6
1
In December 1788 the Astronomer Royal, Dr Nevil Maskelyne, a leading Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote effusively to thirty-eight-year-old Caroline Herschel congratulating her on being the ‘first woman in the history of the world’ to discover not one, but two new comets. No woman since the renowned Greek mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria had had such an impact on the sciences. Her celebrity would, as the Director of the Paris Observatory, Pierre Méchain, noted, ‘shine down through the ages’.
Nevertheless, observed Dr Maskelyne with jocular good humour, he hoped Caroline did not feel too isolated among the male community of astronomers in Britain. He trusted she would not be tempted to ride off alone into outer space on ‘the immense fiery tail’ of her new comet: ‘I hope you, dear Miss Caroline, for the benefit of terrestrial astronomy, will not think of taking such a flight, at least till your friends are ready to accompany you.’ Or at least until her achievements were recognised by his colleagues in the Royal Society. Curiously, no such recognition was immediately forthcoming; and this raises an obvious but extremely interesting question.
All through the year 2010, and all around the globe, the Royal Society of London celebrated its 350th birthday. In a sense, this was a celebration of science itself and the social importance of its history. The senior scientific establishment in Britain, and arguably in the world, the Royal Society dates to the time of Charles II. Its early members included Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, and even – rather intriguingly – Samuel Pepys. But amid the year’s seminars, exhibitions and publications, there was one ghost at the feast: the historic absence of women scientists from its early ranks.
Although it was founded in 1660, women were not permitted by statute to become Fellows of the Royal Society until 285 years later, in 1945. (An exception was made for Queen Victoria, who was made a Royal Fellow.) It will be recalled that women over the age of thirty had won the vote nearly thirty years earlier, in 1918. Very similar exclusions operated elsewhere: in the American National Academy of Sciences until 1925; in the Russian National Academy until 1939; and even in that home of Enlightenment science, the Académie des Sciences in France, until 1962. Marie Curie was rejected for membership of the Académie in 1911, the same year she won her second Nobel Prize.
The first original paper that might be considered as part of a scientific research programme conducted by a woman and published in the Royal Society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions, had been submitted by Caroline Herschel. It appeared in August 1786, modestly entitled ‘An Account of a new Comet, in a letter from Miss Caroline Herschel to Mr Charles Blagden MD, Secretary to the Royal Society’. But Caroline, as we have seen, was sister to William Herschel, the great Romantic astronomer and influential Fellow of the Royal Society, and this undoubtedly gave her a special advantage that no other woman of this period was granted.
Both Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, and Charles Blagden, the Secretary, knew that Caroline’s brother was immensely proud of her, had built her special telescopes, and had helped her to obtain the first state salary for a female astronomer in Britain. William had also personally put forward her ‘Account of a new Comet’ to the Royal Society. Even so, he carefully annotated this first historic paper: ‘Since my sister’s observations were made by moonlight, twilight, hazy weather, and very near the horizon, it would not be surprising if a mistake had been made.’ By the end of her long life, Caroline’s acknowledged speciality was the discovery of new comets, of which she eventually found eight, at a time when fewer than thirty were known. For this she was made an Honorary Fellow of the newly founded Royal Astronomical Society in 1835. But though she lived until 1848, she was never elected to the Royal Society itself.
It is true that by the turn of the twenty-first century there had been more than sixty distinguished women Fellows of the Society. Many have become household names, such as the brilliant crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, who famously won a Nobel Prize in 1964, and whose whirling portrait by Maggi Hambling (1985) now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Her heroic life – she mapped the structure of penicillin, and then dedicated thirty-five years to deciphering the structure of insulin – is told in a superb biography by Georgina Ferry. Yet in Victorian Britain, the very idea of women doing serious science (except botany and perhaps geology) was still widely ridiculed, and even botany (with its naming of sexual parts) could be regarded as morally perilous. Mary Anning (1799–1847), the great West Country palaeontologist, struggled for years to have her discoveries – such as the plesiosaurus – recognised as her own.
In March 1860 Thomas Henry Huxley FRS, famed as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, wrote privately to his friend, the great geologist Charles Lyell FRS: ‘Five-sixths of women will stop in the doll stage of evolution, to be the stronghold of parsonism, the drag on civilisation, the degradation of every important pursuit in which they mix themselves – intrigues in politics and friponnes in science.’ This can be taken as typical of certain (though not all) Victorian assumptions, including the idea that physiologically the female brain simply could not cope with mathematics, experimental proofs or laboratory procedures.
When the young Ada Lovelace, the future computer pioneer, began to study advanced mathematics in the 1830s, her tutor August de Morgan (Professor of Mathematics at the newly founded University College, London) wrote privately to her mother Lady Byron, fearing that Ada would dangerously overtax her mental powers, and that the ‘very great tension of the mind’ involved in calculus would surely lead to a fatal breakdown. Certainly compared with their literary sisters, the scientific women of the mid-nineteenth century still appear invisible, if not actually non-existent. What female scientific names can be cited to compare with Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, the three Brontë sisters, George Eliot or Harriet Martineau?
Yet re-examination of the Royal Society archives suggests something that may require a subtle revision of the early history of science in Britain. This is the previously unsuspected degree to which women were a catalyst in the first discussion of the social role of science. More even than their male colleagues, they had a gift for imagining the human impact of scientific discovery, both exploring and questioning it. Precisely by being excluded from the Fellowship of the Society, they saw the life of science in a wider world. Observing from the outside, they saw the inside more clearly. They raised questions about the duties and moral responsibilities of science, its promise and its menace, in ways we can appreciate far more fully today.
2
The first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society was Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, in May 1667. In her own lifetime she became known as ‘Mad Madge’. But she was born plain Margaret Lucas, the daughter of a wealthy Essex farmer owning estates near Colchester, in 1623. She was the youngest of eight children; her father died when she was only two years old, so the whole family were brought up by an independent-minded and highly ambitious mother. Shy but headstrong, Margaret grew up with a mind of her own, a taste for fashion, great determination and energy, and a healthy disregard for the opinions of others.
She was appointed maid of honour to Queen Henrietta-Maria at Oxford during the latter part of Charles I’s reign, and a glittering place in English society and a handsome conventional marriage beckoned. But then in 1642 came the outbreak of the Civil War. It swept through English society ‘like a Whirlwind’, as Margaret later wrote, steadily destroying the world she had known. The Royalist Lucas family were soon in jeopardy, and Margaret’s brother Charles went off to fight for the King. Margaret herself slipped away into Parisian exile with the remnants of the royal court in 1644, aged twenty-one. She was away for seventeen years, only returning when she was thirty-seven. Her unconventional character, her unusual philosophical ideas, and not least her remarkable dress, were to be powerfully shaped by this Continental exile, and her long immersion in European manners and culture.
Margaret’s escape from England was timely. By 1647 the family house had been ransacked by passing Cromwellian troops. Both her mother and her sister were dispossessed and humiliated, and with their health and spirits broken by poverty, they died before the end of the year. Her brother Charles was arrested during the last desperate defence of Colchester, and executed in 1648. All the Lucas estates were seized, and even the family tomb was broken up. Finally, with the trial and execution of the King in 1649, it seemed that Margaret’s world and all its old certainties were lost forever.
But Margaret Lucas was a survivor. In Paris she met and quickly fell in love with the widowed William Cavendish, thirty years her senior. Cavendish, then Marquis of Newcastle, was a handsome and heroic figure who had commanded the Royalist troops at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644. After disastrous defeat he had also fled to the Continent, and joined the Queen’s exiled court at Saint-Germain, on the outskirts of Paris. Despite the fact that he was now largely penniless, he was welcomed as head of one of the great aristocratic dynasties of British science, with a mathematical brother, the hunchbacked Charles Cavendish, whom Margaret also came to admire.
By happy chance, twenty-one of Margaret’s early love letters to William Cavendish in Paris have survived, and are now held in the British Library. They were written between their first meeting in April 1645 and their marriage in December 1645, evidence of a whirlwind romance to match the times. Only Margaret’s side of the correspondence exists, so William evidently kept and treasured her letters all his life. They capture something of Margaret’s reckless charm, her volatile mixture of shyness and steely determination, at the age of twenty-two. All the letters are short, and appear to have been written at great speed, with highly idiosyncratic spelling and an almost total disregard for punctuation, which are themselves extraordinarily expressive of Margaret’s vehement character.
She later wrote: ‘my Letters seem rather as a ragged Rout than a well-armed body, for the Brain being quicker in creating than the Hand in writing or the memory in retaining, many Fancies are lost, by reason they oft-times outrun the Pen …’
The very first, written when they were evidently already lovers, begins abruptly and dramatically: ‘my Lord there is but one Accident – which is Death – to make me unhappy …’ Margaret proceeds to pour scorn on those at court who have been attempting ‘to untie the Knot of our affection’. It ends with a refusal to let anyone else interfere with the precious but perhaps perilous happiness she has achieved: ‘… And sure, my Lord, I threw not myself away when I gave myself to you, for I never did any act worthy of Praise before, but tis of the Nature of those that cannot be Happy to desire none else should be so, as I shall be in having you, and will be so, in spite of all Malice, in being, my Lord, your most humbell servant Margaret Lucas. Pray lay the fault of my Writing to my pen.’
Soon after, a more confident love letter begins flirtatiously: ‘My Lord, I think you have a plot against my Health in sending so early, for I was forced to read your Letter by a Candle Light, for there was not day enough; but I had rather read your Letter than sleep, and it doth me more good …’
Other letters discuss the constant shifts of political hopes and intrigues at the exiles’ court in Paris; the unreliable attitude of the Queen towards their affair (William diplomatically gives Her Majesty a pair of gloves); Margaret’s own lack of ‘discretion’ (already characteristic); the portrait and ‘token of love’ which William sends her; and their shared delight in the writing and exchange of love poems, in which they are both absorbed. Here Margaret for once assumes the position of command, criticising William’s grasp of metre: ‘My Lord, let your Ear limit your poetry.’
Margaret makes many explicit and tender declarations of love, which are clearly reciprocated. Yet sometimes she reveals more complicated feelings, expressing both her innocence and her ambition, simultaneously: ‘I have not much Experience of the World, yet I have found it such as I could willingly part with it, but since I knew you, I fear I shall love it too well, because you are in it; and yet methinks you are not in it, because you are not of it; so I am both in and out of it, a strange Enchantment.’
Another unexpected revelation is Margaret’s depressive side, her ‘very Melancholy humour’, which occasionally makes her ‘look upon this world as a Death’s Head for mortification, for I see all things subject to alteration and changing’. The image of the Death’s Head is curiously self-conscious and even painterly. Yet her sense of the uncertainty of life, and the anxiety of exile, is evident throughout these letters; and perhaps this never quite leaves her. At such moments her hopes become, in a striking phrase, ‘as if they had taken Opium’. She would be utterly lost in such dark thoughts if she had not met William, who ‘restores me to my self again’.
In the last surviving letter of the series, she and William are looking forward to their imminent marriage in Paris. Margaret is cheerful again, and promising to behave: ‘Be assured I will bring none to our wedding but those you please.’ She also points out that by getting married they will appease the Queen, and make Her Majesty their ‘good friend again’. Margaret’s final declaration of love is heartfelt, and is delivered with a typical lift of her chin: ‘My Lord, I desire nothing so much as the continuance of your Affection, for I think myself richer in having it than if I were a Monarch of all the World.’
It was an ambitious and successful match for Margaret, which soon established her place in a lively and high-spirited circle of thinkers and writers among the exiles. William and his brother Charles formed a philosophical salon whose participants included Marin Mersenne (‘the father of acoustics’, an expert on mathematics and harmonics); Pierre Gassendi (an astronomer and leading proponent of contemporary ‘atomism’); the English philosopher and adventurer Kenelm Digby; and not least the political theorist Thomas Hobbes. Margaret was encouraged to attend and participate on surprisingly equal terms, in a way that would have been impossible back home in conventional English society. Indeed, it seems that even her ‘good friend’ Queen Henrietta-Maria was shocked by the freedom of manners among this group. It was said that they talked ‘as soldiers as well as philosophers’, and drank and swore with fine disregard for civilian proprieties – or even the presence of the handsome young Lady Cavendish.
It was at this time, and among this outspoken company, that Margaret began to experiment with dashing male ‘cavalier’ outfits, steadily adding to her conventional wardrobe a whole range of short, knee-length military-style ‘jupes’ or jackets, extravagant silk sashes and decorative belts, and a panoply of beribboned and stridently feathered hats. This evidently began as part of the theatrical games which the exiles loved to stage, and for which Margaret playfully learned a whole repertoire of sweeping masculine bows as a mocking substitute for the traditional demure, courtly curtsey. She would later deploy these to scandalous effect in London. Cross-dressing, and theatrical self-presentation, would become a favourite theme in her writing. Surprisingly, the Queen soon seems to have become reconciled to her lady-in-waiting’s strange transformations, and approved of her marriage into the headstrong, incorrigible Cavendish clan.
In 1648 the Cavendish group moved to Holland, where a £2,000 gift (then a formidable sum) from the Queen, and Cavendish’s cavalier borrowing from friends, allowed them to set up home in the artist Rubens’s old house in Antwerp. Here their circle of intellectual friends widened to include René Descartes and the mathematician Constantijn Huygens, whom Margaret got to know well. Throughout the 1650s she was also despatched on several delicate diplomatic trips to London in an attempt to secure William’s inheritance from the Cromwellian government. She was only partially successful, but in the meantime William’s social position was confirmed, and she thenceforth called herself the Marchioness of Newcastle. She finally returned permanently to England with William at the Restoration in 1660, full of French science, French manners and French dress fashions, all of which she would put to spectacular and frequently mischievous use.
By then she had already published her first book at the age of thirty and under her own name – a provocative step for a woman, even an aristocratic one. The title page ran: Poems and Fancies, Written by the Right Honourable the Lady Margaret Cavendish Marchioness of Newcastle … Printed in London at the Bell in Saint Pauls Church Yard, 1653. The book was not dedicated to her husband, but to ‘Sir Charles Cavendish, my Noble Brother-in-Law’. Her Epistle Dedicatory was characteristically teasing, and included a clever image drawn from dressmaking:
True it is, Spinning with the Fingers is more proper to our Sex, than studying or writing Poetry, which is Spinning with the brain. But having no skill in the Art of the first (and if I had, I had no hopes of gaining so much as to make me a Garment to keep me from the cold) made me delight in the latter, since all brains work naturally, and incessantly, in some kind or other, which made me endeavour to Spin a Garment of Memory, to lap up my Name, that it might grow to after Ages …
To this she added a series of challenging Prefaces, addressed respectively ‘To All Noble and Worthy Ladies’, ‘To Naturall Philosophers’, and ‘To the Reader’. She made no political references to the Cromwellian regime, but concentrated on attacking the currently subservient position of women in England. To the ‘Noble Ladies’ she remarked: ‘I imagine I shall be censured by my own Sex; and Men will cast a smile of Scorne upon my Book, because they think thereby, Women encroach too much upon their Prerogatives, for they hold Books as their Crown, and the Sword and Sceptre by which they rule and govern.’ Nevertheless, she begged women to support her, ‘otherwise I may chance to be cast into the Fire, but if I burn, I desire to die your martyr’.
The book is divided into five sections, each linked by a different poem with the generic title of ‘The Claspe’, as if Margaret conceived of the collection as an artfully strung necklace of threaded beads. Her verse, unlike her breathless florid prose, is plain, measured, heavily rhymed and carefully pointed. There is an early series of poems based on mathematics, and exploring the current theories of Gassendi concerning the atomic structure of the material world (‘Motion directs, while Atoms dance’). These include philosophical reflections on what the concept of ‘infinity’ might mean in terms of space and time, and a vividly imaginative speculation on the possibilities of a microscopic world, entitled ‘A World in an Ear-Ring’. Written in her deceptively direct, almost childlike style, it opens with the idea of a miniaturised solar system (with the sun firmly at the centre):
An Ear-ring round may well a Zodiac be,
Where in a Sun goeth round, and we not see.
And Planets seven about that Sun may move,
And he stand still, as some Wise Men would prove.
And fix-ed Stars, like twinkling Diamonds placed
About this Ear-ring, which a World is vast …
In later sections of her poetic necklace come curious observations of natural phenomena, seen from unexpectedly scientific angles: ‘Of Cold Winds’, ‘Of Stars’, ‘Of Shadow’, ‘What makes an Echo’, ‘Of Vacuum’, ‘The Motion of Thoughts’, ‘The Motion of the Blood’, ‘Of the Beams of the Sun’, or ‘What is Liquid’. Often these are explored through extended and ingenious similes, or structured around formal ‘dialogues’ between the elements. There is a further section on animals, birds and insects. Many of these pieces have a disconcerting wit, and are like comic aphorisms, or even provoking ‘nonsense’ rhymes. Here is the whole of her poem ‘Of Fishes’:
Who knows, but Fishes which swim in the sea,
Can give a Reason, why Salt it be?
And how it ebbs and flows, perchance they can
Give Reasons, for which never yet could Man.
She also displays sudden, surreal turns of humour or imagination. She delivers a long, learned poem entitled ‘The Windy Giants’, on the different natures of the winds from the four points of the compass. This is presented as a serious semi-scientific text, which draws on considerable meteorological knowledge. But then she unexpectedly follows this with a short poem called ‘Witches of Lapland’, which seems to be pure myth – or pure mischief:
Lapland is the place from whence all Winds come,
From Witches, not from Caves, as do think some.
For they the Air do draw into high Hills,
And beat them out again by certain Mills:
Then sack it up, and sell it out for gain
To Mariners, which traffick on the Main.
She includes many long poems against animal cruelty, among them ‘The Hunting of the Hare’ and ‘The Hunting of the Stag’. In one of her Prefaces she describes herself as a typical woman in her feelings, being ‘as fearful as a Hare’. But in another striking poem, ‘Similizing Fancy to a Gnat’, she implies that as a poet her imagination is furious and masculine, burning hot with thoughts that turn ‘red’:
Some Fancies, like small Gnats, buzz in the Braine,
Which by the hand of Worldly Cares are slaine.
But they do sting so sore the Poet’s Head
His Mind is blistered, and the Thought turned red.
Nought can take out the burning heat, and pain,
But Pen and Ink, to write on Paper plain.
But take the Oil of Fame, and ’noint the Mind,
And this will be a perfect Cure, you’ll find.
Poems and Fancies ran to three editions, the third being published in 1668. It was to be the first of no fewer than twenty-three volumes, which included a steady stream of plays, essays, orations, fictions, biography, autobiography and letters. Not least of the works written in exile was a provoking mixture of prose tales and poetry, entitled Nature’s Pictures (1656). Here, for example, Margaret coolly raises the question of what actually happens after death, mixing Christian, classical and even atheist explanations, without preference or prejudice:
There was a Man which much desired to know
When he was dead, whither his Soul should go:
Whither to Heaven high, or down to Hell,
Or to the Elesian Fields, where Lovers dwell;
Or whether in the Air to float about,
Or whether it, like to a Light, goes out.
Through the Cavendish connection, Margaret took full advantage of her new social position, meeting many of the leading Fellows of the newly formed Royal Society, like Robert Boyle, Samuel Pepys and John Aubrey. But knowledge of her satirical writing on scientific themes led her to be distrusted, and then openly mocked. Pepys, on his first attempt to meet her ‘after dinner, at Whitehall’, remarked dryly: ‘the whole story of this Lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic’. He added that her footmen were all dressed in extravagant black and white velvet, and even more irritatingly, she herself spectacularly failed to appear.
On 30 May 1667 she did appear, when she became the first woman to attend one of the Royal Society’s formal meetings at Arundel House, now Gresham’s College, off High Holborn. On this occasion she witnessed several optical and microscopic experiments (organised by Robert Hooke), and was ‘full of admiration’ – although, according to Pepys, her dress was ‘so antic and her deportment so unordinary’ that the Fellows were made strangely uneasy. He first describes the bustle surrounding the event in his characteristic gossipy style:
After dinner I walked to Arundell House, the way very dusty, the day of meeting of the Society being changed from Wednesday to Thursday, which I knew not before, because the Wednesday is a Council-day, and several of the Council are of the Society, and would come but for their attending the King at Council; where I find much company, indeed very much company, in expectation of the Duchesse of Newcastle, who had desired to be invited to the Society; and was, after much debate, pro and con., it seems many being against it; and we do believe the town will be full of ballads of it.
He then archly records the scene:
Anon comes the Duchesse with her women attending her … The Duchesse hath been a good, comely woman; but her dress so antick, and her deportment so [un]ordinary, that I do not like her at all, nor did I hear her say any thing that was worth hearing, but that she was full of admiration, all admiration. Several fine experiments were shown her of colours, loadstones, microscopes, and of liquors among others, of one that did, while she was there, turn a piece of roasted mutton into pure blood, which was very rare.
John Evelyn conceded that the Duchess dressed ‘like a Cavalier’, but his diary is rather more respectful, or at least more non-committal:
30th May, 1667. To London, to wait on the Duchess of Newcastle (who was a mighty pretender to learning, poetry, and philosophy, and had in both published divers books) at the Royal Society, whither she came in great pomp, and being received by our Lord President at the door of our meeting-room, the mace, etc., carried before him, had several experiments shown to her. I conducted her Grace to her coach, and returned home.
Dorothy Osborne remarked casually of the Duchess that ‘there were many soberer People in Bedlam’. But Sir Robert Merivel, Physician to the Royal Dogs, noted kindly that ‘My Lady Newcastle was greeted by much yapping and barking by the learned Fellows of the Society, but seemed to keep them all at heel in a very easy manner.’
Subsequently there were protests at her visit from many of the Fellows, while Pepys himself records the scandal with considerable relish. The dangerous experiment was not to be repeated by the Royal Society for another couple of centuries. Yet Margaret Cavendish was now more widely known (or notorious) than ever, and her many books, treatises and poems, began to be seen as championing the principle of free publication and ‘popular’ writing. In one of the linking ‘Claspe’ pieces in Poems and Fancies, she wrote:
Give me the free and noble style
Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild:
Though it runs wild about, it cares not where;
It shows more Courage, than it doth of Fear.
Give me a style that Nature frames, not Art:
For Art doth seem to take the Pedant’s part.
Closer examination of her works suggests why the Fellows of the Royal Society were so wary of her. In what is arguably the first ever science-fiction novel, The Blazing World, published a year before her memorable visit in 1666, she had openly satirised the Society. She justified this in an interesting Preface to the Reader, as ‘adding a piece of fancy to my serious philosophical observations’. In it she considered an alternative dystopian future for science, presenting herself as a visiting Empress to a sinister, distorted, experimental world, and the Royal Society Fellows as various kinds of foolish and predatory animals: ‘bird-men’, ‘fox-men’ or ‘spider-men’, all busily and blindly at work on their particular obsessions.
In her role of royal agent-provocateuse she criticised the Fellows’ confident reliance on new-fangled optical instruments like the telescope and the microscope. She suggested that these might be dangerously distorting, producing wholly false notions of scientific objectivity. She ‘grew angry’ at their telescopes, which might be ‘false-informers’ and cut astronomers off from the true wonders of nature. She commanded them to break the lenses, ‘and let the bird-men trust only to their natural eyes, and examine celestial objects by the motions of their own sense and reason’.
She added to this a vividly polemical account of Robert Hooke’s grotesque microscopic enlargements contained in his celebrated illustrated book Micrographia (1665). These included a horrendously hairy flea and an enormous supine louse, ‘so terrible that they put her into a swoon’. Hooke’s magnified drawings made the louse appear ‘as big as an elephant’, and a mite ‘as big as a whale’. Such magnifications were a kind of blasphemy against the beauty and proportion of Nature. Moreover, she asked, what were their practical benefits to mankind, especially to the ‘poor infected beggars’ on whom both louse and mite fed so ravenously and caused such unchecked torment? ‘After the Empress had seen the shapes of these monstrous creatures, she desired to know whether their microscopes could hinder their biting … To which they answered, that such arts were mechanical and below the noble study of microscopical observations.’ She also attacked William Harvey’s cruel anatomical dissections, carried out on hundreds of live animals, and causing an infinite world of useless pain.
In places her criticisms could become strangely poetic, even metaphysical: ‘Notwithstanding their great skill, industry and ingenuity in experimental philosophy, they could yet by no means contrive such glasses, by the help of which they could spy out a vacuum, with all its dimensions, nor immaterial substances, non-being, and mixed-being, or such as are between something and nothing; which they were very much troubled at, hoping that yet, in time, by long study and practice, they might perhaps attain it.’
All of these provoking observations, many of which anticipate the satires of Jonathan Swift against scientific ‘speculators’ a generation later, seem aimed at what Margaret saw as the inhumane attitudes of the experimenters of the Royal Society, rather than at the actual sciences themselves. Her parodies of the new visionary power of the telescope and the microscope, which she knew very well were revolutionising scientific observation at this date, were deliberately wilful and perverse. They aimed to shock and mock. Samuel Pepys – soon to become President of the Royal Society himself – easily concluded that the Duchess of Newcastle was ‘a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman’. But that was a very short-sighted (and uncharacteristically humourless) dismissal. In retrospect it is clear that The Blazing World did raise for the first time some perennial questions about the humane purpose of experiment. Against this, her poems show a genuine fascination with the new emerging forms of scientific knowledge. If her satirical prose work is comparable in some ways to Swift, the quirky and enquiring turns of her poetry might remind us at moments of John Donne.
Elsewhere in her writings she produced a string of heterodox and often challenging remarks about the impact of science. In one of her Playes published in 1662, she observed: ‘Nature behaves her selfe like a Huntress, and makes Mankind as her Hounds, to hunt out the hidden effects of unknown causes, leading Mankind … by the string of observation, the string of conception, and the string of experience.’
She emphasised the need to retain a proper sympathy with Nature, in order fully to understand it. She conceived Nature as powerful, female, uninhibited and unconfined; in fact it had ‘wild Inconstancy’, just like herself. ‘All Creatures, and so Matter, desire liberty,’ she wrote in her Philosophical Letters (1664). She always felt close emotional kinship with the natural world, and wrote in a late autobiographical fragment (1675): ‘I am tender natured, for it troubles my conscience to kill a fly, and the groans of a dying beast strike my soul.’
This instinctive sympathy with animals, and precise scientific observation of them, appears most memorably in her long poem ‘The Hunting of the Hare’, from Poems and Fancies. In this she describes how a beautiful hare (who she calls tenderly ‘poor Wat’) lies up between the ridges of a ploughed field in absolute stillness, ‘his Nose upon his two fore-feet’, at peace with Nature. He quietly surveys his world, with his ‘great grey eye’ scanning the landscape ‘obliquely’. He is intelligent and alert. He always turns himself into the wind so that his fur lies flat and snug against his body – he ‘keeps his Coat still down, so warm he lies’. Yet none of this avails him against the predatory violence of mankind. Inevitably he is spotted, pursued and savagely killed. After the useless horror of the hunt (‘The hornes keep time, the Hunters shout for joy’) and the viciousness of the hounds, Margaret laments the innocent creature’s inevitable and ‘patient’ death:
Then tumbling downe, did fall with weeping Eyes,
Gives up his ghost, and thus poor Wat he dies.
Her conclusion is fierce, and has a characteristically surreal touch. She bluntly declares that men are instinctively cruel, and essentially callous: ‘Or else for Sport, or Recreations sake’, they
Destroy those Lives that God saw good to make;
Making their stomaches Graves, which full they fill
With murdered Bodies, that in sport they kill.
Yet Man doth think himself so gentle mild,
When he of Creatures is most cruel wild.
Her more general sense of mankind laying siege to Nature is explored in her painful ‘Dialogue between an Oak and a Man about to cut Him down’. The oak is offered all the delights of being turned into a mighty ship ‘to traffick on the Main’, or into a stately house ‘wherein shall Princes live of great renown’. But the noble tree sturdily rejects them all:
Yet I am happier, said the Oak, than Man;
With my condition I contented am.
Thus Margaret Cavendish emerges as a contradictory, but strikingly prophetic, figure at the very heart of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. Poet, polemicist, feminist, satirist, aristocrat, naturalist, stylist, eccentric and survivor, she stands forever at the doors of the Royal Society demanding readmittance. She also knocks at the gates of scientific history, and of biography itself, doffing her wildly feathered cap, requesting better recognition. With an ironic bow perhaps, rather than a submissive curtsey.
She mocked the empirical worldview of the Fellows, clearly implying that it was damagingly male. She challenged an unfeeling attitude to the beauties of Nature; questioned the practice of vivisection; and wondered what rational explanation could be given for women’s exclusion from learned institutions and societies. She interrogated, in her own flamboyant way, the Baconian notion of relentless scientific progress, suggesting alternative Stoic doctrines of patience, kindness and sensitivity. She did all this most effectively in her strange but inventive poems, and her outrageous polemical fiction, rather than in her more formal philosophical works such as Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1668).
Unconventional to the last, she published a proud and tender memoir of her husband, The Life of William Cavendish, relating the story of their exile and return. To this she added an autobiography, unblushingly under her own name, one of the earliest in women’s literature: A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life (1675). This includes wonderfully indiscriminate accounts of her views of science, taste in food, philosophy of life, preferences in love, attitudes to dress and cross-dressing, and favoured books and animals. Naturally, she analyses her own character at length, and obviously revels in its contradictions: ‘I fear my ambition inclines to vain-glory, for I am very ambitious … though I am naturally bashfull … also in some cases I am naturally a coward, and in other cases very valiant … I am not prodigal, but … I am so vain (if it be vanity) as to endeavour to be worshipped, rather than not be regarded …’
One of the final images she leaves of her public self involves her clothes, but in an unexpected way: ‘And though I desire to appear to the best advantage, whilst I live in the view of the public world, yet I could willingly exclude myself, so as never to see the face of any creature (but my Lord) as long as I live, enclosing myself like an anchorite, wearing a frieze gown, tied with a cord about my waist … But I hope my readers will not think me vain for writing my Life …’
For all these things she earned the mocking soubriquet ‘Mad Madge’, a phrase which still clings to her biography, and will instantly summon her up on Google. Even Virginia Woolf described her dubiously in an essay as ‘Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted’ (1925). Yet Margaret Cavendish clearly established herself as an alternative voice of sceptical wit and humane enquiry, unique among seventeenth-century women, and prophesying many others. There is something magnificent about her irrepressible eccentricity. In her own fashion she survived a social revolution, and bore witness to a scientific one.
She also somehow pulled off the posthumous feat of being buried in Westminster Abbey. The expectation of this must have appeased many memories of the ransacked Lucas family tomb in humble Colchester. Her splendid baroque monument, where she lies in state alongside her husband, occupies a well-chosen corner of the Abbey. Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, is naturally arrayed in all her silks and lace, with an extravagant hat. But in her hand she holds a simple pen case, a notebook, and a remarkably capacious inkwell.