NOTES

The year itself is practically a character in this series. John Quincy Adams was president of the United States. The prince regent of England had become King George IV just six years before, and the future Queen Victoria was only seven years old. By 1826, the world had seen a recent flurry of inventions: Volta’s electric battery (1800), Fulton’s submarine and torpedo (1800), Winsor’s patented gas lighting (1804), Trevithick’s steam locomotive (1804), Davy’s electric arc light (1809), Bell’s steam-powered boat (1812), and Sturgeon’s electromagnet (1824). It was an exciting time of technological advancement, and it brought forth two very bright girls who changed the world through their intellect and imagination.

The lives of women—and particularly girls—were extremely limited and under constant watch. Women were not allowed to vote or practice professions, and were widely thought to be less capable than men. A girl’s value to her family was in her reputation and her service, and she was expected to obediently accept a husband of her parents’ choosing. Any threat to that reputation—like behaving unusually—was often enough to ruin a family.

However, because girls were not expected to have a career and compete with their (or anybody’s) husband, upper-class girls were free to read or study as they wished, for few people took them seriously. Because of this rare freedom, the nineteenth century saw a sharp surge in the intellectual contributions of female scientists and mathematicians, with Ada foremost among them.

AUGUSTA ADA BYRON (1815–1852) was a brilliant mathematician and the daughter of the poet Lord Byron (who died when Ada was eight). Largely abandoned by her mother, she was raised by servants (and sometimes her grandmother) at the Marylebone house and was very much cut off from the world as a child.

With her legendary temper and lack of social skills (a modern historian unkindly calls her “mad as a hatter”), Ada made few friends. Her mother insisted that young Ada have no connection to her father’s friends or even his interests, so Ada turned to mathematics. She worked with her friend Charles Babbage on the tables of numbers for his “Analytical Engine”—a mechanical computer—which was not built in his lifetime. But Ada’s contribution to the work, as well as her idea that computers could be used not only for mathematics but also for creative works such as music, has led many people to refer to Ada as “the world’s first computer programmer.” Babbage called her the Enchantress of Numbers.

Ada grew to control her temper and insecurities, and was married at nineteen to William King, a baron, who became the Count of Lovelace three years later. This is why Ada is more commonly known as Ada Lovelace. She had three children—Byron, Annabella, and Ralph—and died of cancer at the age of thirty-six. She continues to inspire scientists and mathematicians to this day, and many worthwhile projects are named after her.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT godwin (1797–1851) was the daughter of the famous feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (who died ten days after giving birth) and the political philosopher William Godwin. William Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont in 1801, and Mary grew up in a mixed household of half siblings and stepsiblings in Somers Town, in what was then the northern part of London. She read broadly and had an appetite for adventure and romanticism. She ran away with Percy Shelley at age sixteen, and over one very famous weekend with Shelley, Lord Byron (Ada’s father), and early vampire novelist Dr. John Polidori, Mary came up with the idea for the world’s first science-fiction novel—Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus—which she wrote at age nineteen.

In real life, Mary was eighteen years older than Ada. But I thought it would be more fun this way—to cast these two luminaries as friends.

PERCY BYSSHE (rhymes with “fish”) SHELLEY (1792–1822) was an important poet and best friend to Ada’s father, Lord Byron. Percy came from a wealthy family, and he offered to support Mary’s father and the Godwin family. At age twenty-two, he ran off with then-sixteen-year-old Mary to Switzerland, and they were married two years later. He drowned at the age of twenty-nine when his sailboat sank in a storm.

While, in reality, Peebs had died even before our story begins, I have extended his life so that they can be in this story together. It is Peebs, as Ada’s father’s friend and Mary’s future husband, who provides a real-life link between our two heroines.

CHARLES DICKENS (1812–1870) is considered one of the great writers of Victorian England. He really was fourteen in 1826, and he really did work in a boot-polish factory, gluing labels. He loved books and was a keen observer of everyday life in London. The bit about the carriage and pretending not to be there is made up, although he was certainly clever enough—and cheeky enough—to have gotten away with it. The names Gulpidge, Chowser, and Dedlock come from his writings (though Brocklehurst and Earnshaw are borrowed, with thanks, from Charlotte Brontë). He is best known to young readers as the author of A Christmas Carol.

Just as the first Wollstonecraft novel was in part inspired by Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), widely regarded as the first detective novel in English, Collins’s book The Woman in White (1859) was a jumping-off point for this story. The Woman in White was the first novel to feature a female detective—a role here played by Ada. The story also includes secret twin girls, an escape from a hospital, a bored and fragile relative in a library, and a secret in a crypt. The bit about Ada being caught in the rain and contracting a fever is from Collins as well. In real life, Ada was quite sick as a young girl and was stuck in bed for almost two years.

CLARA MARY JANE CLAIRMONT (1798–1879) was known as Jane as a child but later adopted the name Claire. She really was Mary’s stepsister (her mother married Mary’s father), but her real life diverges dramatically from this story. Jane was actually Allegra’s mother! I adjusted her timeline and role so that the two sets of sisters—Ada and Allegra, Mary and Jane—could work together as friends and detectives.

Lord Byron called Claire “a little fiend,” but she referred to him as a few moments of happiness and a lifetime of trouble. She was an aspiring novelist and extremely well-read. Claire traveled throughout Europe, living in Russia for a time, returning to England to care for her mother, moving to Paris, and then finally settling in Italy. She was the longest-lived of all the Shelley-Byron circle.

CLARA ALLEGRA (Alba) BYRON (1817–1822) was the daughter of Claire Clairmont and Lord Byron. Her mother could not care for her, so she was left with her father. He, however, frequently left her in the care of strangers, eventually placing her in a convent in Italy. She died of fever at the age of five, but I have moved her timeline and brought her to life in the world of Wollstonecraft, to be a truer sister to Ada.

MARY SOMERVILLE (1780–1872) was a mathematician, astronomer, and feminist. She grew up in Scotland and, after being sent away to boarding school, was secretly tutored alongside her brother in mathematics. In 1831, she translated a complex algebra text into plain English for the marvelously named Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. She and Caroline Herschel were jointly nominated as the first female members of the Royal Astronomical Society. Somerville was also awarded a medal by the Royal Geographical Society. She wrote books on mathematics, geography, and physics, as well as molecular and microscopic science. There is both a crater on the moon and an asteroid named after her.

JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI (1795–1821) was a physician, poet, and horror writer who is credited with writing the first vampire story in English. He was a good friend of both Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. As he was dead before our story takes place, his timeline has been adjusted to mesh with that of Peebs, Jane, and Mary. Because of the era’s use of leeches in medicine, I have made him a bit of a vampire himself. He was an Englishman, despite his Italian name, and had an “unplaceable” accent. His eyebrows, however, were entirely terrifying.

WILLIAM GODWIN (1756–1836) was a publisher, novelist, and political thinker. Educated as a minister, he wrote books on religion and philosophy, as well as several books for children. After Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died, Godwin honored her request to publish her diaries, even though her ideas were so different at the time that it meant people tended to be very disapproving. He and his children were often quite poor. Politically, his main idea was that poverty and crime and war could be eliminated if everyone would sit down and have a reasonable chat about things, after which there would be very little need for things like government.

MARY (Marie) JANE CLAIRMONT GODWIN (1766–1841) was the mother of Jane and the wife of Mary’s father, William Godwin, which makes her Mary’s stepmother. Little is known about her early life, which is to say that the story she told everyone seems to have been completely made up. But we do know that at one point she was living with her children in the Polygon next to Godwin and his daughters after the death of his first wife. She seems to have decided to marry Godwin and pretty much talked him into it, leaving him little choice. She was known to have a temper, to choose favorites among her children (always Jane and never Mary), and to be levelheaded about money and business. She was the most successful publisher of children’s literature in England at the time.

The Polygon was a fifteen-sided apartment building in Clarendon Square in Somers Town, in what was then the northern part of London (the city has long since grown around it). It was home not only to the Godwin family, but later to Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote about the Polygon, making it the home of Harold Skimpole in the novel Bleak House. Scholars have speculated that the character of Skimpole may have been based on William Godwin. While the building is long gone, the road that bears its name remains.