Settled in their new home, with the foundations of their large 40ft reflector already laid and a scientific reputation that was steadily growing for both siblings, the Herschels’ fortunes were most definitely on the rise from the outset of 1787. William had been a household name since word had spread of his discovery of a planet through first the scientific and then the popular press back in 1781. And after the announcement of her new comet, curiosity about Caroline was also growing. In January, the pair began their observations on two new moons of Uranus. Then there were the many nebulae, star clusters and double stars that the pair added regularly to their catalogues. In just that one year, Caroline wrote up six papers for her brother to submit to the Royal Society. This kept her busy, exactly as she liked to be, and kept her mind off the publication of her own paper by that same institution.
Even before publication, word had spread of the extraordinary discovery by this extraordinary woman. Fanny Burney, the author and diarist, wrote of a visit to the palace: William had been summoned as part of his duties as Royal Astronomer to show collected guests his sister’s comet. Burney remarked that she was ‘very desirous to see it’. Although it was small and ‘had nothing grand or striking in its appearance’, she wanted very much to see it because ‘it is the first lady’s comet’. And that was reason enough.
Astronomer friends were even more enthusiastic. The amateur astronomer and family friend Alexander Aubert wrote gushingly to Caroline after hearing of and then seeing the comet for himself. ‘I wish you joy most sincerely for the discovery,’ he wrote. ‘I am more pleased than you can well conceive that you have made it and I think I see your wonderfully clever and wonderfully amiable Brother, upon the news of it, shed a tear of joy.’1
A few months later, Fanny visited the Herschels with her father and met Caroline for the first time. ‘She is very little,’ Fanny remarked, ‘very gentle, very modest, very ingenuous; and her manners are those of a person unhackneyed and unawed by the world, yet desirous to meet and return its smiles.’
A neighbour of the Herschels, Mrs Papendiek, made similar observations on Caroline’s character, though she was more generous in describing her talents. According to her, ‘Miss Caroline Herschel was by no means prepossessing, but a most excellent, kind-hearted creature, and though not a young woman of brilliant talents, yet one of unremitting perseverance, and or natural cleverness.’2 It was this appearance of gentle modesty and apparent desire to please that helped Caroline become the first (named) woman to discover a comet and the first to have her paper read to and published by the Royal Society in the oldest and longest-running scientific journal in the world.
William and Alexander had both been away when Caroline made her discovery. Etiquette dictated that had they been around, they would have been expected to speak for her, to have announced her discovery to their scientific friends on her behalf, simply because they were men. Men’s voices carried authority on scientific matters; women’s did not. Even after Caroline made her announcement in her own words, William felt obliged to add his own a few days later, when he got back, to add weight to her claim. Women were not expected to participate in science in the way that Caroline did; she had to be very careful about her wording and her presentation, and she needed allies.
It would be completely wrong to say that women have not participated much in science historically or that Caroline was among the first. A much truer claim would be to say that women have always participated in science but that their contributions have, for centuries, been unacknowledged, trivialised or simply labelled anything other than science. In early modern chemistry-heavy industries like brewing, for example, women often dominated up until the seventeenth century, when men began to take over. As a female-dominated industry, brewing tended to be regarded as a part of cooking; once men became involved, it came to be regarded as a more scientific and industrial process. In medicine, similarly, where women dominated, practices tended to be labelled as domestic, part of the overall process of caring; male involvement in medicine, meanwhile, was regarded as professional and analytical.
In later periods too, women were often involved in scientific practice, but convention dictated that only very few participants in that process received credit. Robert Boyle, for example, known to schoolchildren everywhere for Boyle’s Law (describing the relationship between pressure, volume and temperature in a gas), carried out grand experiments in his home. He wrote them up, describing his work as though he was the only one there, yet he had a team of assistants and technicians helping him. Just as servants were invisible to people of Boyle’s class, so too were the multitude of scientific helpers that made their work possible.
The help of servants, assistants, technicians, wives, sisters and daughters was very much taken for granted in science right up until the late nineteenth century. History has only recently begun to grudgingly acknowledge that these men could only have achieved what they did by virtue of the team of predominantly female relatives and servants keeping them clean and fed, helping them in the laboratory and tending to their social networks. Looking more closely at these women and the work they performed, the line between domestic help and scientific help gets increasingly blurred.
It would have been perfectly in keeping with conventions of the time for William to have claimed all Caroline’s nebulae discoveries as his own. He was the male figurehead of the family’s scientific enterprise and therefore he was the official discoverer of everything they found, the maker of all their telescopes and the creator of all their theoretical work. The work of his siblings and the many servants and workmen was not generally considered important enough to the enterprise to receive credit. Today, scientific papers often have long lists of authors, discoveries are often claimed by teams rather than individuals, whereas in the past, history seems to have been made by only a handful of white men. Boyle, by this logic, carried out his experiments single-handed and Darwin alone collected, catalogued and interpreted his specimens.
Very occasionally, female partners’ contributions have been acknowledged in portraits (Elisabeth Hevelius, or Marie-Anne Lavoisier,3 for example) but it was extremely rare for it to happen in print. In fact, science was always a team effort, but historically large swathes of people – women, servants, the lower classes – were seen as invisible and unimportant to knowledge creation. What makes the Herschels – not just Caroline, but the whole family – different is their disregard for this convention, at least as it applied to women.
William had already broken with convention, naming Caroline as the discoverer of several nebulae in his catalogue. Now it was Caroline’s turn. Her years training as a society musician would not go to waste. These were what taught her how to win over a sceptical crowd. She had once been warned by a well-meaning woman in rehearsals for a concert in Bath not to be ‘her own trumpeter’. It was not seemly – for a woman especially – to be too self-congratulatory; much better to be self-depreciating, to present an image of exaggerated modesty and allow others to recognise and celebrate your talent. It was this lesson that Caroline now applied to science.
‘In consequence of the Friendship I know to exist between you and my brother I venture to trouble you in his absence with the following imperfect account of a comet.’ This is how Caroline began her letter to Royal Society secretary Charles Blagden, a letter that would form the basis of her published article. Today, claiming that your account of a scientific observation was imperfect might seem a little shoddy and unprofessional, but for Caroline it was essential to being taken seriously. It allowed the men within the Royal Society to accept this paper by a woman without immediately dismissing her and her work as overconfident and arrogant. She ventures to trouble him, again putting him and other readers off guard, forcing them to politely assure her it was no trouble rather than offending them by demanding attention. She explains it is because of ‘his absence’ that she is writing, again assuring her reader that it is only because there was no alternative that it is she and not a man who is writing. In just that one opening sentence, Caroline, using her lessons in society manners and performance, managed to completely neutralise any possible opposition she, as a woman, might have expected to encounter.
Her paper continued, carefully, diligently neutralising all and any opposition that might arise. Her brother helped too, stepping in at the end with his assurance that he too had seen what his sister claimed, and could vouch for her abilities. Another friend also assisted, offering his own observations in a paper read a little later and published in the same volume of Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society.
Caroline’s caution regarding her dealings with the Royal Society seems, historically at least, to have been extremely wise. While she may not have been aware of the details, she was almost certainly aware of the frosty reception the Royal Society tended to give women. Generally speaking, most eighteenth-century public and professional institutions were unwelcoming to women. Women would no more expect entry to the Royal Society than to a university or the Houses of Parliament.
There had been women at the Royal Society in the 120 years of its existence before Caroline, but none had received the welcome – such as it was – that Caroline enjoyed. Margaret Cavendish, for example, the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne no less, was the first woman to attend a meeting at the Royal Society, a year after it was founded. Cavendish was openly ambitious and wrote unapologetically on natural philosophy (writing in total six books on the subject) at a time when women writers rarely published anything under their own names. Her presence, however, made the fellows uncomfortable. Some of the more unkind members began referring to her as ‘mad Madge’. They were rude, not just about her ideas, but about her clothes, her stance, everything about her. Just to make sure this sort of thing did not happen again, women were barred from attending meetings for another two centuries.
Several decades later, Margaret Flamsteed, a woman in a position more similar to Caroline’s, had a run-in of her own with England’s all-male scientific elite. As the wife of the first Astronomer Royal, she had often assisted her husband with his observing and calculating at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. She had been his eyes when his sight deteriorated with age. She offered continuity too, as observatory assistants came and went, rarely staying long due to the long, solitary hours and the bad pay. When her husband died, Margaret naturally saw it as her job to complete his work, bring it together and have his catalogue – the first catalogue of northern hemisphere stars made with a telescope – published. (An earlier incomplete version had been published before, through some devious goings on between Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton, but John, Margaret’s husband, had been furious about this and had them all destroyed, bar a very small number he had been unable to track down.) Margaret assumed she would be the one to carry out her husband’s wishes to publish his improved version of the catalogue. Yet her assumptions about her abilities and the logical sense in having those most familiar with the material work with it to completion appeared only to antagonise her male peers. Eventually she achieved what she set out to do, but not before dealing with a huge amount of condescension and obstruction.
Even before her article on her comet, news had spread about Caroline’s discovery; after her publication in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions she became a household name. Scientific journals in the eighteenth century were not quite what they are today. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was one of only a very small number of scientific journals in the world. It covered most science, or natural philosophy as it was then known, and was read by the entire Royal Society membership, which included both practitioners of science and gentlemen interested enough to pay the fees and of a high enough social ranking to be elected.
The journal was also read by a growing and disparate group of interested amateurs: people such as the Herschels before they gained their royal patronage. These interested amateurs, not quite proficient enough, or of high enough social status to become members of the society themselves, would borrow copies from philanthropic neighbours or from travelling libraries. These men and women – often nominally scientific through their occupations as teachers or naval men (or not at all in the case of leisured country gentlemen) – called themselves ‘philomaths’ in the eighteenth century. They were interested in philosophy and mathematics (hence the name) but as consumers rather than producers of new knowledge. They read second-hand copies of Philosophical Tranactions or, more often, watered-down versions of the same works in journals especially designed for them, such as The Ladies’ Diary. There were also, for the even less committed or for those starting out, more populist journals such as The European Magazine, which would often publish discussions on Royal Society papers for their non-specialist readers. All of this meant that certain ideas, when they caught the imagination of readers and journalists, could travel quickly. A female comet hunter was an eye-catching story.
While Caroline’s comet paper was big news, and an important moment in the creation and development of her independent reputation, it was by no means the only astronomical achievement for her that year. As she had been doing for the past five years, Caroline continued to assist her brother in his observations. In January 1787, William and Caroline first recorded seeing two new satellites, or moons, of Uranus. Since Galileo first spotted four moons around Jupiter in 1610, other moons around other planets had been discovered, although not many. Today, we know of around 200 moons (or natural satellites) orbiting planets and dwarf planets in our solar system. By 1787, however, only Galileo’s four moons and another five around Saturn were known. Two new satellites around Uranus was therefore a significant discovery, if not quite as huge as William’s earlier discovery of the planet itself.
In February, the pair oversaw further work on the 40ft telescope. The tube was now finished and one of the mirrors that had been cast in London to William’s own specifications and brought down the river to Slough was placed in the tube for the first time. The telescope was still a long way from being complete, but it was significant progress. Then, in April the Herschels had a visitor.
By 1787 the Herschels were used to having a lot of guests. By the summer, they were getting visitors to see not only the famous astronomer and instrument maker William Herschel, and his planet Uranus and its satellites but also the discoverer of the first lady’s comet. These visitors were mainly aristocrats, people with titles but no real interest in science, who came to see what all the talk was about. Caroline found these people rather tiresome. She saw their reception as a duty, a professional obligation, but took no real pleasure in their company. Occasionally they were visited by a philosopher or mathematician, an artist or poet and these visits were more welcome, although they still took Caroline away from the practical, self-improving solitude which was her main pleasure.
Their April visitor, however, was quite different to their regular evening guests. Between April and October, William and Caroline’s older brother Jacob came over from Hanover to stay. Ordinarily Caroline was very family orientated. She loved solitude and her family in almost equal measure and would happily shun all society to be with and to look after her loved ones. However, she disliked Jacob, sixteen years her senior, intensely.
Her autobiographies are peppered with remarks on how irritating she found his behaviour, and at times even his very existence. He embodied everything she disapproved of. That he had inherited the role of head of the household after their father died, giving him authority in all decisions about her life and future back in Hanover, did not help. She also noted her brother’s profligate spending, alongside his disdain for earning a living. Rather caustically, she observed that he always saw himself above teaching and would never sell his compositions as no printer ever offered enough. She also felt he had been spoilt by being overindulged by his family. He was, she felt, ‘too much admired for his musical and other promising abilities … to deny him any gratification’.
Back in Hanover, his attempts (as Caroline saw them) to mix in high society would frequently have a negative impact on Caroline’s already busy and thankless life. He would often have friends over, she would complain, and Caroline was expected to serve them drinks, on top of her already onerous domestic workload. At one point, he felt his station demanded a servant – except they did not have a room for one, and so Caroline was expected to share hers. Even when Caroline had the chance to leave and come to England, it was Jacob, according to Caroline, who was the greatest obstacle to her gaining permission.
Like all the Herschel brothers from the time William had settled in Bath as a musician, Jacob had made frequent visits to England to stay. This would be his first visit since they had moved to Slough, and the first in which he did not have the ready excuse of coming to join them as a fellow professional musician. Jacob’s stay is left remarkably undocumented in the Herschels’ extant papers. Caroline simply and curtly states in her autobiography that, ‘My brother Jacob was with us from April till October when he returned to Hanover again.’ She adds that Alexander came over from Bath briefly during that time, but not for long, as his wife – who had kept Caroline company the summer before, when William and Alexander had been in Göttingen – was very ill. Given her desire always to come across as obliging (at least when she thought about it), this suggests that perhaps Caroline did not say anything about this visit because if you have nothing nice to say, you should not say anything at all.
It seems likely that Jacob visited his nephews, sons of their older sister Sophia, while he was in England. Sophia was the eldest of the Herschel children. In 1755, when Caroline was just 5, she had left home to marry Heinrich Griesbach, a musician in the same military band as her father and brothers. Their first son, George, was born two years later, followed soon after by Charles (born 1760), Henry (1762), Frederick (1769) and William (1772). Not long after George was born, Heinrich left the military and became a town musician in Coppenbrügge. The pay was not fantastic, but at least it meant he could see his family. To supplement their income, Heinrich would take on private engagements, playing at weddings and parties, and sometimes copied music to earn some extra money. Sophia, when she was not busy with her own young children, took a post teaching at a local girls’ school for a while.
Like the Herschel children, the Griesbach children went to the local school and were taught music intensively at home. By the time George was 5 he could play a few tunes on the violin, and by the time he was a teenager he could play much more, and on a range of instruments. His brothers were much the same. In 1759, they had been joined by their uncle, Sophia’s brother Alexander, who came to live with them as Heinrich’s apprentice. Again, like the Herschels, this was a very busy, musically ambitious household where money was always tight, but where it could generally be found through a musical engagement or two.
In 1773, when George was just 15, their father Heinrich died and his post as town musician was passed down to his eldest son, giving him his first experience of professional employment. A few years later, George’s godfather, his Uncle Jacob, came across an opportunity that would transform the family’s fortunes. Jacob had heard on one of his visits to England that George III was sending a scout to Hanover to look for musicians for the royal court. He pointed his eldest nephew in his direction.
George was successful, and although worried for her young son leaving her to live so far away, Sophia was comforted by the fact that three of her siblings were already settled in England and would keep an eye on him. She let him go. From that day in 1777 until the mid-nineteenth century, the Griesbach family dominated music at the English royal court. Very much like William, George settled in England and then gradually called over his brothers, one by one, as opportunities for them arose. The Griesbach brothers would surely have given Jacob a warm reception, even if Caroline had been a little frosty.
Ordinarily Caroline would have gone to great lengths and huge personal cost to make her visiting family comfortable. When the baby of the family, Dietrich (five years her junior), came to visit in 1782, she gave up everything to look after him. Dietrich had run away from Hanover, but not planned his trip well. He was deserted by his travelling companion and had sent a very distressed letter on his arrival in England, telling William and Caroline that he was ill and staying in Wapping. They had asked a friend to help him get to Bath and, once there, Caroline nursed him back to health, barely leaving his side in over a fortnight.
Jacob, however, was perfectly healthy and could look after himself. To ensure she did not have the kind of spare time she knew her brother had a habit of exploiting, Caroline looked around for astronomical work that might need doing. ‘I had always in hand,’ she wrote, ‘some kind of work with which I could proceed without troubling him [William] with questions.’ And so it was that she began the ‘Temporary Index’ in June 1787.
Caroline’s ‘Temporary Index’ was an organising, transcribing and improving project that would help make William’s cataloguing work much easier to carry out. William was at the time cataloguing the sky, section by section, using his large telescopes, which were renowned for their exceptional magnifying power. To do this, or at least to make sure that what he listed was genuinely new to astronomers, he and Caroline had to cross reference each new point of light in the night sky against previous catalogues. Their main source was Flamsteed’s catalogue, the first survey of the night sky made with a telescope, which had been produced nearly a century earlier from Greenwich. They also consulted Charles Messier’s catalogue of nebulae and star clusters. There may have been others.
All the catalogues, however, had one flaw: they were ordered according to constellation. This was very much how European astronomers worked at the time. The sky was divided up into constellations, some Greek, some invented more recently by explorers, and the stars were listed according to which constellation they were said to belong to. Constellations, however, fill the sky in a rather haphazard way; they overlap, vary in size and bend around one another. The Herschels’ survey, on the other hand, was methodical, structured and took a section of the sky at a time. They would scan one vertical strip of sky and each strip would typically include a few stars from a number of different constellations. There was no order to it, and so it was that Caroline decided to impose her own order.
To begin with, Caroline set about creating a cross-referencing system, an index that would allow the siblings to more easily incorporate the information from published catalogues into their own work. This was her ‘Index’ – ‘Temporary’ because she considered it to be a temporary stopgap, a tool to assist rather than the finished product. This kept her busy in the daytime during the summer they had their elder brother to stay. It helped her to become more familiar with the night sky, what had been found before and how those discoveries had previously been described. However, it had one other valuable contribution to make to Caroline’s well-being: it gave her a project that was all her own. It gave her a sense of control and even, within the confines of her domestic arrangements, independence.
The summer of 1787 was turning into an exceptionally busy one, even for the Herschels. Her indexing project aside, Caroline barely had time to worry about Jacob, or indeed much else besides astronomy and the development of the instruments. William’s expensive and ambitious 40ft telescope was starting to take shape and she was increasingly involved in the future plans for it.
William had become famous in astronomy when he discovered the new planet Uranus in 1781, but it was on the quality of his telescope that he had built his reputation. After he announced his discovery, astronomers in London and Paris had quickly checked the observations and soon confirmed it as a new planet. What they were less convinced by were the claims he made about his telescopes and their magnifying power. They were so far beyond anything then known, it just seemed to them too unlikely.
William tried to explain his telescopes with a musical analogy. The magnification, he claimed, was possible through practice; it was a combination of magnifying power and getting your eyes used to seeing. ‘You must not expect to be able to see at sight or a livre ouvert,’ he told a friend. However, the astronomers at the Royal Society needed more to convince them. They ordered him to bring his telescopes to Greenwich so they could see for themselves. To their astonishment, his claims were entirely accurate.
With his reputation as an instrument maker secured, he set about building on it, designing bigger and bigger telescopes until he came up with his plan for the biggest telescope in the world. In 1785 William, with the help of some friends, had successfully petitioned the king to get funding for the 40ft telescope. By 1787, the money had all been spent and the telescope was still a long way from completion.
George III prided himself on being a patron of science. He had had his own observatory built at Kew, near London, and supported the Royal Society and many scientific expeditions. For centuries, art and science had been largely funded in this way, practised either by rich individuals who could fund themselves or by those who could persuade rich individuals to become their patrons. Galileo had named the moons of Jupiter the ‘Medician Stars’ because this was a good way to flatter and gain funding and patronage from the Medici family. Johanne Kepler dedicated an essay to the Archduke Ferdinand in order to win his support. William had done the same when he originally named his planet Georgium Sidus. He now hoped he could flatter the king enough for his support to continue.
In July, imagining the king would still be enthusiastic about the project, William wrote asking for more money. The king, however, was not as keen as William had hoped. He expected the original grant to have been enough and was not happy about being asked for more money. Before he answered the request, he decided to go and see what progress had been made. He brought with him a large party, including the Archbishop of Canterbury.
However annoyed the king might have been, the sight of the partially built telescope, including the huge 40ft tube lying on the ground, obviously delighted him. It put him in a good mood. He saw its potential and realised that such a statement structure might help cement his image as a scientifically enlightened monarch. Leading the archbishop through the tube (on the Herschels’ invitation – it was their current party trick), he quipped, ‘Come, my Lord Bishop, I will show you the way to Heaven.’4
A few days later, William received word from the palace. The king would provide further funds. William now had to provide a reasonable estimate of what those additional costs might be to have the telescope up and running. He made his calculations: another £1,000 for construction, plus £200 a year in running costs. He had an additional suggestion, however, and it concerned his sister.
For all her public claims to family devotion and her assertions about wanting nothing more than to serve her family, Caroline had clearly shown her brother another side to her feelings. She had been offered independence as a musician, back in 1778 when she had been asked to leave her family for a post in Birmingham. She had turned it down because the thought of working completely separately and far away from her siblings had seemed too big a step. It had obviously sparked something in her, however, because a few years later William had helped her set up her own millinery business with some friends, using skills she had gained from a course she had attended a few years earlier in Hanover. Unfortunately the business failed.
The Herschels blamed staff, partners and location for this, but it did show both William and Caroline that she had a desire for independence and was happy to work hard for it. Since then, the siblings had moved to Slough, and Caroline had been trained in astronomy as William’s assistant. Her old desire for some kind of independence, however, was never completely lost, and so when it came to asking for more money for the 40ft telescope, these disparate ideas and desires that had been floating about for a while came together. The 40ft telescope might just offer the siblings a new way to help Caroline achieve her ambition to be financially secure, free at last from becoming a burden on her family.
William set about making his case. Caroline, William argued to the king, was now highly trained and an invaluable assistant to him in his work. To train a replacement would be costly and time consuming. And of course, to employ a man to do the same job would cost the king twice as much. Caroline was good at what she did, and she was a bargain! Perhaps, as discoverer of the first lady’s comet, she could receive her pension from the queen, woman to woman? Unpalatable as they might seem in the modern era (and yet at the same time, wearily familiar), William’s arguments worked. Caroline was to receive her own salary – or, to be more technically accurate, pension – for her work in science.
‘Firsts’ in history are always popular, and always problematic. Was Caroline the first woman, or at least the first woman in England to be paid for her science? Well, no. For centuries women had worked in industries, arts and crafts that today would all plausibly be labelled as scientific. Wise women, female apothecaries and early modern female brewers, for example, were all practitioners of sciences of sorts. Before the mid-1600s and the formation of the Royal Society, there were no strict boundaries about what did and did not count as natural philosophy or, as we call it today, science. Lots of work, however, involved processes that we would now consider to be scientific. Chemistry, for example, was practised by people making medicines, dying fabric and brewing beer – and some of those people were women, and some of them were even paid. Astronomy similarly was used in understanding and planning agricultural timetables and in astrology, and many women were paid for work in those fields.
Even if we look at higher-status roles in science, Caroline was not the first woman to be paid. Laura Bassi is generally ascribed that honour, as the first female professor at Bologna University in Italy in 1732. In England, however, Caroline could be said to be the first high-status woman paid for her science, and almost certainly the first to receive royal patronage. Let us give her that at least.
Caroline received £12 10s, the first of the quarterly instalments of her annual pension, in October 1787. It was to give her the kind of financial independence she had never imagined would be hers.