Abstract
Mary Somerville had many blessings. In addition to her obvious intellectual gifts, she had 92 years of active life, an elegance of form which she retained into old age, and a beauty of disposition and a sympathy that gave her the gift of friendship. She was also practical and tough-minded, with no time for woolliness or pretence: a hard-headed individual in a romantic age.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Maria Edgeworth to Miss Ruxton, 17 January 1822. Copy of letter in Somerville Papers, Bodleian MS. Dep.c. 370. MSB. 3–34, Collection ‘E’. This same letter is also printed in Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections (London, 1873), 156, though it is headed ‘Maria Edgeworth to Miss…’, without any reference to Miss Ruxton. The reason for the omission of Miss Ruxton’s name in the printed text is uncertain, as it is clearly spelt on the above-mentioned Bodleian Library document. As this document, Dep. c. 370, seems to be an early nineteenth-century copy of the original letter, however, the omission may possibly be due to an error of transcription.
- 2.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 227.
- 3.
Elizabeth C. Patterson, Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science, 1815–1840 (Martinus Nijhoff, Kluwer, Boston, The Hague, Lancaster, 1983), 1. Elizabeth C. Patterson, Mary Somerville (Oxford, 1979), 7–9. Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 20.
- 4.
This passage about childhood swearing appears under Mary Somerville’s own hand in the First Autobiographical draft: Bodleian Library, Somerville Papers Dep. c. 355 MSAU-3, p. 5, but a later editor (probably Martha Somerville) has cut the entire passage out of the page with scissors, leaving a 5 × 4-inch hole in the sheet. The offending passage was restored by Dorothy McMillan (ed.), Queen of Science. The Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville (Canongate Classics 102, Edinburgh, 2001), 9.
- 5.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 47.
- 6.
See [1].
- 7.
- 8.
The Home Life of Sir David Brewster, by his daughter Mrs. Gordon (Edinburgh, 1869). Also James Nasmyth [n.7], 63–95.
- 9.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 54.
- 10.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 60.
- 11.
E. Patterson, Mary Somerville [n.3], 11–12. E. Patterson, Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science [n.3], 5.
- 12.
For the mathematical innovations, see Ivor Gratton-Guinness, ‘The young mathematician’, in John Herschel, 1792–1871: A Bicentennial Commemoration, ed. D.G. King-Hele, F.R.S. (Royal Society, London, 1992), 17–28. For Oxford’s astronomical excellence, see A. Chapman, ‘Oxford’s Newtonian School’, in Oxford Figures. 800 Years of Mathematics, ed. John Fauvel, Raymond Flood and Robin Wilson (Oxford University Press, 2000 [ed. 2]?), 137–149.
- 13.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 80.
- 14.
Lady Margaret Brodie Stewart Herschel makes many references in her correspondence to the abuses to which newly-freed slaves were subjected at the Cape of Good Hope in 1834: Lady Herschel’s Letters from the Cape, 1834–1838, ed. Brian Warner (Friends of the South African Library, Cape Town, 1991), 43, 50, etc.
- 15.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], p.30, for Oxford visit, though she does not give a date. February 1829 is given in E. Patterson, Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science [n.3], 53.
- 16.
Dr. William Somerville to the Revd Prof. Adam Sedgwick, April 1832, in The Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick LL.D. D.C.L., F.R.S., vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1890), 388.
- 17.
Mary Somerville to Sedgwick, Chelsea, 25 April 1832: Life and Letters of… Sedgwick [n.16], 389. For Kater’s work on the physics of vibrating pendulums and their experimental applications, see Henry Kater, ‘An Account of Experiments for Determining the Length of the Pendulum vibrating Seconds in the Latitude of London’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 108 (1818), 33–102.
- 18.
No date for the evening with the Katers is given in Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 130; nor is there any reference to the occasion in George Peacock’s Life of Thomas Young M.D., F.R.S., & C. (London, 1855). It probably took place some time just before or after 1820, however, when Young was doing his work on the ancient Egyptian language and script. At that time (c.1801–1826) he was living at 48 Welbeck Street, London: Life, 468 and 253. Unfortunately Peacock’s Life contains neither an index nor an itemised contents page, so that searching for a reference to a particular event is not easy. I have, nonetheless, looked through the most seemingly relevant chapters: VI, VIII, X, XII, XIV, and XV.
- 19.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 131. For Young’s work on Egyptian hieroglyphs after 1814, see George Peacock, Life of Thomas Young [n.18], 258–344.
- 20.
A. Chapman, The Victorian Amateur Astronomer. Independent Astronomical Research in Britain 1820–1920 (Praxis-Wiley, Chichester and New York, 1998), 3–11. For Mary Somerville’s £300 Civil List Pension, see Elizabeth Patterson, Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science [n.3], 153–155.
- 21.
L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday (Chapman and Hall, London, 1956), 196.
- 22.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 108–121. The original Journal of her 1817–1818 continental travels is in a small green notebook commencing ‘17th July. With a fair wind we embarked at Dover 10 min before 12 in the King George Packet…’: Bodleian Library, Somerville Papers, Dep. c. 355 MSAU-1 Book No. 2.
- 23.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 110.
- 24.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 112–113.
- 25.
Jane Marcet, Conversations on Chemistry, in which the Elements of that Science are familiarly explained and illustrated by Experiments, 2 vols. (1806). L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday [n.21], 19, 20.
- 26.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 121–122.
- 27.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 185–186. Elizabeth Patterson, Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science [n.3], 100–108.
- 28.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.1], 192–193.
References
Lubbock, C. A. (1993). The Herschel Chronicle. The life-story of William Herschel and his sister Caroline Herschel (pp. 73–74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nasmyth, J. (1889). James Nasmyth, engineer: An autobiography. In S. Smiles (Ed.) (pp. 18–62). London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Kemp, M. (1970). Alexander Nasmyth and the style of graphic eloquence. In The Connoisseur (93–99).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chapman, A. (2015). Early Life, Career and Friends: The Social World of Georgian Science. In: Mary Somerville and the World of Science. SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09399-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09399-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09398-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09399-4
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)