1. Miss Annabella Milbanke: ‘a fine child’ in her adoring parents’ view.
2. Annabella Milbanke as a muchcourted heiress, and as Byron would have first seen her.
3. Comte d’Orsay seems to have painted little Ada Byron before he met her father at Genoa in 1823. He captures her lively charm.
4. Ada’s beloved Persian cat, Puff, drawn by her mother with an accompanying tribute in verse.
5. Lady Byron commissioned this handsome portrait of Ada in the year of her marriage. Ada disliked both it and the artist.
6. Lord Byron. Annabella’s mother was so delighted by Thomas Phillips’s portrait of her future son-in-law that she purchased it for herself. It was how the 25-year-old author of Childe Harold wished to be seen.
7. George Anson Byron (8th Lord) was Ada’s ‘sweet cousin’. She looked upon George as a brother. He married a Nottinghamshire heiress.
8. Lady Melbourne, here in her splendid prime, was Byron’s most worldly advisor. She was also the mother-in-law of Lady Caroline Lamb and the aunt of Annabella Milbanke.
9. Augusta Leigh, half-sister to Lord Byron.
10. Byron’s ‘Mignonne’, Elizabeth Leigh, better known to us as Medora, the daughter of Augusta.
11. As a young man, Ada Lovelace’s future husband modelled his appearance upon Lord Byron. Like him, William King also travelled to Greece.
12. Lady Hester King, the mother of William, was a cold and unhappy woman. Even Ada Lovelace failed to pierce her armour.
13. Ada was especially fond of her sweet-natured sister-in-law, Hester, Jr.
14. Ada helped to facilitate Hester’s marriage to the kind and devoted Reverend Sir George Crauford.
15. Lord Lovelace’s exuberant creation helped to ruin him. Ada never inhabited her special Mathematical Room in the tower above the moat. The Lovelaces’ daughter nicknamed Horsley Towers ‘Glum Castle’.
16. Charles Babbage was of an age to have been a father figure to Ada. Their relationship was both fiery and playful.
17. The remarkable Mary Somerville furthered Ada’s mathematical education and became a second mother to her. The close connection continued through Ada’s daughter into the next generation.
18. The unbuilt Analytical Engine stood at the heart of Ada Lovelace’s professional friendship with Charles Babbage.
19. Antoine Claudet made a series of daguerreotypes of Ada and her children in the 1840s. Ada was fascinated by this technique of early photography.
20. Lady Byron drew this heartbreaking final image of Ada while helping to watch over her in London.
21. Byron Ockham, Ada and William’s first son, wears his midshipman’s uniform. This is by Claudet, c.1849.
22. Claudet’s daguerreotype of Ada and William’s second son, Ralph (later Lord Wentworth), c.1849.
23. Ada’s clever and long-suffering daughter Annabella (later Anne) married William Scawen Blunt. She is in Eastern dress, beside one of her celebrated Arabian horses.
