Scottish Beginnings

Abstract

Mrs. Mary Fairfax Greig Somerville, who became ‘the queen of [nineteenth- century] science’,¹ was born on 26 December 1780 in the manse at Jedburgh, the home of an aunt, Martha Charters Somerville, who later became her mother-in-law. Her own mother, Margaret Charters Fairfax, who barely reached this border town before the baby arrived, was on her way back to Edinburgh from London, where she had seen her naval husband off on a long tour of sea duty. The new mother was very ill after her confinement and the infant was suckled by her sister, Mrs. Somerville, herself lately a mother. This sort of oddity — being born in the house of, and suckled by, a future mother-in-law — is characteristic of the unusual fortune, generally benign, that attended the child throughout her long life.