John Frederick William Herschel was born on 7 March 1792 at the family home, Observatory House, in Slough.1 He was baptised at Mary’s church, the old church in Upton, and two godfathers were chosen for him, both old friends of William and Caroline: Sir William Watson and General Komarzewski.
Watson was an old friend from Bath. He had lived near to the Herschels and helped William to get started in astronomy. He had introduced him to the Bath Philosophical Society and various important people who would later help him in his career, including the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. They had met General Komarzewski more recently. He was a Polish nobleman who had become a close friend to the Herschels during his time in England.
Caroline, of course, was present at the christening. There is no record of whether their brother Alexander came down from Bath for the occasion. On Mary’s side of the family, it is not clear who was at the christening, although since most lived close by, most of them would probably have attended. None of Mary’s friends, however, seem to have been chosen as godparents and there do not seem to have been many at the christening. On hearing of John’s birth, Mary’s grown-up son, Paul Adee, wrote to offer his congratulations. He was living away from home at the time in Birmingham as an apprentice chemist, apparently with family. Immediately he heard their announcement he wrote to send kind words to his new brother, his mother and his stepfather:
Accept my most sincere congratulations at the happy conclusion of an event which has blessed you with a son & me with a Brother, the news of which has given great joy to all the family here & they join with me in wishing you all the happiness to see him grow up an honour to his father and mother.2
Friends, family and neighbours of Mary were also quickly informed of the news: Mary’s mother, Elizabeth Baldwin, her ‘Aunt Clark’, and her brother, Thomas Baldwin. There were family friends such as Miss White, a well-known London hostess and friend of the royal household, who features several times in the Baldwin family correspondence.3 Friendly neighbours – the Papendieks, the Linds, Delucs and so on – were all keen to congratulate the happy couple on the safe arrival of their healthy baby boy.
That spring, the house was filled with the excitement of this tiny new baby and with visitors after Mary’s obligatory period of confinement. Women in the eighteenth century, as least those who could afford to, were generally expected to stay at home, resting, recuperating and recovering from the birth of their new baby in the first few weeks after labour. Some babies were sent out to wet nurses, local women who might breastfeed the child in lieu of their mother, but this does not seem to have been the case with John Herschel. By the 1790s the fashion was fading (though slowly), as medical experts began to advise against it, concerned with the spread of disease and whether or not breastfeeding might be a factor in it. Instead, it seems baby John stayed at home with his mother, father and Aunt Caroline, and through the exhaustion and anxiety of that shared care, gradually the tensions between them began to lessen. Caroline was besotted with her new nephew from the start, and was always happy and willing to lend a hand. Mary, aware that she would have work to return to, keeping on top of her family’s various properties and investments, was delighted to have such a willing companion. Gradually, with baby John as their own shared project, the Herschel women began to tolerate and even like one another.
Outside the cosy cocoon of the Herschel home, the world was in political and military turmoil. After seven years of fighting across Europe over the boundaries of various empires in the Seven Years War, attentions had now turned to the threat of revolution and its possible spread beyond French borders. On 20 April, war was declared. This was the first of the Revolutionary Wars and was called the War of the First Coalition (1792–97). It was shortly followed by the War of the Second Coalition (1798–1802) and then by the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). Today, it can seem as though there is always a war in the Middle East; back then, Europe pitched more of its battles on home soil and was, for several decades, the world’s main battleground.
The first coalition against the rebellious French comprised several European monarchies – Austria, Prussia and the United Kingdom – all trying to bring down the new Republic of France. Things had begun with France declaring war on the monarchy of Austria (hoping that the people of Austria would rise up and join them). A few weeks later, Prussia had joined the fight on Austria’s side. Britain, the Netherlands and Spain would all join the war the following year, but for now those countries just looked on with concern.
Back in Britain, a battle of a more intellectual variety was taking place. Following the spat between Burke and Paine over the appropriate British response to the French Revolution, novelist Mary Wollstonecraft had felt compelled to wade in. In 1790, she had written a pamphlet, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, attacking Burke’s critique of the revolution and supporting Paine’s position. Central to her argument was the idea that rights should come about because they made sense and were reasonable, not just out of tradition and habit. Two years later, however, a discussion within the French Assembly made her question her support for the revolution. Perhaps their aims and ideals did not chime as perfectly with hers as she had originally thought.
In 1791, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, an aristocrat, cleric and diplomat active within the republican government, presented his recommendations on a new system of universal education to the Assembly. He asserted that men and women should be educated differently. Rather than have a constitution that allowed equality between the sexes, he advocated teaching women ‘not to aspire to advantages which the Constitution denies them’. Men, he argued, were well suited to public life and should be educated accordingly; women, conversely, were better placed in the home and their respective education should reflect that division.
The first to react to Talleyrand’s proposed system of education was French playwright, feminist and political activist Olympe de Gouges, in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. By 1792, Olympe de Gouges was fully immersed in the political debates of the day. She was a keen and early critic of slavery and, like Wollstonecraft, had originally been strongly in favour of the French Revolution. In 1791, she became involved in the Amis de la Verité (Society of the Friends of Truth), a political and intellectual organisation that aimed to make public intellectual debates about how the new republic should be run. Among their strongly held beliefs was that of equality between the sexes, although this was also one of their more controversial positions. Olympe de Gouges felt strongly that women could be equal to men given the right opportunities, and certainly they could, with the right education, be men’s intellectual equals. This was her position and the position of the Society of the Friends of Truth. With these discussions from within the society fresh in her mind, Talleyrand’s assertions about unequal education seemed like a betrayal of the revolutionary spirit she had once defended. It did not take long for Olympe de Gouges to formulate and publish her response.
Mary Wollstonecraft, over in England, responded in much the same way as Olympe de Gouges and her Friends of Truth had done in France. Just to make it absolutely clear, the book was directed at him. Wollstonecraft dedicated the whole volume to Talleyrand, with the remarks:
Having read with great pleasure a pamphlet which you have lately published, I dedicate this volume to you; to induce you to reconsider the subject, and maturely weigh what I have advanced respecting the rights of woman and national education.
As an indication of current thinking in the world in which Caroline was working, and making a public name for herself in science, it is worth taking a moment to look in some detail at Wollstonecraft’s book. Although Caroline is not mentioned directly in the book (it is not overly weighed down with actual examples), it is plausible to suppose that she may have been one of the ‘few exceptions’ to whom Wollstonecraft referred when she wrote, ‘That the civilised women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect’.4 Women, she felt, should be less worried about being liked (or loved) and concern themselves more with trying to be good at things and demanding respect for those talents.
The book, she stated, was aimed at the middle class, ‘because they appear to be in the most natural state’, in contrast to the rich, ‘the education of the rich tends to render them vain and helpless’.5 The lower classes, she had not really considered. She continued with some advice that seemed to run contrary to the carefully crafted super-feminine self-presentation that Caroline had been steadily cultivating over the years:
I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness.6
She went further:
Dismissing, then, those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to shew that elegance is inferior to virtue.7
Wollstonecraft was homing in on language and self-presentation, suggesting that it was damaging to women and their ability to gain respect for their talents to talk of themselves and allow others to talk of them as delicate, fragile creatures. Caroline, in contrast, seems to have approached this problem in a completely different, less confrontational way. Like Wollstonecraft, Caroline was aware of the very different language used for women, but instead of insisting that women lose such language and adopt a way of speaking that was closer to that of men, she did something very different.
Instead of challenging traditional conventions about how to talk about women and how women should talk about themselves, Caroline made a point of using such language for her own gain. She was always very careful to convey her delicacy of sentiment and her sweet docility of manners, but had managed to do so to apparent good effect, using it to win allies and ease the reception of her work. That Wollstonecraft felt compelled to argue so strongly against such tendencies indicates just how prevalent it must have been. Caroline was an astronomer, she took no interest in politics, but she was aware of the social currency of language. As a singer, she had learned how to speak in social situations in a way that was appropriate but, without ideas like Wollstonecraft’s at the time, she saw it simply as just the way of things. In fact, most people did. Wollstonecraft was advocating that women might change that. According to her, women did not have to continually disguise their ambition or downplay their role. She was not arguing against good manners, but simply that women did not have to, as Caroline and countless other had, present a self-image to the world that was so very modest and self-depreciating.
Caroline and Wollstonecraft had seen a problem in the way in which men’s and women’s language differed and tried to solve it in very different ways. On the subject of education, too, it is possible that they would have agreed on the problem but not the solution. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s proposed educational system, she suggested boys and girls should be educated together in buildings with lots of outdoor space. Lessons should be short and full of activity, performance and conversation, and they should be broken up with time to play outdoors. All of which sounds very much like the education system we have today. However, while Wollstonecraft’s proposed system seems very much designed to improve education for all and for girls in particular, it is debatable how much it would have helped children like Caroline. While the first part may have been an improvement on what Caroline experienced back in Hanover, Wollstonecraft then goes on to say that, from the age of 9, girls and boys ‘intended for domestic employments, or mechanical trades, ought to be removed to other schools, and receive instruction in some measure appropriate to the destination of each individual’, while ‘the young people of superior abilities, or fortune, might now be taught, in another school’. Aged 9, Caroline was very much intended for domestic employment, or at least domestic labours. It is unlikely that anyone would have seen in her then the potential of what she would later become.
Wollstonecraft was not so very unusual in making such distinctions. The general assumption of the time was that while many individuals might aspire to leave the lower orders for the chance of a better life, maintaining a lower class was still a necessity for society. For all their talk of equality, most intellectuals still wanted someone else to carry out the domestic work and manual labour. They still wanted servants, although increasing numbers of the more liberal writers balked at actual slavery. While some writers were happy to make the distinction between those who had equality and those who carried out useful but low-status work along gendered lines, others found class, or that often intangible commodity ‘ability’, to be a more palatable division. Given the lack of sympathy for people of her background, it is possibly not surprising that Caroline took little interest in the political debates of her time. Nevertheless, as Wollstonecraft’s views about female education and language began to make their way through society, a little of them may have reached Caroline’s ears and given her pause to wonder and reflect.
Back in the Herschel household, plans were afoot for a grand trip – for the men of the house at least. Towards the end of May, when his tiny baby son was just 3 months old, William and the boy’s godfather, General Komarzewski, set off for a grand tour of Britain, ending with an award ceremony in Scotland. William was to be given an honorary degree. He had never been to university; few had in the late eighteenth century and, for most, university was treated either as a male finishing school for the aristocracy or a vocational training ground for future lawyers, doctors and clerics. University was not a place for training men (or women) of science, or indeed any other academic discipline, although very slowly it was inching in that direction. In time, William would be awarded a number of honorary degrees and other awards and titles from institutions around the world. This award, from the University of Glasgow, was not his first honorary degree but he was keen, nonetheless, to use the opportunity to travel and meet a great many of the Scottish men of science whom he admired.
Herschel and Komarzewski set off from Slough on 29 May in the direction of Oxford. By the following day they had reach Warwick, where they stopped to visit William’s old friend, Mr Greatheed. Bertie Greatheed was not a man of science: he was the son of an MP, an aristocrat, at least by marriage, and a dramatist. They were regular correspondents, and it was due to Greatheed’s persuasion that William sat for one of his most famous portraits, by William Artaud in 1819.
From Warwick, they travelled to Birmingham where they met William’s brother-in-law, Thomas Baldwin, and William’s stepson, Paul Adee Pitt. William and Mary had been married for four years by this point, so William and Paul, and possibly William and Thomas, had very probably met before, though there is no record of those meetings. While in Birmingham, Herschel and Komarzewski also took the opportunity to visit the famous Soho works. This was Boulton and Watt’s Manufactory, one of the first of its kind in the world and one of a handful of starting points for Britain’s Industrial Revolution. At the time, the factory was powered by a waterwheel and produced various pieces of metalwork (buttons and buckles, for example). Metalwork of this kind would be a speciality of the Birmingham area until well into the twentieth century. A few years later, Boulton and Watt would replace their waterwheel with a steam engine, which revolutionised how industry could be powered, and where factories could be sited. William was fascinated by this and other factories he saw on his travels. He would make intricate drawings of the machinery and the mechanisms for transferring the power from the waterwheels to the factory floor.
From the industrial landscape of Birmingham, they travelled west to the rural countryside of Wales. Here, William found much that reminded him of his life back in Hanover. ‘The inn,’ he wrote in his travel journal, ‘resembles in its situation those of the country about Hanover. They burn turf or peat, a farm yard with trees and cows in front and garden by the side or back.’ He also found the markets similar:
A great number of women had butter in baskets, others eggs, &c., in the manner of the German country villages. [However] the air of these women was … totally different from that of the Germans; most of them are lean but of agreeable features and good transparent complexions, but rather pale and emaciated.
Sadly, he does not elaborate on how German women differed from this description. To add a scientific flavour to their tour of Wales the pair, accompanied by three guides, attempted to climb Snowdon with William’s 7ft reflector telescope in tow. Unfortunately, cloud cover prevented them making any observations.
By 3 July they had reached Scotland. In Glasgow, they were met by the mayor and presented with the Freedom of the City. There was a grand dinner held at the university and William was presented with his honorary degree. He got to see his friend, Glasgow’s professor of astronomy Patrick Wilson, who had helped him when he had on occasion struggled to understand the mathematics offered by his French colleagues. (It was very probably Wilson who was one of the main reasons why the university decided to award William this honour.)
And then it was time to move on. The following day, they moved further east and a couple of days later were in Edinburgh, where they were shown the castle, observatory and various telescopes. Edinburgh had also awarded William with an honorary degree, back in 1786. There he met some of the major figures who were busy shaping the Scottish Enlightenment: Joseph Black (chemist), John Playfair (mathematician) and James Hutton (geologist), among others. William and Komarzewski even dined with Black and Hutton before heading south on 8 July and gradually making their way home, this time down the east coast, arriving back in Slough on 19 July.
What were Caroline, Mary and baby John doing all this time? History, being what it is, offers little record of their activities while William was away. If they corresponded with anyone outside the family, those letters were not kept. Very likely they spent their time exchanging visits with local women – Mary’s mother, Miss White, Mary’s Aunt Clark – caring for the baby and managing household staff. Caroline would have continued her observing, catching up on her reading and writing up observations of papers. Mostly, however, they were probably engaged in the kinds of day-to-day domestic activity that fills copious amounts of time and yet leaves little trace.
While William travelled up and down the country, and Caroline and Mary stayed at home caring for a small baby and running their two houses, disturbing events were taking place back in their home town of Hanover about which, curiously, the Herschel siblings said very little.8 On 23 June 1792, the papers reported that William and Caroline’s older brother, Jacob, had been found murdered, strangled, in a field just outside town.
Jacob had been living in Hanover as a court musician for many years by 1792. He and William had originally escaped to England together back in the 1750s, when Hanover was at war and French troops occupied the town. While William had stayed and made a life for himself in England, Jacob soon returned home when an opening became available within the Hanoverian Court Orchestra. Sometimes he visited the England-based Herschels and his nephews, the Griesbachs who, thanks to him, were now musicians within the English court. Mostly, however, he had remained in Hanover, continuing to mix with the aristocrats, gentry and upper middle classes for whom he played, and getting himself into debt as he tried to keep up.
How and why Jacob was eventually murdered remains a mystery. His killer was never found and his case was never taken to court. Some historians have suggested that he found himself caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and his murder was in some way connected with the French occupation. However, Hanover was no longer occupied by the French in 1792 – it was not occupied by anyone in 1792. It was not even involved, as yet, in the European War of the First Coalition. It is not out of the question, however, that there may have been rogue soldiers or sympathisers about town, or that Jacob found himself involved in a political dispute that got out of hand. Equally plausible, however, if we consider all that Caroline has ever told us about her brother and his arrogance, profligacy and excessive spending, is that his debts eventually caught up with him.
Caroline never liked her older brother. His power over her life as a child and young woman was something she never quite forgot or forgave. Her view of him was always coloured by those early experiences, so perhaps the image she painted was exaggerated. From her accounts, Jacob’s desire to live in the same state of luxury as the aristocrats he served was such that he would happily see his family starve and himself in debt rather than miss out on a party or look scruffy while socialising with his employers. Quite possibly it was this tendency, rather than the political climate of the time, that led Jacob to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
William and Caroline never mentioned their brother’s murder. Considering what a close-knit family they were in other respects – the way in which Caroline would drop everything to make each visiting brother feel comfortable – this omission seems extraordinary. It is possible that they did not find out straightaway. It is equally possible that the story did not reflect well on them as a family. While William and Caroline would willingly talk of dramatic events in their past as a means of demonstrating their grit and determination to succeed or their triumph in the face of adversity, this story would have served no such purpose. Caroline never liked her brother, so her omission is perhaps easier to understand than William’s.
William and Jacob, in contrast, were at one time extremely close. After William first came to England and Jacob returned home, it was to each other that they kept up their most consistent and heartfelt correspondence. Perhaps any discussion of their murdered brother took place verbally, without a paper trail. It is likely they considered it no one’s business outside their family, although presumably news of his murder must have reached them somehow. Perhaps those letters between Caroline, William, their surviving brothers, Alexander in Bath and Dietrich in Hanover, and their sister Sophia in Coppenbrügge have since been lost. It was not a story either sibling chose to retell in any later account of their lives, although by the time Caroline was writing her autobiographies she would almost certainly have known. Perhaps they did not know – or perhaps, when they did find out, William had another tragedy closer to home to contend with and felt this to be the lesser of the two.
In November 17929 Mary’s grown-up 18-year-old son, Paul Adee, died of consumption (tuberculosis, or TB). He had been sick for a while, and had been gradually losing weight as the disease, as the name suggests, consumed him. William knew him only vaguely from the occasional meeting and odd letter. Caroline knew of him, but had not met her nephew. Mary alone in the house had any real memory of the son she had just lost. Her husband and sister-in-law might sympathise, but they could not fully share in her grief. As John grew, he was encouraged to keep his brother’s memory alive although he had been only a few months old when he died. When, many years later, John’s granddaughter was cataloguing the family papers, she found a picture of Paul Adee along with a note written by one of her uncles or aunts that this brother of John, although never known to him, was always present in his life as he grew up. John, the note declares, ‘always knew his brother’s worth’.10
Babies had a high mortality rate in the late eighteenth century. It was not uncommon for families to lose children up to the age of 5. Indeed, Mary had lost a son from her first marriage (whom she had named William) in his infancy, back in the yearly years of that marriage. William and Caroline had lost several siblings who had died as infants. Although devastating, families were in some ways prepared for a loss of that kind. To lose a child just as they were entering adulthood, however, was something different and unexpected. As Mary grieved, trying to keep alive the memory of her older son, Caroline did what she could to help care for Mary’s new son, John Frederick William Herschel.