The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel E-Book

Dr Emily Winterburn

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 421

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Caroline Herschel was a prolific writer and recorder of her private and academic life, through diaries, autobiographies for family members, notebooks and observation notes. Yet for reasons unknown she destroyed all of her notebooks and diaries from 1788 to 1797. As a result, we have almost no record of the decade in which she made her most influential mark on science when she discovered eight comets and became the first woman to have a paper read at the Royal Society. Here, for the first time, historian Dr Emily Winterburn looks deep into Caroline's life and wonders why, in the year following the marriage of her brother and constant companion, Caroline wanted no record of her life to remain. Was she consumed with grief and jealousy? By piecing together – from letters, reminiscences and museum objects – a detailed account of that time, we get to see a new side to history's 'most admirable lady astronomer' and one of the greatest pioneering female scientists of all time.

Leseprobe

For my quiet, clever family and for Austin & Paul, and the quiet, clever families they left behind.

First published in 2017

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Emily Winterburn, 2017

The right of Emily Winterburn to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 8651 9

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Preface

1787

  1     Foundations

  2     The First ‘Lady’s Comet’

1788

  3     William and Mary

  4     Jérôme de Lalande

1789

  5     Astronomy and Engineering

1790

  6     Two More Comets

  7     Friends and Fans

1791

  8     Riots

  9     Order in the Skies

1792

10     Births and Deaths

1793

11     Home Life

12     Solar Eclipse

1794

13     Originality by Stealth

1795

14     The Indefatigable Assistant

15     Nevil Maskelyne

1796

16     The Other Brother

1797

17     New Beginnings

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

PREFACE

This book has been a long time in the making but is, I think, the better for it. I was first ‘introduced’ to the Herschels back in around 1999 when the curator of astronomy at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Maria Blyzinsky, showed me around the stores, talking me through the collections I was soon to take over. Piled up, I remember, in the middle of the floor in the basement to Flamsteed House (in the cellars of the former hunting lodge on which the observatory was subsequently built) were a number of acid-free conservation grade cardboard boxes. Inside those boxes – treasure!

The boxes contained the contents of two cabinets that had once belonged to the Herschel family. Three generations had used them as a set of handy drawers, depositing parts of half-finished experiments, lenses, mirrors, coloured glass, a pin cushion, a pair of small scissors. The boxes contained all manner of bits and bobs, invitingly hinting at this family’s peculiar mix of domestic and scientific life; providing questions, if not yet answers, about how science and family life might have once coexisted side by side down the generations.

The Herschel family, I knew, were famous. They had achieved many great things, but what those were, or which of the plethora of Herschels had achieved what, I was not quite sure. And so I set about finding out – and from that learning process eventually grew a PhD and, later still, this book.

Where research for my PhD ended and the research for this book began is a grey area, but all of it has been fascinating. I have been to some amazing places. I have talked to people all over the world – at conferences, but also in conversation, the moment anyone has shown the slightest bit of interest in the Herschels. I have investigated numerous archives, often to be found in beautiful libraries. I even met the Herschels’ modern-day descendants, who very kindly put me up for a week and allowed me to nose around their private family archive uncovering all kinds of material that previous generations of historians, archivists and collectors had left behind.

From this mass of material – from all the letters, diaries, artefacts and other ephemera – stories emerged that seemed to not quite tally with the existing accounts I had by this stage already read. Perhaps my background in physics made me see things differently. All that time spent studying physics and always being one of the only girls; feeling that my voice was quieter, less confident, less certain than my male peers – perhaps that gave me a different perspective. Certainly the picture of Caroline Herschel these sources painted was very different to what I had read in biographies and articles on this pioneering woman of science.

Caroline Herschel wrote a lot about her life. She kept diaries, accounts and an observing book. She also wrote extensively about her life, especially her early life, in two autobiographies written for relatives in old age, and supplemented these with anecdotes in her letters. Much of the time this was in response to direct questions: people wanted to know how she had become an astronomer when so few women were visible in that field; they wanted to know about her and her background – and she wanted to tell them a good story.

In her letters, and especially in her autobiographies, Caroline was very careful to present herself in a particular way. When she put her mind to it, the image she presented of her life and her path to success was that of an innocent, wide-eyed, but put-upon heroine. She was a passive but grateful recipient of good fortune. These accounts were, after all, written in the years when the Grimm brothers were collecting and recording their fairy tales. Heroines in those stories were kind and gentle, willing participants complicit in their own subjugation. Caroline, as ever, was quick to pick up on the prevailing mood and to weave those images into her own accounts of her life. At one point in those stories, she even referred to herself as the Cinderella or ‘Ashenbröthe of the Family (being the only girl)’.1

To an extent, those fairy stories and the portrayal Caroline adopted from them reflected the real-life experiences of women, and especially low-status women, in eighteenth-century Europe. Women were expected to fit in with men, to have access to education only if they had a male relative who chose to allow it. They were expected to stay at home, cook, clean and raise children while their brothers, fathers and husbands went out into the world. They were expected to accept their fate quietly, their only hope of escape to be found in meeting a prince or, at the very least, a wealthy man, and to marry him.

Caroline grew up in the part of the world from which the Brothers Grimm collected most of their stories. Those stories came out of a folk tradition with which Caroline would have been familiar and so her adoption of some of the caricatures in her accounts of herself and her life is understandable. What has always seemed stranger to me is that historians have also often adopted these fairy-tale caricatures when talking about Caroline’s life. She is very often, even now, described as ‘astronomy’s Cinderella’. Her mother, meanwhile, is cast with annoying regularity as the wicked stepmother, while William gets to be her saviour prince.

Perhaps Caroline’s mother is often presented in such damning terms because her story otherwise lacks any real tangible enemy. Although Caroline was very much a woman of her time, faced with all the barriers to education and scientific institutions and public debate which that entailed, she was never victim to any direct attacks, as some women were. Her story contains no ‘Big Bad Wolf’. Overall, most of her fellow astronomers and the many other scientific individuals she came across were welcoming and encouraging. In a sense, her enemy was more abstract. While no one individual insisted that she stay quiet or be kept down, just simply by virtue of being a woman, fellow practitioners of science and the wider world were less ready to believe in her abilities and accept her claims. That she found ways around this obstacle is very much to her credit, and an essential although often overlooked part of her story.

Accounts of Caroline to date tend to have taken her fairy-tale depiction of herself and her family at face value. They have overlooked her struggles for recognition in the absence of any overt force putting her down. Most puzzling of all, though, is the uncritical acceptance of her ten missing years. The years 1788 to 1797 are entirely absent in Caroline’s accounts of herself. They are gone – deliberately destroyed – and yet they were, in many ways, her most significant years in terms of work. The missing period dates from the year her brother William married to the year she moved out of her brother’s home – and they are completely gone; we know nothing of them.

At some point in her later life Caroline destroyed this decade of journal entries. What is striking, however, is that coincidentally these were the ten most astronomically productive years of her life. While we have a detailed record of her Cinderella-like childhood, cooking and cleaning for her family, and almost as much detail of her bitter old age, praised from afar by philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers, while surrounded by ignorant and conceited relatives, much less has been written about her middle years. Her most productive period is glossed over, reeled off simply as a list of achievements rather than a time spent generating great science.

It has always been said that she destroyed her diaries because they contained all her mean and bitter thoughts towards her new sister-in-law, and the timing does add up to an extent. These were the ten years that followed her brother William’s marriage to the widow Mary Pitt (née Baldwin). However, they were also the years in which she made discoveries, wrote and generally became celebrated for her work as a lady in science. It always seemed odd to me that she would destroy that record.

During those missing years, Caroline was not hiding in her room writing mean things about the woman who would later become her friend. These were the years in which she did her most important work, in which she became a ‘comet huntress’, a ‘lady astronomer’ and a ‘priestess of the heavens’, all the things we now celebrate about her today. This was the same decade she came to the attention of the core of Europe’s scientific elite – Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, Jérôme de Lalande and Joseph Banks – and won them over. Why would she destroy her personal thoughts on these key professional breakthroughs? This was also the period in which her nephew, John Herschel, was born. Why would she not want a record of her reaction to the birth of the child on whom she doted and who, in return, came to confide in her as he grew up and made his own way in the scientific world?

The current portrayal of Caroline Herschel, told in many potted biographies celebrating ‘women in science’, leaves us with a picture of Caroline broken by her brother’s marriage, while astronomical breakthroughs seem simply to have happened to her. The coincidence of the timing is never mentioned (though it is occasionally acknowledged that her comet discoveries tended to take place when her brother was out). This book sets out with a different purpose. It focuses on just those ten tumultuous years, when family life was turned upside down while Caroline’s astronomical career was blossoming. By piecing together – from letters, reminiscences and sometimes museum objects – a detailed account of that time, we get to see a new side to Caroline. Perhaps she was not just snidely complaining about her brother and his marriage the whole time. Perhaps she had other reasons to destroy her diaries, ones that offer a less socially acceptable side to this woman than simple jealously over a man.

When it comes to women in the history of science, only a very few have managed to capture the public imagination. Marie Curie might be a household name, but few others have managed that level of recognition. Even after decades of trying to find heroic but forgotten women in the history of science, we struggle to find anyone who can capture the public imagination quite so well as Curie. We do not even expect our male heroes of science to be quite as brilliant as the two-time Nobel Prize winner. Yet, somehow, we expect women who do not reach that mark to hold some responsibility for their historical invisibility.

Caroline Herschel, in many ways, is a more typical woman in science than Marie Curie, and that is part of her charm. She was, as so many were, a scientific partner to a male relative and many of her achievements came out of that partnership. She had less education than her brother and less access to scientific societies. She took on typically female roles within that partnership: she organised, recorded and wrote out their collaborative work. She also, however, made discoveries, and this is what she is best known for today – in total, Caroline Herschel discovered eight comets.

Caroline lived through a period of tremendous political and social change. Equality was being fought for with vigour, even if there was some disagreement about the interpretation of the term. Philosophers of the Enlightenment had begun questioning the natural order of things, asking what it is to be human, how we learn and what is innate about human nature. It no longer followed that the aristocracy and the Church should run everything while the rest of the population remained obediently happy with their lot. The American, French and British industrial revolutions all took place within Caroline’s lifetime. These were dramatic upheavals of the status quo. And alongside this, other movements were emerging, also arguing for equality. Anti-slavery campaigns were just beginning, and women were starting to map out logical arguments against their own treatment compared to that of powerful white men.

As all these political arguments raged, Caroline got on, in her own small quiet way, with putting those arguments into practice. As Mary Wollstonecraft and other early campaigners were arguing in favour of women’s potential, Caroline was quietly fulfilling it. In just one decade, Caroline destroyed centuries-old arguments about what women were capable of. She showed, simply by doing, that women could observe and catalogue, discover and study, and even write papers good enough to read to the Royal Society. In doing so, Caroline began to transform astronomy from a very masculine branch of the physical sciences, into something much more feminine. Thanks to her, future generations of women began to look to astronomy as a subject in which they, too, might be able to succeed.

Caroline’s story, pieced together here from letters, memoirs and publications, is one of quiet determination. She has fascinated scientists and historians of science for generations. She does not easily lend herself to the heroic stories of discovery we are used to hearing about, but that to me is what makes her story so interesting. It is what makes her story resonate with many of the problems women in science still face today. Even now, girls are rarely encouraged to see themselves as heroes and innovators; instead, we tend to see ourselves as conscientious and dedicated, helpful and hardworking. This difference comes out in the ways we talk about ourselves and our work.

Caroline’s story teaches us to look past our differences and to celebrate the work of women in science – however they present themselves.

1

FOUNDATIONS

In early 1787, Caroline Herschel, a middle-aged economic refugee, waited expectantly for her first ever scientific article to be published. As a woman, she had not been allowed to announce her discovery in person to the gentlemen and natural philosophers of the Royal Society of London. Instead, she had written a letter which her brother William had read on her behalf at a meeting on 9 November 1786.

The letter had told the assembled guests, in very polite and modest terms, how, in the course of ‘sweeping’ the heavens, she had happened across a new comet. She did not want to make any presumptions, but thought that for science, and for the sake of her brother and his astronomical friends, she should pass on this information:

In consequence of the Friendship which I know to exist between you and my Brother I venture to trouble you in his absence with the following imperfect account of a comet.

Her paper ended with a request to Charles Blagden (secretary to the Royal Society, to whom the letter was addressed) asking if he would ‘do me the favour of communicating these observations to my brother’s astronomical friends’.

Caroline’s paper was the very first written by a woman to be read to the Royal Society. It was uncharted territory. To the end of her paper, William had added a few remarks, mainly to confirm that he agreed with his sister on what she claimed to have seen. The following week, the society met again and William delivered a paper of his own, to the effect that he had seen Caroline’s comet too, when he returned from Germany, adding his own small description. It was almost as though he were trying to reassure the society members that the observations of a woman could be trusted.

A month later, their friend Reverend Francis Wollaston waded in too, with a paper declaring that he had seen Caroline’s comet, though adding very little beyond that, in terms of new scientific insight. Perhaps assurance from Caroline’s own brother was not considered convincing enough …

Caroline’s paper makes interesting reading today, when women often still struggle to be heard, and are still inclined towards language that can seem out of place in the sometimes aggressively competitive culture of the scientific world. Her casual remark that her account is ‘imperfect’, though without stating what it might lack, her apologetic opening, ‘I venture to trouble you’, and her need to justify why it is her and not her brother making the announcement all seem decidedly feminine. In a modern piece, she would be criticised for her lack of assertiveness, with the responsibility for her lack of voice placed squarely on her own shoulders. And yet, the curious thing about Caroline Herschel is that it was precisely because she used this very feminine style, with its exaggerated good manners and self-depreciation, that she managed to gain attention and, in time, respect and admiration. She made people listen by essentially being very, very polite.

The publication of her paper in 1787 was a great moment for Caroline Herschel, and for women in science everywhere, but it was slow in coming and arrived only after many years of hard work. She was by no means a scientific ingénue waiting for her chance to shine. There was little in her early years that later biographers could point to as evidence that this would eventually and undoubtedly become her fate. Rather, her early years give a glimpse of how hard life was for women of very little wealth in the eighteenth century and how extraordinary it would be for a woman from such a background to even imagine entering the prestigious world of Royal Society science.

Nothing about Caroline’s early life suggested she would grow up to become a pioneering female astronomer. She was the younger of two surviving daughters in a large Germanic family from Hanover. Their father, Isaac, was a self-taught army musician (his father had been a gardener), her mother was illiterate and without regular work (besides looking after her large family), although she would sometimes take on piecemeal work such as sewing. Caroline, the youngest daughter, was expected – as was typical in poor Hanoverian households in the eighteenth century – to help her mother look after her home and family. She was taught to cook, clean, spin and make clothes, and was required to look after younger children as well as take care of her older brothers and ageing parents. While her brothers were trained by their father to follow him into careers as musicians, Caroline and her older sister Sophia were trained to run a household and to be useful and agreeable to her family. Sophia got married (to another musician) and left home when Caroline was just 5 years old, leaving her and her mother to look after the rest of the family.

Hanover was an area of Lower Saxony and part of Prussia in the eighteenth century. Since 1714 the region had had a special connection with Britain when the ruling Elector of Hanover became Britain’s King George I. For women like Caroline Herschel, this region within a pre-industrial Germanic state was much like any other. The connections made by the nobility with another country had little impact on the day-to-day running of her life. Instead, she, like other women in her situation, was brought up with very few options. She was trained to look after her family and could look forward to looking after her parents in their old age, and then hopefully being taken in by one of her siblings in later life. Alternatively, she might get married or become a maid. If she was especially enterprising, she might find a means of earning her own living sewing or spinning while still living at home (to do so independently was frowned upon) or find a loophole that allowed her to work for a guild – most guilds explicitly prohibited the employment of women, but a few left their rules open to interpretation.

Prospects were bleak for women in Caroline’s position but, academically at least, things were beginning to show signs of improvement. The Protestant Reformation had begun around 200 years before Caroline was born, but its effects were still being felt and the new Protestant movement was promoting a strong emphasis on personal understanding of the Bible. It was no longer enough, as it had been under Catholicism, to hear the stories of the Bible in sermons, or see them in stained-glass windows, via the priest and the Church. Protestants were expected to read, interpret and understand the Bible for themselves and with that came a need for mass literacy. All children, not just the very rich, were required for the first time in Europe to learn to read.

Desiring mass literacy, even being religiously motivated to teach everyone to read, was one thing, but making it happen in practice was quite another. Slowly, however, a system of mass education began to emerge and within Europe it happened first in the Germanic states. For the Herschels, they were helped by their father’s position as an army musician within the Hanoverian Guards since that made him part of the Prussian Army.

The Prussian Army had begun to set up garrison schools from the early eighteenth century onwards, aiming to provide elementary education for all the children (girls and boys) of its personnel, excluding those at the very top. All the Herschel children went to the school, though there is some disagreement among historians as to exactly what they were taught. Reading, writing and religion seem to have been taught to all, mathematics and Latin may have been taught only to boys. The system, as was typical for the time and place, was to encourage the best of the older pupils to help teach the younger children alongside employed teachers.

Throughout her childhood, Caroline was kept very busy going to school with her brothers, and after school helping her mother to cook, clean and look after her family. As she learned to read and write, those skills were immediately put to good use and she was called upon to read and write for her mother and the other illiterate women in their neighbourhood, allowing them to correspond with their husbands when they were away on military service. Sometimes Caroline would even go to additional classes after school to learn extra domestic skills. Her job was to be as useful as she possibly could, and to use her education to learn skills that might be useful to her loved ones – and she recognised early on that this was her key to survival.

As Caroline grew up, cooking, cleaning and writing letters on behalf of her mother and other local, illiterate women, she could see her brothers receiving quite a different education. Her four brothers, three older (Jacob, William and Alexander), one younger (Dietrich), were all being trained to follow their father into his profession. Their father was an army musician, but his aspiration was to teach his sons to rise higher than he had ever managed himself, perhaps even finding work at the royal court. To this end, they were trained intensively, with hours of practice every evening. Caroline was occasionally permitted to join in, but never had quite enough time. Her time was precious and needed to make her brothers’ home life comfortable, so her musical education was never a priority.

Caroline did her best, in many accounts of her early life, to try to come across as selfless and nurturing and accommodating. Now and then, however (and this is one of the reasons she is such a joy to research), she would let her anger show through. She could see the unfairness of it all, though it would take her many years to work out how to redress the balance. When writing, for example, of her rare chances to learn some music, she wrote as evenly as she could that she ‘felt very unhappy that no time at all was left for improving myself in music’. On another occasion, when her cousin came to stay and followed her around presumably trying to be friendly, Caroline complained:

This young woman, full of good nature and ignorance, grew unfortunately so fond of me that she was for ever at my side, and by that means I lost that little interval of leisure I might then have had for reading, practising the violin, etc.

Although she took her responsibilities to her family very seriously, worrying for example how her work would get done if she got sick, growing up with four brothers, all musicians and all starting to find their way in the world, had a profound effect. She had no reason to expect to be able to join them, but she could still envy them just a little.

Then, in 1757, war broke out near where the Herschels lived. Ostensibly this was part of a larger battle (the Seven Years War) between Britain and Prussia on one side and France and its allies on the other. It was about land, colonies and power and was ultimately won by the British side as Britain rose to become the world’s dominant empire. The battle that took place in 1757 at Hastenbeck, however, was less successful for the British/Prussian/Hanoverian armies. The French won and occupied Hanover for several months. The Herschels had soldiers living in their building.

For the battle itself, Isaac had to go to play in the army band on the battlefield. His two eldest sons, Jacob and William, should have gone too. At 14 they had both auditioned and joined the Hanoverian Guards like their father, in their first jobs as professional musicians and Jacob was now 23 and William 19. The life of an army musician in wartime, however, was one of extreme danger, playing unarmed on the front line, and Isaac and Anna were not going risk their sons’ lives if they could help it. Quietly and in secret, they made plans. Caroline helped her mother work into the night, preparing clothing and food for the journey. Then, one night the boys were off, sent to England to seek their fortune as musicians.

England was well known for its opportunities for German and Italian musicians, who were considered to be the best in Europe. Famous contemporary composers – people such as Bach, Vivaldi and Haydn – came disproportionately from those two areas of Europe, and for that reason every fashionable household in England wanted a German or Italian music teacher.

England had another reason for attracting musicians – there was simply more work for them in England than elsewhere in Europe. While in many places, including the Herschels’ home town, musicians had to compete for the small number of positions at court, in England there was a growing market for musicians who could play at the newly established public concert venues and chapels, and in the country homes of the emergent trade and merchant class. Added to that, Isaac had contacts in London whom the boys could call upon. Hanover’s supposed ‘special relationship’ with England at the time also suggested the boys should be fine.

Caroline was 7 years old when her brothers left. Jacob came back soon after when a job at court came up, while William stayed and would, in time, make England his home for the rest of his life. That left Caroline at home with her two remaining brothers, Alexander and Dietrich. She adored Alexander. He was five years older than her and was always happy to spend time with his little sister. They would chat of an evening as their mother spun, Caroline sewed and Alexander tinkered away experimenting with constructing his own telescope or clock.

As a family, they were always busy, the women with endless housework, the men with professional engagements, practice and relaxing with arts and crafts of an evening – and all this in addition to schoolwork. Alexander’s childhood attempts at building scientific instruments was a popular eighteenth-century hobby. Many boys would look back on childhoods spent trying to build clocks, telescopes and globes, although only those who later made it a profession would regard that early play as significant. Alexander was particularly keen, but William also built a globe or two during his fireside evenings as a child. Dietrich, meanwhile, generally preferred to draw or collect, being more drawn to natural history than the mechanics favoured by his brothers.

Over in England, after several years of struggle piecing together a precarious existence as a jobbing musician, travelling around the country and working where he could, William finally found a steady post as organist in a new chapel in Bath. Once settled and established, he sent word to his family in Hanover, and one by one, his brothers came over to try their luck. Jacob went first, staying only for ‘the season’ and then coming home. Alexander, however, liked it very much and decided to stay.

As the boys ventured forth, travelling abroad, mixing in high society (albeit as musicians there only to entertain and occasionally to teach), Caroline continued dutifully to cook, clean, mend and sew, and care for her home and family. However, she began to imagine a future in which the services of a domestically versatile sister might not be needed. When her father died in 1767, the realisation dawned on her that her job caring dutifully for her ageing parents would not last forever, either:

I began to feel great anxiety about my future destination, for I saw that all my exertions would not save me from becoming a burden to my brothers, and I had by this time imbibed too much pride for submitting to take a place as a Ladiesmaid, and for a Governess I was not qualified for want of knowledge in languages.

Her father’s warning that since she was ‘neither handsom nor rich it was not likely that anyone would make me an offer, till perhaps, when far advanced in life, some old man might take me for my good qualities’ came back to haunt her. As marriage was then unlikely, her role was to be indispensable to her family so that they might keep her instead. There were very few options open to working-class women and Caroline had already dismissed almost all of them.

Luckily for her, Alexander was still thinking of her even as he set about building a new life for himself in Bath with William. He thought back to the long walks to school they had shared as children, to their evenings spent diligently working side by side, and to the memory of her embracing every opportunity she was given to snatch a music lesson from her father or hide away and practise when she thought no one could hear or might need her. He persuaded William that their little sister might, with a bit of training, make a good singer to perform at his concerts. They put this to their mother and older brother Jacob, neither of whom was entirely convinced.

Anna was unhappy about any of her children moving away and was not unknown to blame education for giving them the tools with which to leave. Jacob, on the other hand, had simply grown accustomed to having his little sister wait on him and did not like any change that had the potential to inconvenience him. Caroline, however, was delighted and determined to make it work. She now threw herself into even more housework, ensuring the family were well stocked up with clothes before she set off for her two-year trial in England.

William did what he could to alleviate at least Jacob’s concerns. He agreed to pay for a maid to take over some of Caroline’s duties in Hanover so the family would not suffer from her absence too much. Anna, with her ill-expressed grief at the break-up of her family, was overruled, and William came to collect his sister.

Caroline was 22 years old when she arrived in England. She had never left her country before, and had only ventured beyond Hanover very occasionally (there had been her cousin’s wedding, and she would sometimes visit her older, married sister, Sophia, a few towns away). It was quite the culture shock.

The journey itself was horrendous, which did not get her off to a good start. They travelled for twelve days in all, crossing the Low Countries then taking a boat from Utrecht to Yarmouth. The crossing was stormy and, rather alarmingly, the boat lost its mast. From Yarmouth, they continued by horse-drawn cart which again took a rather eventful turn when the horse bolted and the cart was overturned in a ditch. During their brief stop in London, William dragged his physically and emotionally exhausted sister around opticians looking for ideas (he had plans to make telescopes). When they finally arrived in Bath, Caroline had a quick meal and then went to bed, sleeping well into the next day. Travel, she decided, was not for her.

Caroline’s recuperation time from her traumatic journey was very short. The ‘season’ would soon be upon them, and William wanted to get started on her lessons. On her second morning in Bath, her brother asked her to meet him for breakfast at 7 a.m. (‘much too early for me,’ she wrote), to begin her lessons. William taught her English, mathematics (so she could do his accounts) and singing. His housekeeper taught her English cooking. As her English improved she was sent alone (or so she thought) to the market to buy food and haggle with stallholders. Alexander would secretly follow her on those first few trips to ensure she was not taken advantage of as she bought the family’s groceries. As time went on, William brought in extra tutors to teach her how to hold herself on stage and the appropriate ways to act as an English lady. And as she mastered each skill, more and more of William’s day-to-day work – keeping household accounts, training the choir, dealing with staff – was passed onto her.

For William, Caroline and Alexander’s arrival was a terrific boon. With Alexander’s interest and ability in mechanics and Caroline’s apparent willingness to take on more and more of his time-consuming duties, William now found he had the time and skills to take up a hobby that had interested him for a while. He had for some years been reading up on philosophy, natural philosophy (an all-encompassing term, roughly equating to today’s ‘science’) and astronomy.

With his musical reputation now well established, and his siblings around to help out, William began to build his own telescopes with the aim of trying to see some of the astronomical objects he had been reading about. He found a local amateur, who sold him tools and lessons, he bought books that gave him further instruction, and he got started. The house, to Caroline’s dismay, was transformed:

It was to my sorrow that I saw almost every room turned into a workshop. A cabinet maker making a tube and stands of all descriptions in a handsome furnished drawing-room. Alex putting up a huge turning machine … in a bedroom for turning patterns, grinding glasses and turning eye-pieces &c … I was to amuse myself with making the tube of pasteboard against the glasses arrived from London.

This was back in 1773, and it took the siblings several years to work out the perfect design for the telescopes, and longer still to establish a programme of observing that worked for them – in their case, scanning the sky with a telescope section by section, looking for new objects. In that time, their collaboration was successful because each gradually fell into a different, complimentary but equally essential role.

William was in charge, with the big vision and his pick of activities. Alexander was their technical expert; he designed and made the detailed metalwork, the micrometers (for measuring across the eyepiece) and the eyepieces themselves. Caroline, meanwhile, with some help from her brothers, was left with the menial, often unpleasant work. She would, for example, make the mirror moulds ‘from horse dung of which an immense quantity was to be pounded in a morter [sic] and sifted through a fine seaf [sieve]; it was an endless piece of work and served me for many hours’ exercise’. She was also their interpreter, listening and understanding each brother so that she could explain to the other what was needed. With such dramatically different ways of looking at the world – William concerning himself with the very big, Alexander with the very small and detailed – Caroline’s role was invaluable.

Eight years of practice later, all that work paid off, and in a way they could never possibly have predicted. On 13 March 1781 William spotted what he thought was a new and previously undiscovered comet. He sent word to his new friends (friends of a friend in Bath) at the Royal Society. Hasty discussions then followed, there and across the Channel in France, until it was established beyond doubt that this ‘comet’ was in fact something far more impressive. William had discovered a planet.

To put this into context, no one had discovered a planet ever before in the history of the world. The known planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – were all visible to the naked eye and known to all ancient cultures. Along with the Sun and Moon, they were named as gods and form the basis for the names of our days of the week. Telescopes had been around for nearly 200 years when William made his discovery with his small 7ft reflector set up in his back garden in Bath – after 200 years of telescopes, his was the first to unequivocally show us a new planet!

The establishment of this new discovery transformed the Herschels’ lives. William was encouraged to flatter the king as a way of securing royal patronage and so named his new planet Georgium Sidus (‘George’s Star’), after George III. His friends in London campaigned for him to get a court position so he could give up music and devote himself full time to astronomy.

Eventually, a deal was struck and a new post was established, that of ‘Royal Astronomer’ (differentiating it from the ‘Astronomer Royal’ at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and the ‘King’s Astronomer’ at the king’s private observatory in Kew). The pay was not huge – £200 per year, less than the Astronomer Royal and less than he was currently earning as a musician, but still considerably more than a school teacher or clerk – but then very little was required of him for that money. He was expected to move nearer to the king’s main residence, Windsor Castle, and to occasionally bring his telescopes to the palace to entertain royal guests, but that was it.

In the summer of 1782, William and Caroline moved down to a village called Datchet, near Windsor, leaving Alexander behind in Bath to continue his life as a musician. The house they moved into was a wreck. It had been an old hunting lodge and had not been lived in for years. It was falling apart and the grounds were very overgrown. Alexander – down to help them unpack – nearly fell down a well, it was so completely hidden by overgrown weeds.

Getting by on their new reduced income also proved something of a challenge. When William told his good friend William Watson about the deal struck over his salary, Watson exclaimed, ‘Never bought Monarch honour so cheap!’ After that, if anyone asked, he would be extremely vague about the exact figure and only say, ‘the King had provided for him’. Embarrassed as he was, however, it was mostly down to Caroline to work out the details of how in practice they were going to be able to live on less. They did not have a servant in their first few months there, not out of choice but because the lady they had employed at a distance had been imprisoned for theft by the time they arrived and they were unable to find anyone else.

Like all newcomers to London and the Home Counties, then as now, Caroline was shocked to discover everything was much dearer than in her old home. In her autobiographies, she went into some detail about the exact differences in price, even down to the cost of a plate of eggs and bacon – their plans for living cheaply in the country were going to need some refining.

While the cost of living and the state of the house preyed on Caroline’s mind, William was busy hatching other plans for his sister. She wrote:

I found I was to be trained for an assistant Astronomer, and by way of encouragement a Telescope adapted for sweeping consisting of a Tube with two glasses such as are commonly used in a finder, I was to sweep for comets.

It was not something she took to immediately but, like all opportunities with which she found herself presented, she made the best of it. It took several months of regular practice ‘before I felt the least encouragement for spending the starlight nights on a grass-plot covered by dew or hoar frost without a human being near enough to be within call’. Gradually, however, as she got used to the cold and, more importantly, became familiar with the night sky, she actually began to enjoy herself. She felt useful, and she saw the potential she had for slowly developing enough understanding to be able to take part in her brother’s astronomical projects.

By this time, William had begun working on a very specific project. He was attempting to create a catalogue of all the nebulae, star clusters and double stars he could see with his telescopes. Nebulae, as we understand them today, are the regions of space in which the matter needed to form stars is found but has yet to form into, or is only just beginning to form into stars. They are sometimes, rather nicely, described as the birthplace of stars and are sometimes formed out of the material expelled from a dying star as it becomes supernova and explodes. In the Herschels’ time, a nebula (Latin for ‘cloud’) was simply any blurred bit of the night sky that was not easily resolved into a single point of light or star.

Not many people were that interested in nebulae. Most eighteenth-century astronomers concerned themselves almost exclusively with the inside of our solar system. They thought of the star beyond as fixed, unchanging, uninteresting. As telescopes became more powerful, it was assumed by those who gave the matter any thought that eventually nebulae would no longer exist. If nebulae were the unexplained blurs in the night sky, presumably very powerful telescopes could resolve those blurs into individual stars. It might be that they were groups of stars (star clusters) or pairs (double stars). The idea that some might continue to appear as blurs, however much they were magnified, was not yet a defined theory – and no one at this stage had ever heard of a ‘galaxy’. William’s plan was to systematically scan the sky with his powerful telescopes, looking at the blurs and trying to resolve them, identifying which were star clusters, which were double stars and which still appeared as blurs or nebulae even with the increased magnification his telescopes offered.

William’s telescopes had been established – thanks to considerable testing, after his discovery of Uranus – as being among the most powerful in the world. This put him in an excellent position to create a catalogue of such objects. Catalogues of this type had been produced before – Charles Messier had created one a few years earlier – but their purpose was different. Nebulae, star clusters and double stars were not very well understood in the eighteenth century, since to the naked eye most just look like single stars. Look at them through a powerful enough telescope, however, and they might still look blurry, but you may be able to pick out individual stars in a pair, for example. To eighteenth-century astronomers, these objects were regarded simply as a hindrance to comet hunters. No one really cared what they were – astronomers in the eighteenth century were mostly concerned with our solar system, how it moved, distances between bodies, what predictions and laws might be deduced; the ‘fixed stars’ beyond were of little interest, but they did need to know where they were, so that they were not mistaken for comets, which often looked very similar. So, Messier produced a catalogue of objects not to be confused with comets. By the 1780s, Messier had catalogued around eighty nebulae and star clusters – William was on track to catalogue around 2,000.

Caroline began observing in August 1782. As early as February 1783 she had found her first nebulae, which she gave to William for his catalogue. William footnoted his catalogue to acknowledge her contribution. By the end of the same year, she complained of only having found fourteen nebulae, attributing this apparently small number to the many times her sweeping was interrupted ‘by being employed with writing down my Brother’s observations with the large 20-feet’. This was how her training as an astronomer progressed. On the one hand, she was being trained to help her brother observe; on the other, she kept herself busy making her own observations whenever time would allow.

To catalogue a star, you must take measurements or observations of two co-ordinates: you need to know the angular height of your star (its height in degrees above the horizon), and the exact time of your observation (since the Earth turns, making a different part of the sky visible at different times). William was, by this time, using very large, unwieldy telescopes. He had progressed from his 7ft reflector (with which he had single-handedly discovered Uranus) onto a 10ft and then a 20ft telescope. The latter required several workmen to manoeuvre and a communication system for relaying observations to Caroline, who was stationed in a small hut on the ground. William needed a workman to help him move his 20ft telescope tube to the position he wanted to observe, and he needed to sit high up on a platform to see into the eyepiece. All this meant that he needed an assistant. He would shout down his observation, and Caroline, from a small shed, her clock and notebook lit by candlelight in front of her, would note down his observation and the time.

In Hanover, Caroline had always kept herself busy, making use of every free moment to try to learn music or seek out training in all sorts of domestic and decorative skills. Now an astronomer, she did the same, prioritising her work serving her family – this time as her brother’s astronomical assistant – but, at the same time, filling her spare time with self-improvement. What seems extraordinary is that, while William needed large telescopes, an assistant and workmen to discover his nebulae, Caroline was able to add some herself after only a few months of interrupted study and practice, observing on her own and with a much smaller instrument.

After just a few years of living in their house in Datchet, the Herschels decided to move. The house was near a river, and the cold, damp nights were making William ill. The house they moved to, called ‘Clay Hall’, was owned by ‘a litigious woman who told him [William] he must expect to have the rent raised every year according to the improvements he was making on the premises’. Unsurprisingly, they moved again soon after, on 3 April 1786, to a house in Slough. This was to become known as ‘Observatory House’ and was to be home to the Herschel family for the next two centuries.

In the nearly fourteen years that Caroline had been living in England, learning to be first a musician then an astronomer, the world around her had changed dramatically. Throughout the 1770s, tensions had been growing and revolution was brewing. Britain seemed fairly stable in comparison to the rest of the world, although it was, in many cases, responsible for the instabilities elsewhere. But there was a sense, certainly within intellectual circles, that these political protests could have some future meaning for Britain. If a change in power – so that the ‘middling sort’ rather than the current ruling aristocracy had some say in how the country was run – could work elsewhere, why not in Britain? Many, including several scientifically minded friends of the Herschels, were watching with keen interest.

Over in America, the Boston Tea Party took place in 1773. Demonstrators stole onto British East India Company ships and threw huge boxes of tea overboard in protest against new British tax policies. This was the start of the American Revolution. America was officially declared independent of British rule in 1783.

In France, teenagers Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette became king and queen in 1774, inheriting huge debts. Their attempts at reform mostly failed (the Edict of Tolerance, which overturned many legal inequalities between people of different faiths, was an exception). The population, meanwhile, was starving after a series of poor harvests, and absolute monarchy, it was felt more and more, was no way to run a country.

Back in England, rulers appeared to be doing a lot better. Despite the loss of America, the British Empire was growing. In the 1770s, Captain James Cook had been sent on a series of expeditions to discover and claim new lands. The first had been presented as a scientific mission, to view the transit of Venus and make observations that astronomers could analyse and use to calculate the size of the solar system. It was only in secret that he had been instructed also to go further, and try to seek out (and claim for the British) the mysterious Southern Continent.