Lord Byron's Novel (41 page)

Alexandra Novak

In the winter of 2002, I was invited to London to research the lives and work of a number of British women of science, including Mary Somerville and her younger friend Ada Lovelace, for an online virtual museum of women of science (www.strongwomanstory.org). In the course of that research I was privileged to make, or to be part of making, a number of discoveries. Some were of no interest to anybody but me, but one is of very general interest, and it is here presented as fully as possible—which is perhaps not as fully as it might be in future. The story that follows must, in other words, remain tentative, and the reader is asked to suspend disbelief for the present, as a novel or a romance asks us to do, and only attend.

Ada Augusta King, Countess of Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate child, traveled to Nottinghamshire in September of 1850 to visit the ancestral seat of the Byrons, Newstead Abbey—which Lord Byron had sold years before, and which was then in the possession of a Colonel Wildman, an old schoolmate of Byron’s. Returning south, Lady Lovelace and her husband went to the races at Doncaster: they were both, as it was then said, devotees of the turf. Ada backed Voltigeur, which won an upset over the favorite, Flying Dutchman. The win didn’t come close to canceling Ada’s racing debts, which she kept secret from her husband. In May of 1851, the Crystal Palace exhibition opened in London; in August of that year, Ada was told that the illness she had been for some time suffering from was serious, indeed fatal—it was cancer of the cervix, for which there was then no treatment. Sometime in that autumn (Ada was careless in dating her letters) she mentioned to her mother, Lady Byron, that she was at work on “certain productions” involving music and mathematics. In November of 1852, after much suffering, she died of cancer; she was then thirty-six years old (her father died in the same year of his life). Between the date of her visit to Newstead Abbey and her death she acquired, transcribed, annotated, enciphered, and destroyed—at her mother’s request or order—the manuscript of the only extensive piece of prose fiction ever written by her father.

The story of the rediscovery of Ada’s enciphered manuscript after 150 years, its acquisition by the Hon. Miss Georgiana Poole-Hatton, its deciphering and authentication, is told in as great detail as is presently possible in the Textual History and Description which follows this Introduction. Of course it is still possible that what is presented here as the work of Lord Byron, annotated by Ada Lovelace, is not that at all. It might be that Ada herself wrote the novel as well as the notes; that someone else wrote the novel and sold it to her (or to those who then sold it to her) as Byron’s; that both the novel and the annotations are forgeries, dating from sometime between Byron’s or Ada’s time and now. All that can have been done to eliminate these possibilities has been done. Tests indicate (though they can’t prove) that the ink and paper date from before the middle of the nineteenth century; internal evidence in the novel does not point toward a date later than Byron’s death, nor a date later than Ada’s in the notes. The handwriting in the notes is demonstrably Ada’s, though it differs in certain ways from other writings of around the same period, perhaps because of her hurry, or because of the effects of the drugs she was taking almost continuously in ever larger amounts. For reasons explained in the Textual History, it is not possible at this time to trace the physical provenance of the manuscripts or the trunk in which they were allegedly found. For the moment each reader must decide for herself whether she is indeed in contact with these two persons, the poet and his daughter, and hearing their voices in these writings. I think I do hear them; I can’t imagine that they could be anything but what they seem to be.

If the novel is what it purports to be, then where was it before Ada got it, and who acquired it for her? In her own introduction to the manuscript of the novel (pages 46–62 of the present book), Ada states that she arranged to see the man who had the manuscript, an Italian who had acquired it from another who had acquired (or perhaps stolen) it in Italy, when she visited the Crystal Palace. I thought at first that the man who accompanied Ada on that visit must have been Charles Babbage; it was just the kind of thing that Babbage was forever doing for her. He did show her around the site of the Great Exhibition as it was being constructed; but Babbage had had a public controversy with the planners and been entirely excluded from all the planning for the Crystal Palace exhibition; his famed Difference Engine wasn’t displayed there. It seemed unlikely that he would have been eager to go there with her. So who was the go-between, who negotiated with the Italians, who then later went to get the manuscript? It seemed impossible to know, until I came upon an undated note from Ada to Fortunato Prandi, who was one of those in the émigré Italian circle she and Babbage knew—something between a radical activist, a spy, and an agent, maybe a double one. Here is the note, which is in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library.

“A more important service” implies a previous service, which might have been the visit to the Crystal Palace and the glimpse of the man with the gold earring; the present service would then be the actual acquisition of the MS. This is all merely speculative. It certainly seems that something conspiratorial was afoot, but in those years Ada worked up a lot of plots and entanglements. There is much further exploring to do among the Italians in London, and in Ada’s papers, and in Babbage’s too. There are for instance the several mentions in the Babbage/Ada correspondence of a “book,” not further described, that must be passed back and forth between the two of them at intervals, with care taken over its delivery, etc. When I found these I wondered if I had actually caught Byron’s novel in transit, so to speak. A recent biographer of Ada
*
suggests that the “book” may rather have been the betting book Ada was keeping: she had become consumed by horse racing, and ended by selling her family jewels to pay her gambling debts—and then reselling them again after they had been redeemed by her baffled and compassionate husband. (So the story has always run: and yet now we have to wonder if those family jewels weren’t also the source of the money Ada needed to buy
The Evening Land
from its possessors.) In any case the mentions of this book predate the opening of the Crystal Palace and therefore the period in which the book of Byron’s was acquired.

What is certain is that it was from Babbage that Ada learned about codes, ciphers, and enciphering. The cipher Ada used for enciphering Lord Byron’s novel is a variant of the Vigenère cipher, a cipher known since the sixteenth century, which a contemporary of Babbage’s rediscovered without knowing it had long been used though never cracked. When Babbage pointed this out to him, he challenged Babbage to solve a text he encoded with it. Babbage was able to break the cipher, but he never published his solution. He also designed a wheel, like a circular slide rule, that made it easier to set up a cipher and then read off the substituted letters; maybe Ada had one, and used it for
The Evening Land
. Babbage looms over, or lingers behind, the story of Ada like a stage manager or trickster, or like one of the busy mechanical people he loved to show off, whose motives are unreadable, maybe nonexistent, and whose powers are unguessable. In the end (of the story, or of our ability to understand it) he merely bows, and draws his curtain.

Ada, as noted, was very lax about dating her letters, and there are no dates given in her annotations of Byron’s manuscript, and none on the single note to Francisco Prandi. But it seems to be just before the manuscript came into her possession that Ada’s relations with her mother took a new turn. Her biographers trace this change to her visit to Newstead Abbey, her father’s former estate, which somehow awakened her feelings for her father and her Byron ancestors. “I have had a resurrection,” she wrote a little incautiously to her mother. “I do love the venerable old place & all my
wicked forefathers
!” It’s hard to know what would have happened to this manuscript if Ada had discovered it earlier—if she had found no reason in her own heart to protect it. Clearly her mother (like Snow White’s) wouldn’t have allowed it to exist within her kingdom.

But she did preserve it. Whether she perceived that her mother would eventually find it, either among her papers when she died or as she worked over it to make a fair copy; or if she only set about enciphering it after Lady Byron discovered it, and before she agreed to destroy it, can’t be known. The labor of recasting the whole fifty-thousand-plus words of the manuscript into her cipher was so huge that it must have taken her months. My sense is that it wasn’t long after Lady Byron discovered its existence that it was given up to be burned, and that Ada knew it would be, and by that time she was ready, with a pile of “mathematical and musical work” in her desk that no one would inquire about.

In that month she summoned her husband to her, and made him promise that she would be buried beside her father in the Byron family vault at Hucknall Torkard church, where she had seen and touched his casket on her journey to Nottingham in 1850. It had been her secret that she had decided even then to be buried there. She chose an epitaph too, that she told her husband she wanted put on her own casket. It was from the Bible, in which she had evinced so little interest during most of her life. It comes from the Epistle of James:
You have condemned, you have killed the righteous man; he does not resist you
. The first meaning of this remarkable choice is so obvious—she believed her father (whose remains would be lying next to her own) was a righteous man, unjustly condemned and exiled by the society around him—that it seems we discover its second meaning for ourselves: that Ada, though herself dying, would no longer resist those who condemned her. She ceased altogether to resist her mother; she wrote out, at her mother’s instruction, pledges of affection for her mother’s friends, including those she had called the Furies, who had so willingly constrained and punished her when she was a child. She agreed that her mother should have control over all her papers. She confessed her “errors,” and confessed them again. She jettisoned her life.

At some time in these months—the note describing it has no date—she wrote to her mother to say that the manuscript of her father’s novel had been burned. (A transcription of this letter can be found in the Appendix.) I can find no documentary evidence of Ada’s informing her that the manuscript existed, or that she had acquired it, but the papers of the Lovelace family are so extensive that it might still turn up, not having been understood for what it is. I have found no document in her mother’s hand expressing a desire, or an order, that the MS be burned. But it certainly was her wish, if Ada is to be believed.

So all was done. She had surrendered to her mother as to death. And yet still she didn’t die: throughout that autumn she lingered, unwilling or unable to go. Meanwhile her mother prayed with her, and discussed her “errors” with her (she wrote to her Christian correspondents how gratifying it was that Ada saw them and confessed them): these no doubt included her gambling, her pawning of the family jewels, and her single adultery, but it’s likely they also included all the irreligious and skeptical things she’d
thought
. She lived in a kind of twilight, scribbling notes only her mother could read, terrified that she would be buried alive, asking over and over who stood at the door, who stood at the end of the bed, when no one was there. Charles Dickens really did come to visit her, at her request (they had been friends for years) and read to her from
Dombey & Son,
the scene where little Paul Dombey, dying, sees a vision of his mother come to stand at the end of his bed. When Babbage came to visit her, Lady Byron turned him away.

In October Ada’s son Byron, now Viscount Ockham, whom she had above all wanted near her, had been sent away by Lady Byron, because in what Lady Byron called “this state of suspense” he might “receive injurious impressions.” Now he was brought back, for one last visit before returning to his naval duties and his ship at Plymouth. It was decided—by Lady Byron—that the boy should not bid a final farewell to his mother, as she would not be able to bear it; he only went to the door of her room, and looked inside a last time. It’s uncertain whether she knew he was there.

But Ockham didn’t return to his ship. He packed his midshipman’s uniform in a carpetbag, and sent it home to his father. Then he disappeared. Lord Lovelace, distraught, called the police and hired a detective. This is the description of Ockham he ran in the London
Times,
with an offer of a reward for the boy’s discovery:

This description, including those dark, expressive eyes that somehow seem to have come from his grandfather and namesake, was circulated at the principal ports of embarkation for America—Bristol and Liverpool—as though Lord Lovelace had reason to think his son would be found there, and he was—at an inn in Liverpool, where he was living with “common Sailors” and trying to get a passage to America. He didn’t resist the detective who found him, and came home again.