<![CDATA["One of the most gifted writers of her generation." ~Pat Conroy

         Christmas Hollies

  By

Julia Markus

               Christmas Day found Lady Byron alone. For the first time she was not celebrating the season with her daughter Ada, her son-in-law William and her grandchildren at the Lovelace estate.   Instead, in 1851 she sat in the first pew of the Trinity Chapel at Brighton. Annabella Noel Byron, in her late 50s, still maintained her slight figure and “pippin” face as Lord Byron called it long ago.   Her flawless complexion and empathetic blue eyes seemed framed by her white hair and delicate widow’s cap and her posture was straight as she sat. Her best friend in her later years, handsome, vital, thirty- four year old Reverend Frederick Robertson was conducting the service. They were soul mates. Some recent writers thought them, even with the age difference, lovers. They were not.

            Lady Byron by then had founded the first Infants Schools and Co-Operative Schools in England for the children of the working poor, and along with Robertson of Brighton, as he would become known, helped establish the Working Men’s Institute of Brighton during that year of revolutions all through Europe, 1848.   If a new social order was to be formed “I dare to be poor!” Lady Byron proclaimed --and meant it.   She was a blazing progressive. Harriet Beecher Stowe would say Lady Byron did more for England with her schools and her silent philanthropy than any other one person of her time.

               Still, for all Lady Byron’s good deeds and meaningful friendship with Robertson, this Christmas service did not mark a happy occasion. Daughter Ada was not talking to her and that was why she was alone for the holiday season.

              Since nineteen-year old Ada married William King fifteen years before, Lady Byron had called Ada’s husband, a mature, serious. aristocrat 10 years older than her daughter,   “the comfort of my life.” Before then, Lady Byron had raised her temperamental, genius of a daughter as a single mother, something unheard of in her class. Lord Byron left England as soon as the separation papers were signed and never looked back—except in his poetry. In verse he painted himself a perfect father.   William finally offered Lady Byron “a father’s arm” as she called it in her poetry:   A stable man to help her keep her brilliant, naïve, adventurous daughter on the straight and narrow.   Lady Byron couldn’t do enough for her “Crow” as William was called because of his dark eyebrows. Lady Byron was the“Hen” and Ada the “Birdie”. It was a barnyard love fest.   Within a year of the marriage, because of Lady Byron’s influence at Court, the teenaged Queen Victoria elevated Lady Byron’s children. William King became the first Earl of Lovelace and Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, as she is known today.

                  Once Ada had her first son, only daughter, then second son in quick succession, she wrote to her mother—memorably—“I wished for an heir, never should have desired a child.” Lady Byron helped Ada find appropriate nannies, and Ada continued her mathematical studies.   Lord Byron once called his wife his “princess of parallelograms” and Ada inherited her mother’s scientific acumen and through her mother was given access to the finest mathematical minds of her time as tutors and as friends.

                 So by Christmas, 1851 Ada had already written her now-famous “Notes” to an article she had translated which praised friend Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine”. That Engine, if built, would have predated our modern computer. It would have run on the Nineteenth Century’s microchip-- steam, and it would compute information. In her “Notes,” to Menebrea’s article Ada included an algorithm she created to illustrate how such an Engine could be programmed. The Engine would not have the ability “of anticipating” truths but would have the ability to “follow analysis” giving us access to all that was already known. Sound familiar? Google anyone?

               A variation of her prescient software program would be used by the United States Military in the 1980s and named “ADA” in honor of this pioneer of computer science. One can imagine Ada and Babbage walking into an Apple store today, and rather than reeling about in confusion, after adjusting to the small sizes of these 21st Century “Engines”, in unison crying out “Aha!” But all of this was part of a future they could only foresee, though Ada, with that naive grandiosity of hers, wrote often to her mother of seeking to be “great,” of her genius rising and then falling like the sun into exquisite twilight. Turns out she was right.

               However, after she wrote that first computer program, the Byronic part of Ada’s nature took over and she used her mathematical genius to program winners of horse races. She lost a fortune, and made sure none of her friends informed her mother.

                But William, in June, 1851, burst in on his loving mother-in-law late one night, expecting sympathy as he revealed Ada’s catastrophic losses. Instead, “Genius is always a child!” Lady Byron cried out. How could Lovelace allow impressionable Ada to go to the fashionable meets alone.   He knew what “overweening confidence” Ada had in her abilities!   Why hadn’t Ada told the truth last spring when she came to her mother asking to borrow money ostensibly for books, music, court clothes. “She might have had as many thousands as I gave her hundreds.” The next morning, when the Crow came to his Hen, she refused to see him. The halcyon years of pet names was at an end, as was the illusion of Lovelace’s steadfast fatherly arm.

               Ada, using Lady Byron’s treatment of her husband as an excuse, cut contact with her mother, most probably embarrassed by her lies being exposed. In truth,   Ada was more invested in her unscrupulous lover than her husband in those days. Despite Ada ignoring her, Lady Byron sent a mutual friend to get a list of her daughter’s debts and she paid them all off.

                Even after that grand gesture, Lady Byron sat at Christmas without her children and grandchildren surrounding her.    However, things can always get worse.   Robertson rose to deliver the Christmas sermon—and collapsed at the pulpit. His wife and Lady Byron rushed to him. Though he revived, as Lady Byron put it, “The hollies seemed to change to cypresses.”

                   The hollies were changing for Ada as well. “Such a day,” Lady Byron wrote to Robertson of her reunion with her daughter in London that Spring of 1852. “I believe I am now in possession of all that has been so studiously kept from me.”   Ada was ill herself and “in her own words” believed the “wisest course for her was to consider me as her best friend. Ada thought it “may save her life, and be of the greatest consequences in other ways.”

                     It is almost a given in family relationships that love between mother and daughter often has a critical edge to it, whereas love between daughter and father seems unconditional—even an absent, seductive father, like Lord Byron who had in life abandoned Ada, but in poetry embraced her.

                      When Ada was a child of 12, she invented a flying machine with a steam engine in its belly to deliver letters and receive them speedily from her mother: “I wish that supposing I fly well by the time you come back you would, if you are satisfied with my performance, present me with a crown of laurels, but it must only be on condition that I fly well,” the child wrote.

                Now Ada had her mother all to herself—day and night—and perhaps that was what she needed all her life. Lady Byron would lament, “To see clearly too late.” She couldn’t stop thinking “of what Might have been.” Yet in the months she was caregiver to Ada, who was finally properly diagnosed as having uterine cancer, Lady Byron did not lament. She was her honest self with Ada, but when her daughter opened her eyes, she always saw her mother’s cheerful face, no matter how exhausted Lady Byron was. Lady Byron recorded these months in a journal that allowed her some release.   “Can God be proved?” Ada asked when she awoke after one heart rendering seizure.

                     Can you prove what I feel towards you, Ada? Yet can you disbelieve it?” her mother replied.

                          Ada requested good friend Charles Dickens to come to read to her. The household staff, as well as Lady Byron and her beloved granddaughter and namesake young Annabella listened.   That granddaughter, the future Lady Anne Blunt, would one day ride horseback, the only woman, through the Arabian desert and would preserve the Arabian steed from extinction.   But as a young girl, watching her mother suffer, she asked her grandmother only, “Whatever will Daddy do?”

                   Dicken’s sonorous voice rang out, reading the death scene of Dombey and Sons as Ada requested, ending with “ The old, old fashioned---Death!”   If death had any art to it at all, Dicken’s reading would have brought down Ada’s curtain. But she would linger another three months, her mother her comfort day and night

                    Lady Byron knew Ada didn’t want to be buried at the Lovelace estate—by then Ada had informed her husband that his friend John Crosse had been her lover, and Lady Byron was incensed when Lovelace did not take that news well. It was she who suggested that Ada might wish to be buried by her father at Newstead.   “Ada’s face lighted up with pleasure and relief.” Those arrangements were already made, but Ada hadn’t told her mother: “I thought you would be angry with me.”

                    “I was secretly wounded by Ada’s reserve,” Lady Byron wrote, but “My journal is not to be feelings of my own—away with them!”

                   Even in their new intimacy, Lady Byron was still Lady Byron shooing away her feelings and Ada was still Ada, keeping a secret about wanting to be with her father that might displease her mother.

                  Ada told her mother that she never learned from experience, that she would “experiment” and if it proved disastrous would “experiment” again. Knowing the end was near, sensing she would die at 36, the same age as her father, Ada had regrets at not having done more while she lived.

                “I pointed out to her few thinking minds ever felt their ends accomplished, yet the survivors have been influenced by those lives in an unforeseen manner leading us to believe that the ends or our existence are hidden from us.”

              Were truer words ever spoken?

                This Christmas we celebrate the 200tho anniversary of Ada, Countess of Lovelace’s birth on 10 December 1815. Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science will be culminating a three -month celebration of Ada’s legacy running through December.   There are times in all our lives when the hollies turn to cypresses, but the cypresses themselves can give root to wondrous things. This Christmas we might turn a thought to what Ada did accomplish in life and acknowledge as well, along with its human imperfections, the power of mother love.

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