abandoned by the absentee rector of Kirkby Mallory. While Annabella delegated the two young Noel girls to care for their somewhat helpless mother, her primary concern was for their brothers.
The four Noel sons stood halfway in age between Annabella and Ada. Tom, the eldest, now aged twenty-six, was a pleasant but irresponsible young man who liked writing poems. It was Robert, a clever, Pickwickian youth of twenty-two, whom Annabella singled out to act as trustee for his younger siblings, Charles (aged twenty) and Edward (nineteen). From 1825 on, while always taking care to consult and respect their mother’s wishes, the Noel boys would become virtual extensions of Lady Byron’s own tiny family. Writing to Robert from Italy in 1827, she addressed him as ‘Caro Fratello’, but the relationship was nearer to that of mother and son. The warmth of the relationship is apparent from the fact that Robert described Annabella in 1847 as his oldest and kindest friend. It was from conscience as much as for convenience that Annabella chose the third Noel, Charles, to act as her agent and overseer at Kirkby. It was, she reasoned, only right that a male Noel, a Wentworth grandson, should be placed in charge of a vast estate that had been under Noel ownership since the sixteenth century.
Released at last from filial duty, Annabella herself fell ill. Branch Lodge was abandoned as Lady Byron travelled from one spa to the next in her fruitless search for a cure. Ada, together with Miss Briggs, Puff and an additional fine black cat (an inky kitten had been promised to Cousin George), also found herself once again on the move.
Bifrons (originally so named because of its two contrasting façades, although the old house had long since been replaced) stood just outside Canterbury, on the Dover road. All that remains today of the house that Annabella rented for the next few years is bare land and a dwindling avenue of ancient trees. It was here, while being looked after by Mary Montgomery, one of her favourites among Annabella’s friends, that Ada decided that she, like the literary father of whose fame she was now becoming dimly aware, would become a writer. Evidence that Annabella knew of her daughter’s plan and actively set out to thwart it emerges from a curious letter that has survived, tucked away within the archive of John Murray.
On 31 March 1826, Annabella, conscious that Byron’s publisher was always anxious to placate the poet’s widow, issued Murray with a clear directive. He was to publish absolutely nothing initialled ‘AB’ that might appear to have received her authority, ‘tho from the accidental delay of a letter, my consent may have been inferred by the party in question’. And what on earth, a baffled John Murray must have wondered, did Lady Byron mean to convey to him by that strangely ambiguous defence? If an ‘accidental delay’ on her part had caused the problem, why not write again? Few letter-writers were more zealous, after all, than Byron’s widow. And why did she write to him, and not to the mysterious AB? The most likely answer seems to be that Annabella shrank from explicit censorship and chose this elaborate course as the easier route to suppression. It doubtless explains why an enchanting twenty-five-page story by Ada, carefully worked over by another hand, still lies unpublished – and seemingly unknown – within the Murray papers, held at the National Library of Scotland.*
Briefly lodged during the spring of 1826 with Miss Montgomery, at Library House in Hastings, Ada had begun to look upon Lady Byron’s old friend almost as a second mother. (Among the many reasons for Mary Montgomery’s popularity with Ada were that she played the guitar, that she had a pleasingly exotic little nephew, and that she allowed Ada to sit in her dressing room and chatter, while practising her Italian with a lady who spoke the language fluently.) It was not, then, with much gratitude for her real and absent mother’s endeavours that Ada learned that a new governess was on her way. After glumly admitting that it had been ‘quite shocking’ of her to announce she did not believe in prayers, Ada resignedly accepted that this unknown educator was God’s way of punishing her.
A pleasant surprise was due. Miss Charlotte Stamp transformed young Ada’s life. Kind, thoughtful and entertaining, she was everything that a clever, inventive and ebullient little girl could have wished for. An ‘apt scholar’ at chess, a ready partner in the quadrille, a willing collaborator in Ada’s story-writing endeavours, Miss Stamp was extolled by her pupil as ‘an enchantress’ and a treasure. Twenty years later, Ada would still regard this impeccable governess as her chosen model of perfection.
Annabella also approved. Planning the most adventurous step she had taken since leaving Byron, she included Ada and Miss Stamp in the carefully picked group who were to travel with her around Europe for fifteen months.
The Napoleonic Wars had deprived Annabella herself of any chance to visit the Continent as a child. Aged thirty-five, she had still voyaged no further than Edinburgh. Understandably – for a widow whose name remained tainted by the scandal surrounding her separation from Byron – Annabella wanted to travel within a protective circle of friends. Robert Noel, a fluent linguist, acted as her interpreter during the first months of the trip before travelling alone to Lyons, where the base was laid for Robert’s future career as one of Europe’s most eminent phrenologists. (Lady Byron had reluctantly abandoned her wish to settle him in England as a clergyman.) Along with Ada and Miss Stamp, Annabella was accompanied through various stages of the 1826–7 trip by Harriet Siddons, Mary Montgomery and Louisa Chaloner, a friend from her northern youth. Ada, who respected Harriet and loved Miss Montgomery, struggled to feel equal enthusiasm for Miss Chaloner, an outspoken Yorkshirewoman who had recently told Ada that she was a plain child. Intended as a corrective to vanity, the observation had stung. ‘I do like to look well,’ Ada wistfully confessed to her mother on the day of Miss Chaloner’s comment (2 June 1826). The announcement which followed (‘I think it is well for me I am not beautiful’) fell short of true conviction. Physical appearance would become, from this time on, a regular feature of Ada’s letters.
The European tour offers poignant evidence of Lady Byron’s feelings for her late husband. In England, she had paid anonymous visits to Harrow, to the deserted house at Piccadilly Terrace and even to Newstead Abbey, where the emotional experience of standing for the first time in Byron’s own private rooms, back in 1818, had almost overwhelmed her. Arriving in Switzerland, Lady Byron arranged a sailing trip on Lake Geneva, within eyesight of the shuttered villa where her husband had spent the summer of 1816. In Genoa, the city from which Byron had set out for Greece, his final adventure, Annabella rented an elegant palace. Here, Ada’s tutor in singing and drawing was selected precisely because Signor Isola claimed to have known and felt affection for Lord Byron. When the party of travellers moved on to Turin, they took Isola along with them. Annabella declared that Ada needed to continue her drawing lessons, but Isola’s primary role was to talk with his employer about Byron, and his life in Italy.
Such nostalgic indulgence was always camouflaged by Lady Byron’s interest in a higher cause. A second sentimental visit to Switzerland during this same extensive pilgrimage was ostensibly undertaken solely in order to settle Tom Noel as a young teacher at Dr Emmanuel Fellenberg’s celebrated school.
While Tom Noel failed to fit into Hofwyl’s demanding regime, Annabella swiftly established a warm relationship with the school’s creator. A voluminous correspondence commenced, in which Dr Fellenberg’s French addresses to ‘Milady’ were matched by Annabella’s stately responses in her own tongue. Plans were swiftly laid for Tom’s younger brother, Edward, and little Hugo Montgomery to complete their schooling at Hofwyl.
It would be hard to overstate the influence of Emmanuel Fellenberg’s enlightened and progressive school upon Annabella’s future life as a reformer. Recommended to her by Harriet Siddons, herself an ardent educationalist, Hofwyl provided the model for the schools through which Annabella, in her mid-thirties, decided to provide practical knowledge and technical skills to the poor. As at Hofwyl, which she had also heard praised by Henry Brougham, she would raise her pupils up to become teachers and spreaders of learning for a class to whom it had hitherto been denied. Thrillingly ahead of the times when Annabella paid her first visit to Fellenberg’s country academy in 1826, Hofwyl showed her how to start using her great fortune for the public good. It became the mainspring for her lifework.
Little record survives of Ada’s feelings about her travels, other than some drawings, along with anxious reports to her mother’s friends in England on the subject of Lady Byron’s failing health. Hofwyl had proved inspiring, but the tour reawakened an unforeseen storm of emotion and grief in Annabella. The near loss of Harriet Siddons to a severe attack of ‘brainfever’ seemed to be the final blow from a remorseless fate. Returning to England in the autumn of 1827, Lady Byron managed a month of supervising Ada at Bifrons (Miss Stamp had gone on holiday) before she herself altogether collapsed. The gravity of her illness is apparent from the fact that Ada, composing in February one of many worried little notes, expressed relief that her mother could now manage to scrawl in her own hand the simple words ‘much better’. Two months later, Ada admitted that there had been times when ‘I really thought . . . you could not live.’
While travel had brought Annabella to what seemed to be her deathbed, it fired her precocious 11-year-old daughter with further dreams of escape. On 3 February 1828, Ada excitedly revealed her newest project. She was teaching herself to fly.
I am going to begin my paper wings tomorrow and the more I think about it, the more I feel almost convinced that with a year or so’s experience & practise I shall be able to bring the art of flying to very great perfection. I think of writing a book of Flyology illustrated with plates . . .
The following day, having joyfully conveyed the news that Miss Doyle’s niece Fanny Smith was looking forward to flying alongside her when she next visited Bifrons, Ada set out the next phase of her plan. Once she had mastered the art of flight, she would become a ‘carrier pigeon’, an airborne messenger who would transport her mother’s letters across the skies. As an extra incentive to the recovery of her health, Lady Byron learned that her wish to become godmother to Puff’s new kitten was granted. Puff, so she learned, had become especially bold of late, hiding up the chimney, when not crunching bird bones beneath Ada’s bed.
In part, Ada was making an endearing attempt to comfort an ailing mother to whom she now frequently signed herself off as ‘Carrier Pigeon’ or even ‘Your affectionate Young Turkey’. Nevertheless, as her flying schemes grew ever more elaborate, it became clear that Ada wished her aerial aspiration to be treated seriously. Writing to Annabella at the spa of Tunbridge Wells on 2 April, she requested a scientific book about bird anatomy. A bird’s wings, as Ada explained, offered an ideal model for her own paper constructions. Five days later, Ada’s plans had taken a further leap. She was going to build a flying machine.
I have got a scheme about a . . . steamengine which, if ever I effect it, will be more wonderful than either steam packets or steam carriages, it is to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steamengine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.
Ada’s plans had begun with a wonderful fantasy of flying about in ‘the great room’ at Bifrons and astonishing her mother with her feats. Now, a disused tack room for horses at Bifrons was converted into a ‘flying room’ hung with ropes (presumably for swinging about in simulated flights). Miss Stamp’s discovery of an old saddle stand languishing in a corner led on to another bright idea. Might Ada be allowed to take up riding? Mamma had doubtless forgotten that there was the dearest little pony who was kept in the park at Bifrons: ‘very gentle . . . just a little pottering thing . . . I really think that when you come back, an arrangement might be made without any trouble or inconvenience to any one for me to ride little Shag, as I call him.’
Miss Stamp, who dryly remarked that she now featured so often in her pupil’s letters that she had best just become ‘Miss S’, decided that it was wisest to indulge her excited young pupil’s projects and boasts. (‘When you come home you shall see me ride,’ Ada swaggered to her mother. She had never yet even sat upon a horse.)
Miss Stamp was tolerant. Annabella, recovering her health, grew apprehensive. A brisk course in theorems might calm her daughter’s overexcited state. Arabella Lawrence was consulted, while William Frend and his daughter Sophia were invited to see if they could not help to restrain Miss Byron’s fancies by confining her energies to figures and logic. In vain: instead of furthering Lady Byron’s plan, Frend found himself being recast as her daughter’s pet astronomer. Lady Byron had asked for lessons in geometry. Ada requested a map of the stars. Frend surrendered. People always did, when Ada set her heart upon something. By February 1829, the elderly mathematician had become the bewitched recipient of the young girl’s confidences about her newest project. Flying had been abandoned for the creation of ‘my Planetarium’.
Overexcitement; illness; the onset of puberty; the departure of her beloved Charlotte Stamp to get married (never, sadly for Ada, to return). A combination of these things brought Ada’s year of elated dreaming to a shocking close. William Frend, writing to Lady Byron on 27 May 1829 to enquire if her daughter would be observing the course of Jupiter that June, was informed that a severe attack of measles had left Ada paralysed, semi-blind and bedridden.* It remained impossible to predict how much time might be required for her recovery.
* Annabella had agreed to Romilly’s suggestion after Augusta Leigh, in February 1816, indicated that she might personally oppose her sister-in-law’s right to keep the child. Annabella feared seeing Ada shuffled off into the Leigh household almost more than the prospect of losing her to Lord Byron.
* It says much for Byron’s underlying affection for his wife that he observed this inexplicable similarity with the keenest of pleasure. To an outsider, the description of Allegra’s features raises the intriguing possibility that she may have not been Byron’s child at all. Claire herself was dark-haired. Her daughter’s fair hair, blue eyes and high forehead were all well-observed aspects of Shelley’s delicate countenance. His paternity is not unthinkable; Claire and Shelley’s intimacy has been widely noted.
* Sarah Carr later married Annabella’s lawyer and devoted friend, Stephen Lushington. Her sister Frances (Fanny to her family) would one day become the most formidable of the three trustees of Lady Byron’s papers.
† Lady Noel went further. In 1818, she wrote to ask the Prince Regent to permit a name change for her ‘insulted and injured daughter’. Annabella was not informed and the Prince did not oblige. (JN to HRH the Prince Regent, 14 September 1818. A copy, or what may have been a draft, survives in the Lovelace Byron Papers.)
* Harriet’s own pioneering school in Scotland seemingly inspired Annabella’s lifelong interest in education, while Harriet’s personable brothers-in-law, George and Andrew Combe, introduced Lady Byron to another enduring interest: phrenology. That would-be science sought to interpret personality from the shape of a skull. George Combe, the husband of Cecilia Siddons, was its leading authority. Annabella became an ardent convert.
* ‘The Neopolitan Brothers’, completed in 1827, possibly during her time in Europe, suggests that Ada had been dipping into the ladies’ annuals which were published (in lavish editions) for the Christmas market. A gothic romance, Ada’s tale features a murder, a haunting, a vividly imagined Italian setting and unspeakable remorse. As the work of a child of eleven, it is impressive. The reviser was most likely to have been Ada’s sympathetic governess, Charlotte Stamp. (John Murray Archive, MS 43363, NLS.)
* It is unlikely that Ada’s measles was related to the paralysis. Although this has happened (most recently, in 1964), such consequences are extremely rare. At the time, a connection did seem possible. (See the appendix on Ada’s health on pp. 475–6.)