Ada's Algorithm E-Book

James Essinger

• Herausgeber: Gibson Square
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, the dangerous romantic poet whose name became a byword for scandal. Over the past decades, she herself has become a surprising underground star for digital pioneers all over the world, starting with Alan Turing. Embraced by programmers and women in technology, Ada even has her own day that is commemorated every year on Google's search engine. Ada's Algorithm, tells the exceptional story of Ada Lovelace's life and achievement, and traces how her contemporaries failed to recognise the extraordinary break-through she had made. If they had, the computer age could have started almost two centuries ago. In her private life, Ada suffered many battles, not least with the common conception at the time that science was 'beyond the strength of a woman's physical power of application,' but also her over-bearing mother, her father's infamy, nervousness, and addiction to gambling. The fact that her fame today continues to rise despite such hurdles is a tribute to her singular determination and inspiring personality. Based on 10 years of research and filled with a host of fascinating characters - including Charles Dickens and Walter Scott - Lovelace's own writing, as well as illustrations, her short but poignant story is told here in unprecedented, spell-binding detail.

Leseprobe

Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter, was rediscovered in the 1930s by computer pioneers such as Alan Turing. Four decades on, a new generation of computer programmers named a widely-used programme ‘Ada’ in honour of her achievements.

A Female Genius tells the astonishing story how Ada Lovelace would have started the computer age almost two centuries ago, in 1840s London, but for the fetters of social conventions that are felt to this day. It shows how Ada Lovelace was the only one who understood this, despite opposition that the principles of science were ‘beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application’.

Ada Lovelace wrote the world’s first computer programme and foresaw that music would be created by computers and the emergence of computer science (which she called ‘poetical science’). Hers is one of the most exceptional and inspirational stories in the history of science.

James Essinger’previous book, Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (OUP 2004) was chosen as one of the top 5 popular science books of the year by the Economist. While writing this book he got fascinated by Ada Lovelace, who some scientists still consider overrated – the reason why he researched this book. James Essinger read English at Lincoln College, (University of Oxford) and lives in Canterbury.

Contents

Preface

1. Poetic Beginnings

2. Lord Byron: A Scandalous Ancestry

3. Annabella: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

4. The Manor of Parallelograms

5. The Art of Flying

6. Love

7. Silken Threads

8. When Ada Met Charles

9. The Thinking Machine

10. Kinship

11. Mad Scientist

12. A Window on the Future

13. The Jacquard Loom

14. A Mind with a View

15. Ada’s Offer to Babbage

16. The Enchantress of Number

17. A Horrible Death

18. Redemption

Afterword

Acknowledgements

“Dans un livre qui voudrait… raconter une [vie], il faudrait user, par opposition à la psychologie plane dont on use d’ordinaire, d’une sorte de psychologie dans l’espace… puisque la mémoire, en introduisant le passé dans le présent sans le modifier, tel qu’il était au moment où il était le présent, supprime précisément cette grande dimension du Temps suivant laquelle la vie se réalise.”

In a book attempting to tell the story of a human life, a normal, one-dimensional psychological approach would have to be abandoned, in favour of something more fluid…because, when memory represents the past in the present,without modification, what is lost is the self-same rich dimension of Time, in which actual life experience occurs.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past – translated by Hilary Rouse-Amadi

Preface

I became fascinated by Ada Lovelace while writing my book Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (2004), by which time a general interest in Ada’s work was well-established. There is a popular software language called ‘Ada’ that was originally developed by the US Ministry of Defence in the late 1970s to unite a host of different programming languages. In 2009, the International Ada Lovelace Day was launched on London’s Southbank to celebrate the achievement of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. There is a Hollywood movie about Ada (written by Shanee Edwards), Enchantress of Numbers, in development.

It would, at least at first glance, appear that science has a chequered record of treating women as equals of men. Indeed, female staff at Bletchley Park, the wartime decryption HQ that cracked German ciphers, were largely unrecognised for their painstaking work. Meanwhile Rosalind Franklin, who did much of the unrecognised Nobel-Prize-winning work on DNA, was ignored in all official recognition of the deduction of the existence of the double helix, to the embarrassment of the male scientists involved.

Whether this is historically a case of sexism or social conditioning of both genders is beyond the scope of this book. (Change is afoot for the future – as Lin Ostrom quipped on becoming in 2009 the first female Nobel Prize winner for economics, ‘I won’t be the last’.) What is clear, though, is that there is a surging interest in the history of women and their contribution to and involvement with science.

While Byron cast a long shadow over Ada’s life, she was only six weeks old when they parted company for ever and so she never met him in any meaningful sense. The more important person was Lady Byron, who had been well-educated by her enlightened parents and moved in liberal circles. She maintained a ferocious control over her daughter’s life and, as it would turn out, death.

The man with whom Ada Lovelace’s story is most closely interwoven is that of her close friend Charles Babbage, the scientist who invented the first mechanical computer. Like Babbage, Ada was tireless in the pursuit of knowledge. She once wrote to him:

I wish to add my mite [might] towards expounding & interpreting the Almighty, & his laws & works, for the most effective use of mankind; and certainly, I should feel it no small glory if I were enabled to be one of his most noted prophets (using this word in my own peculiar sense) in this world.

Their letters became so intimate that some think that theirs might have a been a romantic friendship.

Unlike Babbage himself, Ada Lovelace saw beyond the immediate purpose of his invention. He had little interest in that question and appears to have seen his invention as a ‘mere’ calculator. She understood that a whole new area of discovery awaited once the real world and abstract mathematics were linked through calculations that no human could ever hope to undertake. She speculated that such a computer, for example, might handle ‘pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent’: a very familiar truth over a century and a half later but inconceivable to scientists at the time.

Ada was passionate, kind, imaginative, excitable and emphatic. She loved emphasising words in the letters and documents she wrote by underlining them (such words are italicised where she is quoted). She was in poor health and used mathematics as a way to regain her balance. She would later in life, when she was in serious pain, use medication that we now recognise as mind-altering drugs. After a long and excruciating deathbed that she appears to have suffered without complaining, she would die of cancer at the age of thirty-six, the same age as her father Lord Byron.

One of the fiercest criticisms of Ada is found in The Little Engines That Could’ve (1990) by Bruce Collier. This book, an otherwise shrewd and useful account of Babbage’s work, contains much highly-informed technical material. But Collier writes this about Ada:

There is one subject ancillary to Babbage on which far too much has been written, and that is the contributions of Ada Lovelace… It is no exaggeration to say that she was a manic-depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine… To me, this familiar material seems to make obvious once again that Ada was as mad as a hatter… I will retain an open mind on whether Ada was crazy because of her substance abuse… I guess someone has to be the most overrated figure in the history of computing.

Against this modern opinion one can let Charles Babbage himself give the answer. He wrote about Ada Lovelace on September 9 1843 to Michael Faraday, the nineteenth-century polymath who discovered electrolysis and magnetic induction:

[T]hat Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it.

I hope that A Female Genius will make it clear that Ada Byron, later Countess of Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter, should without doubt be included in the list of overlooked women whose potential was treated casually merely because of their gender. There has so far been no biography of Ada that fully defends the genius of her thinking, which prompted me to write this book. Ada’s grasp of complex questions came with such ease that she was able to see beyond it where others needed to work hard to understand even the question itself.

The conversion of money from the past to the present is a highly technical subject. Its problems are discussed in some detail in one example. The conversions in this book are from www.measuringworth.com, which has a detailed and subtle discussion of the data and theory behind calculating worth over time. Ada Lovelace would have appreciated how its sophisticated calculations open up further areas of enquiry, an idea that was revolutionary two centuries ago.

1

Poetic Beginnings

Four miles south-east of the city of Canterbury, home to the great Norman cathedral famous the world over, you’ll find the small village of Patrixbourne. Pretty and well-manicured, the village nestles amidst some of the loveliest countryside in the county of Kent, which has long been known as the ‘Garden of England’. Among the many who have praised the county is Charles Dickens, who in The Pickwick Papers wrote affectionately of Kent’s ‘apples, cherries, hops and women’.

Today, on the outskirts of Patrixbourne, a muddy, rutted lane leads towards a large field featuring two long parallel rows of wellingtonia trees that date back to the late nineteenth century. The trees once bordered a long driveway. A few hundred yards south, a narrow stream called the Nailbourne – a local legend holds that it flows only once every seven years – is spanned by a little bridge made from stone and wood. The bridge dates back to the eighteenth century.

The wellingtonia trees and the bridge are the only signs today that there was once a splendid country house here known as Bifrons. The driveway led down to the house and in its day would have been used by horse-drawn coaches heading to the house or leaving it.

As for the bridge, and the stretch of the Nailbourne it spans, these were once part of Bifrons’ extensive grounds. Nowadays, though, the bridge is the only structure that remains on the estate.

Sixty miles from the smoky hubbub of London, Bifrons was an unlikely setting to have nurtured the intellectual development of the most famous woman in the history of technology.

Yet if you’d been visiting the house in the early spring of 1828 and had taken a stroll along one of the footpaths that passed through its grounds, you might have caught a glimpse of a pretty and precocious twelve-year-old girl called Ada Byron playing outside.

Bifrons, before being demolished in 1948.

Ada had a turbulent and exotic background. She was the only legitimate daughter of the poet Lord Byron, in his day one of the most famous men in the world, notorious for his love affairs with both sexes, for the scandal of his passion for his half-sister Augusta, and for his disastrous marriage to Ada’s mother, a well-born young woman named Anna Isabella, shortened to Annabella, Milbanke, who had married Byron on the morning of January 2 1815.

Patrixbourne in 1917.

When Byron married Annabella, he was already famous throughout Britain, Europe and beyond, as much for his amorous adventures as for his poetry.

Annabella put up with him for only a short period. During what was a nightmarish twelve months for her, but business as usual for Byron, the young couple were constantly harassed by creditors chasing debts incurred by Byron’s fabulously extravagant expenditure on anything that caught his fancy.

The couple had a major cash-flow crisis because a dowry Annabella’s parents had promised hadn’t yet arrived. Her parents may have worried that once Byron got his hands on it, he’d leave her – and the dowry never did arrive during the one year and a fortnight that Annabella and Byron were together.

He himself regularly harangued his wife during the marriage with crazy outbursts, including declarations that she made him feel he was ‘in hell’. He made love to Annabella whenever he could, but he was also comprehensively unfaithful to her, notably with his half-sister Augusta and an actress named Susan Boyle, though probably with other women too.

Augusta and Byron shared a father rather than a mother. Incest was by no means rare at the time, when poverty, overcrowding and cold houses meant that several people often slept in the same bed, even in large aristocratic houses. In fact, the aristocracy regarded incest between non-uterine siblings as reasonably acceptable. Byron saw Augusta as fair game. Augusta herself wasn’t much concerned by the technicalities either. She just adored her half-brother.

Ada, born on Sunday, December 10 1815, was just over a month old when Annabella, having decided she could take no more of her husband, stole away with her from a sleeping Byron in the early morning of Monday, January 15 1816.

Annabella and Byron had made love on the night before her morning departure. Despite having fled her husband, Annabella initially retained some affection for him. She and Ada went to stay with Annabella’s parents in Seaham, County Durham. From there, she wrote doting letters to Byron, but her parents heard how he had treated their daughter, and slowly turned her against him.

Details of the disastrous marriage soon got out, not directly from Annabella herself but from her lady friends. Annabella knew this, and had realised when she ‘confided’ in them that they would tell the world. Within a month after Annabella had fled from Byron, the disastrous marriage was the talk of the nation’s drawing-rooms. Soon, fresh rumours began to circulate, that Byron had slept with Augusta during the marriage.

Byron, oppressed by debts, by the outcry over his marriage, and by his conviction that England didn’t deserve a poet as great as him, departed from his native land on Thursday, April 25 1816, three months and ten days after Annabella had left him.

Even the sumptuous gilded coach in which Byron and his friends travelled down to the Kentish sea-port of Dover hadn’t been paid for; bailiffs seeking the price of it were pursuing him. Byron’s coach, a replica of one of Napoleon’s, cost £500 at the time (£500,000 today), or at any rate would have done if Byron had paid for it. The pursuit soon grew more intense. He boarded a ship just in time, taking his luxurious conveyance with him. The bailiffs, with no legal right to pursue him beyond the shores of England, remained in Dover, staring out in frustration at the bubbling Channel.

The Channel was indeed bubbling as if heated by hellfire. Byron escaped his creditors, lovers, Annabella’s wrath, Augusta, England and mundane reality in a ‘rough sea and contrary wind’, as John Hobhouse, a close friend from Byron’s university days, reported.

The weather during the Channel crossing to Ostend, a seventy-five-mile journey, was so harsh the voyage took a nightmarish sixteen hours when it should have lasted less than half as long. During the long and horrible crossing, Byron – amidst bouts of seasickness – wrote the first three stanzas of the third canto of his long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The first two cantos had been published, to great success, in 1812. He scratched his anguish at leaving Ada onto paper as the furious waves battered the ship in the darkness, and as England, and all that England meant to him, receded into oblivion:

Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child!

Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?

When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,

And then we parted, – not as now we part,

But with a hope. –

Awaking with a start,

The waters heave around me; and on high

The winds lift up their voices: I depart,

Whither I know not; but the hour’s gone by

When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.

Yet Byron’s emotional convalescence didn’t last much beyond his landfall at Ostend. When he finally reached the port, he celebrated his new freedom by seducing the chambermaid of his hotel room as soon as he had checked in.

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron.

2

Lord Byron

A Scandalous Ancestry

The little boy fated to become Lord Byron the poet, Ada’s father, was the son of John Byron, who had been born on February 7 1756.

John’s older brother William – known as the ‘Wicked Lord’, whose crimes included stabbing a neighbour to death during a ferocious argument over the best way to hang game – held the title of Lord Byron, which was awarded the previous century to the Byron family by King Charles I. The Wicked Lord managed to escape the hangman’s noose by persuading his peers in the House of Lords that the crime was manslaughter rather than murder. He was absolved from his crime on the condition he paid a fine and retired to Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, the ancestral home of the Byron family. Founded in the late twelfth century, its priory status had come to an end in 1539, when it was closed by King Henry VIII due to his falling-out with the Roman Catholic church over his marriage to Anne Boleyn; he granted it to the Byron family.

John Byron, Ada’s grandfather, was nominally a British army officer, but he spent as much time as he could philandering and spending money that wasn’t his. These two pastimes had always been popular among the Byrons, who traced their ancestry back to a Ralph du Biron, who came to England in 1066 with William the Conqueror and his horde of fortune-hunters and land-robbers. John Byron soon acquired the nickname of ‘Mad Jack’. Mad he might have been, but he was a handsome fellow. Before long he lost interest in his profession and in the family tradition devoted himself to dissipation.

John Byron’s first wife, Amelia, had an annual income of £4,000 – worth £7 million today – which was presumably one reason why Mad Jack married her. Their daughter, Augusta Mary, was born in Paris on January 26 1784. She is an important character in Ada’s story. Amelia Byron did not survive Augusta’s birth, and the girl was cared for, most probably, by an uncle. The causes of Amelia’s actual death remain a sinister mystery: sources vary between saying she died of consumption (this usually meant tuberculosis), of a fever contracted when she went hunting too soon after giving birth, or even of ‘ill-usage’ at her husband’s hands. Some reports hold that her death took place in Paris, but her death certificate states that she died in London.

Whatever the true cause of Amelia’s demise, her income died with her, and as Mad Jack had by now abandoned his military career, such as it had been, he needed cash badly.

In the traditional way of handsome aristocratic rakes who did not want to do anything so tedious as earn a living, Mad Jack ventured to Bath, a famous west-of-England spa town whose very name proclaims its primary historical function. The Romans had pioneered bathing in the supposedly healthy water. By the eighteenth century, Bath was still famous for its waters, and also for the opportunities it offered impoverished noblemen for finding a wealthy heiress.

Before long, Jack’s good looks and easy charm had enabled him to do precisely that. The lady he successfully wooed ticked all his boxes of youth, wealth and vulnerability.

The lady, Catherine Gordon, was Scottish, a big girl and rather ungainly in her manner, though she liked dancing and was good-natured. Catherine was the oldest and by that time the only living daughter of George Gordon, twelfth Laird of Gight, Ada’s grandfather. Catherine was born in the County of Aberdeen in 1764, and brought up in the Castle of Gight, which is in the parish of Fyvie in the Formatine district of Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

The exact date of Catherine’s birth does not appear to be known, but she was christened on April 22 1764, and so she was probably born about a week before that.

Catherine had plenty of money due to her family inheritance. Mad Jack was as interested in Catherine’s money as in Catherine, and indeed probably more so. The Byrons were not famous for the longevity of their virtue, or of their marriages. Soon after the happy couple were united, Mad Jack – relishing the prospect of living in a castle, and even more delighted at the juicy prospect of gaining comprehensive access to Catherine’s money – began an orgy of spending.

Married women had few legal rights at the time and were not even regarded as a separate legal entity from their husband. Any money a woman had automatically became her husband’s once they were married.

Poor Catherine – she would be poor soon – fell head over heels for Mad Jack, but only because in the classic fashion of rakes, he’d been careful to disguise his true nature until after the wedding.

Within a year of the marriage being solemnised, John Byron had spent most of his wife’s fortune. Before she met him, she had about £22,000 (£35 million today). The inheritance rapidly disappeared, even to the extent of forests on Gight land being felled in order for the timber to be sold and the money to line Mad Jack’s pockets for the brief tenure it had in them before being expended on some insane frivolity.

Within eighteen months of the marriage, there was almost no money left in the estate, and what was still there was paid to Mad Jack’s new creditors because, in common with many of his Byron forebears, he wasn’t only content to spend money he had, but also money he didn’t. Catherine remained not only in love with her husband but infatuated with him. The scale of his financial extravagance, however, upset her profoundly. She was left only with the income from about £4,200 that her trustees had managed to sequester from her husband.

Before long, the threat of jail for debt induced Mad Jack to flee to Paris. Flitting off to the Continent was the usual Byron technique for dealing with debt. By the end of 1787, Catherine – unwilling, despite her persisting love for her husband, to spend any more time in Paris living in straitened circumstances – came back to London. Mad Jack couldn’t join her in London because if he had, he would have been jailed for debt right away. By now, she was pregnant, and on January 22 1788, her son and only child came into this world. Catherine named him George Gordon, after her father.

The future poet Lord Byron was born with a caul, a harmless membrane, over his head. In medieval times a caul had been seen as a mark that a child born with one would be destined for greatness. Dried, cauls were believed to prevent their owner from drowning. Some were sold for significant sums to sailors. There is a reference to this practice in the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield (1850). There were no takers for David’s caul, but baby George’s was given to a professional sailor Catherine knew.

George was also born with a deformed right foot, which was to cause him both physical and psychological pain throughout his life. The deformity was at the time referred to as a club foot. Today, the condition is known medically as dysplasia and is characterised by the very problems that Byron suffered: his right leg was thinner than it should have been, and his long narrow foot curved inwards and was stiff so that it affected to some extent the movement of the ankle. Byron’s walk, throughout his life, had a certain sliding gait to it which everyone noticed. All the same, this was a time when many people had something more or less wrong with them, so Byron’s problem would not have been as conspicuous as it would have been today.

Catherine was deeply (and, based on his track record, most likely accurately) concerned that even now her husband, living in Paris, was accruing more debts. Certainly, the pressure on what money Catherine still had was apparently endless. Mad Jack was unable to get credit and was reduced to living only on bread. He was by now also dangerously ill with tuberculosis. On June 21 1791, he made his will, thoughtfully making his penniless son (four years old at the time) responsible for his, the father’s, debts. Six weeks later, on August 2 1791, John Byron died at the age of thirty-five.

Catherine bravely contrived to manage on what money she had left. She sent George to a variety of schools in London. Finally she returned to Scotland and there, in 1794, when George Byron was six years old, he was enrolled at Aberdeen Grammar School.

Mad Jack’s demented older brother, the Wicked Lord, was still alive at this point, but when he died four years later the ten-year-old George became the sixth Lord Byron. On hearing the news, the headmaster of Aberdeen Grammar School called George into his office, informed the boy of his momentous social elevation, and gave him a glass of port, as if determined to welcome the boy symbolically into the bibulous world of the aristocracy.

In 1798, becoming a peer was seen as becoming a new kind of being. Early in August of that year, Catherine and the ten-year-old Lord Byron, accompanied by his nanny Mary Gray, whom he called May, journeyed to Newstead Abbey, where he took possession of his estate. The boy was delighted with Newstead Abbey, and spent a month or so roaming the grounds.

Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home Lord Byron inherited at the age of ten.

Nanny May was a woman of considerably loose virtue; she had regular romantic adventures with young men of about her own age, seventeen or eighteen.1

According to Byron’s friend John Hobhouse – who later in Byron’s life was told about these events by the poet himself – during this time when May Gray was Byron’s nursemaid, she started taking the boy into her bed and masturbating him. Her interest in Byron, though, was not only that of a sexual initiator. She liked to alternate the masturbation with beatings; for which actual or imagined offences is not clear. May even enjoyed showing off to her male companions the power she had over Byron and she enjoyed beating the boy while they looked on. Very likely, the young Byron also witnessed the drunken copulations of May and her friends.

It was the beatings, not the masturbation, that young George Byron finally reported to his mother. When Catherine heard from her son that May was flogging him, Catherine dismissed May and removed Byron from Newstead Abbey. His education continued in London. At the age of thirteen, Byron entered Harrow School, at that time, with Eton, one of the two most renowned schools in Britain.

Life at Harrow was tough. You had to get up at six o’clock, and lessons continued for twelve hours, with some breaks for mealtimes. Floggings administered on younger boys by senior boys and by masters were commonplace; for the floggers, they were a high point of the school routine.

Academic standards could be high, but the syllabus was fairly unvaried. This was 1801, and the syllabus of Britain’s public schools was mostly classical, with the intention of turning young men (there were very few schools that gave much of a classical education to young women) into proxy citizens of the great Roman Empire that had collapsed due to Barbarian predations about 1,400 years ago, but which still had an enormous cultural hold on the Anglo-Saxon mentality. This was partly at least because the Britons admired the way the Romans had built up their empire: with violence, yes, but also with a genuine concern for the welfare of the governed.

One of Byron’s school fellows was to become important in the life of Ada. This was the young Robert Peel, also born in 1788, though Peel was born on February 5 and so was Byron’s junior by exactly two weeks. Byron was later in his life to be generous about Peel’s talents.

Byron was prone to bouts of depression, and may even have suffered from a form of manic depression (nowadays known as bipolar syndrome). Byron himself often seems to have used sex more as a diversion and as a way of forgetting his own low spirits than necessarily always as a supreme physical and spiritual pleasure. He was in addition often curiously passive in courtship; when he reached adulthood and had many female (and male) admirers, they often found it frustrating that they themselves had to initiate things.

Indeed, Byron was also sometimes as intensely taken with chastity as with sexuality. His life’s work fills a closely-printed book of almost 900 pages, and a man who spends most of his life indulging himself sexually and who dies at the age of thirty-six, is not likely to produce such a vast body of work – maybe around one million words in total. So while certainly Byron had bouts of energetic indulgence in sex, he wasn’t always, so to speak, in the mood.

He was certainly bisexual. While at Harrow, he fell ardently in love with a younger boy called John Edelston. The social and moral atmosphere of Harrow was much of the time literally a hotbed of homosexual activity. The poet and critic John Addington Symons (1840 – 1893), himself bisexual, was one of the first to write explicitly about homosexuality in nineteenth-century Britain, when homosexual practices were still an imprisonable offence. Addington Symons wrote this in his memoirs of Harrow, which he started attending in 1854:

Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow’s bitch. Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk of the dormitories and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there, one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences.

In the summer of 1808, Byron visited his friend Lord Grey de Ruthyn, who was about eight years older than Byron. Grey made advances to him which were evidently not repulsed. The poet and lyricist Thomas Moore writing in his own biography of Byron, said that an intimacy sprang up between Byron and Grey.

Byron liked to use the phrase ‘pure relationship’ to describe one which did not involve actual penetrative intercourse. It is not, however, known what ‘intimacy’ meant in terms of Byron and Grey. All that is certain is that Byron was himself conscious of his early sexual initiation. In ‘Detached Thoughts’ – a journal he kept for a few months in 1821 – 1822 when he was living in Pisa, Italy – he admitted:

My passions were developed very early – so early –that few would believe me – if I were to state the period – and the facts which accompanied it.

On Monday, July 1 1805, Byron travelled to Cambridge to become a student at Trinity College, the largest and probably the most famous of the colleges of Cambridge University. In Byron’s time there was only one path to the degree, which was the Senate House Examination (SHE). The SHE was continually developing. At that time it was partially oral but mostly written, with the main subject of examination being mathematics, though a little classics and moral philosophy were thrown in too. However, most noblemen such as Byron treated Cambridge as a sort of finishing school and stayed only for one or two years, generally failing to graduate or even to make an attempt to do so.2

Byron certainly lived it large. He kept three horses and acquired a carriage soon after arriving in Cambridge. What he thought of the university was hardly complimentary. ‘This place is wretched enough,’ he wrote, ‘a villainous chaos of din and drunkenness, nothing but hazard and burgundy, hunting, mathematics and Newmarket, riot and racing.’

Within less than a year of his arrival he had borrowed hundreds of pounds from a money-lender at a high rate of interest. Byron wrote to his impoverished mother that he had ‘a few hundred in ready cash lying by me’, and he then went on to tell her that he could learn nothing at Cambridge and would prefer to go abroad.

Appalled, his mother Catherine wrote to John Hanson, a young married London lawyer who had befriended her before Byron was born and even lent Catherine money when she needed it. It was John Hanson’s brother, a Royal Navy captain, who had been given the caul in which Byron was born.