Augusta Ada Byron was Sunday's child.
Born exactly 200 years ago today, into a chaotic household on the edge of violence.
Ada's mother, Annabella Milbank, came to London at the age of 19 for the season.
She was pretty, kind, intellectually gifted, particularly in mathematics,
she was a future heiress who was unimpressed by the superficial
finery of her class, where she had a battalion of suitors and
their mothers in Regency London that year, 1812.
Enter with dramatic limp, handsome, romantic Mad Bad Byron,
24 years old, who had just published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
and woke up one morning, as he said, to find himself famous.
Regency women who previously ignored Byron,
a minor aristocrat, were suddenly fawning all over him.
Watching this at a fashionable waltz, Lady Byron
looked at these women and lo and behold called Byron-mania,
she asked if human nature would be cast anew because of this man.
Quote, then grant me Jove to wear some other shape, and
be anything except an ape.
Byron proposed to her that year through his great friend, Annabella's Aunt,
Lady Melbourne.
They'd only met once or twice,
I don't even know if Lord Byron meant the proposal.
Lady Melbourne couldn't resist proposing for him in the most flowery terms.
Annabella refused.
It took Annabella two more years to admit her love for Byron and for
the two to become engaged.
But in the meantime, Byron had had an incestuous affair
with his married half sister, the honorable Augusta Lee, and
they had had a daughter recently named Medora Lee.
His sister Augusta and Annabella's aunt,
Lady Melbourne, urged Byron to marry because rumors were
spreading through London about this incest.
They didn't particularly want him to marry Lady Byron, Annabella Milbank,
but other women had refused that year and she didn't.
She was in love and she accepted.
They met maybe three or four times, I think they once touched hands.
From the minute Anabella stepped into the wedding carriage on that cold January
morning in 1815, Byron's cruelty commenced.
Lord Byron told his wife, you thought I loved you, I'll show you, and
he certainly did.
With an air of mystery he told her that had she married him when her aunt
had first asked for him, first proposed, things would have been different.
Without telling her why, he seemed to cast the blame for
his incest on his young wife.
His mental cruelty was punctuated, as it often is,
by teasing regrets, loving moments, plenty of sex, and
then relapse into cruelty during the one year that they lived together.
His behavior brought Sister Augusta back into the household by
Lady Byron's request in the seventh month of her pregnancy.
For Annabella believed with Byron's sister present he
would not act out as outrageously as he said he would.
For example, he said he would bring a woman into the house and
copulate as she gave birth.
Still, even with Augusta present, while Lady Byron was in labor,
Lord Byron made as much noise as possible, throwing bottles and furniture around.
He went in and told his wife that her mother,
very seriously ill at the time, had died, which was not true.
He asked if the child were dead, and
later on seeing his daughter called Ada his perfect instrument of torture.
After two weeks, he refused to see Ada at all, and soon after that,
wrote to Lady Byron telling her to take Ada and leave the house as soon as
possible, as he was closing the establishment and going abroad.
Actually, after she left,
he stayed there with his sister Augusta at 13 Piccadilly Terrace.
Apparently, Lord Byron thought that loving him as she did, and
she really did, Lady Byron would simply,
as Annabella's former governor said, live with her parents.
Pining for him quietly raised their daughter Ada, and he would go his own way.
I'm sure he's not the only man who's ever had this fantasy.
It was only after 24 year old Annabelle swiftly requested a legal
separation of bed and board, that Byron attempted to win her back.
For the Regency elite were again whispering, and now they were saying that
incest might have been the cause for this break up, but it wasn't, it wasn't.
Mental cruelty and Lady Byron's fear for
her daughter's safety under the domination of erratic Byron
were the main reasons she wished to be legally free of her husband's control.
As Byron resisted, society added the rumor of sodomy to
a growing list that painted Byron madder and badder than he wished.
To put an end to Annabella seeking a legal separation,
Byron employed his glorious words.
In a rush of seemingly heartfelt letters,
as well as in the first poem he ever directed to his wife, fair thee well,
fair thee well, if forever, if forever, still fair thee well.
Lady Byron well knew that fair thee well and
this sudden rush of beautiful rush of love letters were insincere.
Byron used words, she said,
the way his hero Napoleon used his troops, for conquest.
Also her lawyers had educated her.
If she responded to Byron's sudden rush of love letters or to his poem,
it would be what English law in those days called condonation,
which meant the wife had forgiven the husband all previous acts, and
the husband could demand her return.
After much negotiation, some bitter back and forth and
sheer dome luck, she won her decree.
Byron left England as soon as the separation agreement was signed
in the spring of 1816, as by then fashionable society had
turned its back on him, particularly when he walked into former
friend Lady Jersey's Soiree arm in arm with his sister.
Yet once aboard ship sailing from England,
Byron used his glorious words to restore his honor,
blast his wife, and win over the daughter he refused to see.
He presented himself as a bereft father torn from his child beginning the third
cantos of Childe Harrods' Pilgrimage, is thy face like thy mother's my fair child?
Ada, sole daughter of my house and heart.
He told the world of his tenderness as a father, to hold thee lightly on
a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss.
This it should seem was not reserved for me, yet this was in my nature.
Through his brilliant poetry, the absent and
very seductive father Ada would never need, reeled his daughter in.
Byron became the ghost of a father even while he lived.
His elements were hers.
He claimed her as he sighed over what might have been.
While in his poetry the absent Byron became the perfect father,
Lady Byron, especially in Ada's early years,
was an imperfect single mother of exceptional intellect and
progressive ideals who had the sole responsibility of raising a brilliant,
fiercely imaginative, and difficult daughter.
And for her to be, Regency was a very lax time
morally, but husbands and wives more or less stayed together.
For someone of her class to have had her husband leave and for
her to be left raising a daughter alone, was extremely unusual.
On Ada's first birthday, Lady Byron had written of her ambiguous feelings,
she wrote this, and she wrote poetry all her life,
thine is the smile and thine the bloom where hope my fancy,
ripe in charms, but my hopes are dyed in memories gloom.
Thou are not in a father's arms, thou are not in a father's arms.
While the absent, seductive,
perfect, father told the world how he regretted his inability to watch
the dawn of little joys, to sit and see almost thy very growth.
To view thee catch knowledge of objects, wonders yet to thee.
What wonderous words!
The actual catching, as well as any bungling, was left to mom.
One could say that from birth Ada was pulled between loving
the mother she had and the father she imagined.
In the first years of her motherhood, educational innovations for
the working class were Lady Byron's salvation.
She wrote that the poor saved her from herself.
When little Ada was not yet three years old,
Lady Byron returned from a short summer trip to Scotland and
founded Atseum in the north where she was born, not born actually but raised.
The first infant school in England for the young children of the working poor.
The school was based on socialist, Robert Owens,
infant school in Scotland, and on the educational values of Swiss,
Jean Jacques Rousseau, and those who followed him such as Pestalozzi.
Young children were to learn, not through dry book learning imposed by
severe masters, but through absorbing the lessons that nature teaches.
They were to sing, to dance, to come to love of learning through their own
curiosity inspired by teachers chosen through their God given patience,
and ability to encourage the young toward their own directions and discoveries.
The operative word in this progressive education was cheerfulness.
In the 1830s when daughter Ada was married, and her mother herself,
Lady Byron had the time to once more visit the progressive Hoffel
school In Switzerland, where she sent her young Noel cousins to be educated.
And she formed a relationship with its founder, Emmanuel Defelonberg.
And he was, his ideas all came from Rousseau and Pestalozzi.
Returning from Switzerland in her mid 40s,
she founded the first cooperative school in England.
In England,Ealing Grove School, for
the education of the older children of the working poor,
based on this Swiss plan of her quote making labor and
more especially agricultural labor, a principal means of education.
Part of the young students' day was spent in the pleasant schoolhouse she
had completely renovated, learning through mutual dialogue and respect,
guided by a humane master.
And part of the day was spent out of doors,
each youth tending his own garden, his own allotment.
The healthy produce of which he could either give to his family or
sell back to the school.
In London at that first cooperative school, today it's the Ealing School
of Art, there's a blue plaque commemorating Lady Byron.
Lady Byron 1792 to 1860, founded the renowned cooperative
school within these environments, 1834 to 1850.
That blue plaque stands a rare public acknowledgement of
Lady Byron's important contribution to progressive education in England.
Her educational ideals were a conscious rebellion against the fagging
system nd brutality of the upper class public schools of her country.
Such as Harrow, where Lord Byron had his first introduction
to what was then labeled sodomy.
In Lady Byron's school, cooperation, not competition, was emphasized.
Children of all or no religion were accepted.
And none were forced to attend the morning scriptural readings or
to go to church on Sunday.
A small fee was to be paid and on time.
It was a token amount but indicated the school was not a charity, but
a partnership.
The Bible was not used for classroom instruction.
Lady Byron once wrote to her friend, in regards to religious opinions
I am a communist, my neighbor's opinion is as good as mine.
If he be right under whatever name, it's so
much gained for me, I call this Christian, you do not.
Such was the clear reasoning of that liberal,
far sighed benefactor to English education who history has all but ignored.
As clear and farsighted as Lady Byron was when it came to the educational advance
for the working class in England, her daughter Ada's education was that of
many upper middle class or aristocratic girls who had intellectual potential.
They were educated by tutors at home just as Lady Byron had been.
Lady Byron recognized Ada's intelligence early on.
By the time Ada was two and a half she was absorbing information with alacrity.
One of the myths about Lady Byron was that she consciously avoided poetry in Ada's
early education as if English literature was part of any curriculum at that time.
In one of the few letters Lord Byron not only wrote,
but actually sent to his wife to his sister of course.
He delighted in Ada's love of science and
he wrote that he too did not like poetry as a child.
Ada's weekdays were filled by her lessons dipped into about
a quarter of an hour at a time, and broken up by rest or
reclining on a board, intended to ease her restlessness.
There was music, French, arithmetic, exercise,
drawing, geography, outside play.
She was given tickets when she was good and had some taken back when she wasn't.
These tickets were part of Robert Owen's system of rewards and
punishments that replaced verbal and physical punishments.
There is little doubt Ada strove to please her mother,
to win her approval, a motivation Lady Byron actually encouraged.
At five, Ada wrote, quote,
the lessons have not been done as well as they might have been done.
And I'm sorry for that because I want very much to get another 12 tickets.
I want to please Mama very much that she and I may be happy together.
At about that age, Ada asked her mother if her grandfather,
Sir Ralph, was also her father.
Ada remembered her mother's anger in retorting that her grandfather was
not her father.
Lady Byron was by nature temperate, but her daughter had hit her vulnerability.
Ada was not in a father's arms, and Lady Byron, for all her intelligence,
was raising a child who had no idea of who or why the father was.
Byron died of fever in Greece when Ada was eight.
Lady Byron was overwhelmed when the news was brought to her, Ada cried as well.
Lady Byron assumed her daughter was crying for her mother's grief,
as her child had never known her father, far from it.
While Lady Byron went to visit the new seventh Lord Byron,
Ada's governess took her to the ship that brought Byron's body back to Byron.
Ada wrote to her mother she was quote, papa's ship and liked it very much.
Viewing the ship made her realize, quote, what a great misfortune it is for
me not to have brothers and sisters.
When her young cousin George died, she wrote to her mother,
his death was going to be a very severe blow of grief.
Ada did not need logical connections to experience bereavement
over her father's death, or over her own existential situation.
Years later when Lady Byron introduced Vedora Lee to Ada as her half sister,
Ada immediately held out her hand to her less fortunate sibling.
As a child Ada reached out for her mothers hand through scientific innovations.
When she was 12, while her mother spent the winter season in Devon hoping for
a cure to her bronchitis, Ada searched for a way of bringing her letters to her
mother and her mother's letters to her more quickly.
To this end, she became absorbed in building a flying machine
powered by steam, steam was the microchip of the 19th century.
And Anju when Lord Byron had written ironically
steam engines will convey him to the moon.
But Ada went beyond metaphor and after months of single
minded absorption realized she would base her head not on a birds body,
but on that of a horse and you heard something about that yesterday.
She also figured out the maps that she would use to get these letters to her
mother quickly, she figured out her own GPS, she was amazing at that age.
Lady Byron supported Ada's scientific creativity, but
was concerned by the intensity with which her daughter pursued her interests with
single minded preoccupation and limitless confidence.
She urged the 12 year old to go on with her other studies as well.
Ada wrote to her mother,
I wish that supposing I fly well by the time you come back, you would,
if you are satisfied with my performance, present me with a crown of laurels,
but it must only be on the condition that I fly well.
Ada was not only precocious, but headstrong.
When her early tutor put her in a cornice, she bit off the cornice.
As a teenager, she was sexually adventurous and
had an affair with her tutor.
Ada reported that they did everything except as Ada put in, have connection.
Connection or not, they were found out, the tutor fired.
Scientifically she was a prodigy similar to Thomasina and
Tom Stoppard's play, Arcadia.
Except Ada was more overtly sexual and lived on, well Thomasina died.
After Ada's affair with her tutor, Lady Byron spent less time with
progressive causes and more with royal society, and
dressmakers preparing a proper course for Ada.
Ada did turn a corner, at 17 she was presented in court.
At this point her mother brought her to meet Charles Babbage at one of his
quirky and pleasant London soirees, and the rest, as we say, is history.
So let's get past Ada's translation in and
her notes which brought her posthumous fame.
And go on to the fact that after that publication
Ada used her computive skills bironically that
internal tug between present mother and absent father resumed.
Ada gambled heavily, relying on programs she created that she believed that
could predict the winners of horse races.
The outcome of the method was predictable, she lost a fortune.
And let me say, a few people have mentioned that the account books for
the Lovelaces were balanced, and that's true.
The thing was she was more and
more entrenched with these gamblers she owed money.
She secretly took the Lovelace jewels, had pastes made and
pawned them, things of that sort.
Nothing was really showing on the surface
until her husband found out about a month before.
She used excuses,
she borrowed from her mother, she borrowed from everyone she could.
Now since Ada's marriage to William King in 1835, and
up to 1850, Lady Byron believed she had found in her son in law,
ten years older than Ada, a father's arm for the daughter she raised.
On William King's part he had never before known mother's love, and
believed his mother in law's love unconditional.
Lady Byron could not do enough for her highborn serious crow,
as he was called, because of his thick eyebrows.
Lady Byron was the hen, and Ada was their birdie, it was a barnyard love fest.
Shortly after the marriage, it was through Lady Byron's influence with
the young Queen Victoria that William King became the first Arrow of Lovelace,
and Ada became as we know her today, the Countess of Lovelace.
When Ada's debts became so huge as to no longer be covered up,
a month after he learned about it,
William came running to Lady Byron late one night to unburden himself.
Rather than consoling him,
Lady Byron cried out, didn't he know genius was always a child?
How could Lovelace have allowed Ava with her naivety, and
her belief in her own infallibility to go to the races without him.
He could not understand that the Lady Byron,
her daughter was once, were not in a father's arm.
Again, she the single mother was all alone and psychologically to her way of thinking
after all the good she had done for her son in law, she was once more betrayed.
She wrote, I am only loved by strangers.
Daughter Ada on her part wouldn't speak to her mother, saying,
Lady Byron had insulted her husband.
However, Ada stretched the truth to her advantage all the time and
was more likely she was embarrassed that her mother now knew how she had
lied to her as she asked for more and more money.
No matter, Lady Byron got a list of Ada's debts through her lawyer and
she paid them all off.
It is almost a given in family relationships that love between mother and
daughter often has a critical edge to it.
Whereas love between daughter and father seems unconditional.
Estranged for a year, mother and
daughter reunited in the most tragic of circumstances.
For Ada's constantly terrible periods which she called her Black Dwarf.
Perhaps were early signs of the uterine cancer that she developed.
During the last half year of Ada's life in 1852, mother and
daughter established the intimacy and understanding that had often eluded them.
One finds it all portrayed in Lady Byron's unpublished journal letters here at
the Bodleian, which she wrote during the months she was with her daughter,
her caregiver day and night.
Ada, who once invented a steam engine to fly her letters to her mother,
now had a mother all to herself.
And perhaps that's what she had needed all of her life,
neither found this out until the end.
Lady Byron would lament, quote, to see clearly too late.
She couldn't stop thinking of what might have been.
Ada realized she was going to die at the age of 36, the same age as her father.
In one hallucination she believed her father was causing her death.
And other times she saw Lord Byron at her beside and
told her mother he was there, he was.
Lady Byron knew her daughter did not want to be buried at Lovelaces Estate at
Arkham, by then Ada had informed her husband that his friend John Cross was her
lover, and Lady Byron was incensed when Lovelace did not take that news well.
The hen had turned into the lioness protecting her cub.
Lady Byron thought to comfort Ada by proposing she be buried as she
put it in Newstead, by her father.
Ada's face lit up with pleasure and relief.
Lady Byron wrote,
Ada told her it had already been decided that she'd be buried in Newstead.
But she didn't tell her mother because she thought,
I thought you might be angry with me.
Lady Byron dispelled this entirely, however, quote,
I was secretly wounded by Ada's reserve.
My journal is not however to be feelings of my own, away with them.
I'd like to finish please.
In her new intimacy,
Lady Byron [LAUGH] was still Lady Byron, chewing away her feelings.
Ada was still Ada, keeping a secret about wanting to be with her
father that might displease her mother.
My daughter, Byron wrote, concluding the third canto of Childe Harold,
when Ada was barely a child, we heard it beautifully portrayed last night in music.
My daughter, with thy name, this much shall end.
I see thee not, I hear thee not, but none can be so wrapped in thee.
My voice shall with thy future visions blend, and reach into thy heart
when mine is cold, a token and a tone, even from thy father's mold.
Ada was buried,
her coffin touching that of her father's mold, all with her mother's approval.
One does wonder if at the end of her short life,
Ada had reconciled those opposite parental pulls in her nature.
While she was dying, Ada felt regrets at not having done more while she lived.
And let me summarize this at the end.
Lady Byron responded to her quote, I pointed out to Ada
that few thinking minds ever felt their ends accomplished, yet
the survivors have been influenced by those lives in an unforeseen manner,
leading us to believe that the ends of our existence are hidden from us, quote.
Lady Byron said that more than 160 years ago to her dying daughter.
We are all here today honoring Ada, Countess of Lovelace, and
in one way or another attesting to the wisdom of her mother's words.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> I'm sorry it went a bit over.