"Ragged and dirty, and covered with vermin": The Mudlark

DVD cover of The Mudlark (1950). Image source: Amazon.ca

The (modern) mudlarks

My partner follows on social media a loosely affiliated group of amateur (and sometimes professional) historians and archaeologists who call themselves mudlarks. Modern mudlarks comb the foreshore of the River Thames looking for artifacts from the past: Roman coins or mosaic fragments, medieval pilgrim badges, Tudor signet rings, Stuart pottery shards, Georgian clay pipes, Regency shoe buckles, Victorian pub tokens, and buttons, handmade pins, keys, bottles, and other objects from the everyday life of many eras. Below Teddington Lock (about halfway between Windsor and central London) the Thames is a tidal river, with a maximum difference of about 7.5 meters (nearly 25 feet) between high and low tides at London's Tower Bridge, according to the Port of London's 2023 Tide Tables. As a result of this powerful daily surge of millions of gallons of water, detritus from the river accumulates on the foreshore with every tide.

The modern mudlarks have formed an association (the Society of Thames Mudlarks) and submit any find that is sufficiently ancient or valuable to the Museum of London for review. While some metal-detectorists also work the foreshore, true mudlarks rely solely on keen eyesight (aided, perhaps, by headlamps in the dawn and evening hours) to discover their treasures.

Malcolm Russell, in Wellingtons, kneepads and headlamp, mudlarking on the north shore of the Thames River in the City of London near the Cannon Street Railway Bridge. Photo credit: Matthew Williams-Ellis. Image source: Thames & Hudson

There are several fascinating books about mudlarking and how serendipitous finds of cast-off, lost or broken objects illuminate the social and cultural history of the metropolis. Among the many books on mudlarking my partner recommends:

Image source: The New Yorker

• Lara Maiklem: Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames, Liveright, 2021. From the jacket: "interweaving reflections from her own life with meditations on the art of wandering, Maiklem ultimately delivers. . .a timeless treatise on the objects we leave in our wake, and the stories they can reveal if only we take a moment to look."

Image source: Princeton University Press

• Malcolm Russell: Mudlark’d: Hidden Histories from the River Thames, Princeton University Press, 2022. Russell's profusely illustrated book tells "stories of forgotten people told through lost objects," covering enslaved people and immigrants; "mollies," "toms," courting couples and sex workers; artists and entertainers; criminals and addicts; street sellers, hawkers and quacks, among other urban subcultures.

Image source: Abebooks.com

• Jason Sandy and Nick Stevens: Thames Mudlarking: Searching for London's Lost Treasures, Shire, 2021. With Stevens' photographs on every page, this slim volume (under 100 pages) spans millennia, describing objects from prehistory to the (near-)present. It features chapters on megafauna, ritual offerings, medieval society, disasters, drinking culture, and World War II, among others.

(Left) A late-Victorian-era skirt lifter to keep the hems of women's dresses from getting soiled in the streets; (right) an 1899 halfpenny with "Votes for Women" stamped over Queen Victoria's profile. From Malcolm Russell: Mudlark’d: Hidden Histories from the River Thames. Image source: Thames & Hudson

The (Victorian) mudlarks

But 150 years ago mudlarking was something very different. In the 19th century the Thames was not only a working waterway packed with steamships, sailing vessels and coal barges, but also London's open sewer, where human and animal waste was dumped. What is now Farringdon Street/A201 was previously a canal known as Fleet Ditch, which ran from Hampstead through King's Cross, Clerkenwell and Holborn to the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge. Until it was finally covered over in the 19th century, Fleet Ditch flowed past Smithfield Meat Market, whose offal would be swept into the Fleet and washed into the Thames with every rainstorm, as graphically described in Jonathan Swift's poem "A Description of a City Shower" (1710):

Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell
What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell. . .
Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.

As London's population increased from about 1 million in 1801 to over 6 million by the end of the 19th century, the pollution of the Thames grew ever worse. In June and July 1858 the city was subjected to the Great Stink, during which a choking, putrid stench from the river and its waste-covered foreshore spread over the city. In a Parliamentary debate on 15 July 1858, Benjamin Disraeli, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, noted that the Thames, "that noble river. . .has really become a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors."

The Mud-Lark, from a Daguerreotype by Beard. Illustration from Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, v. 2, "The Street-Folk," between pages 136 and 137. Image source: Internet Archive

Mudlarks worked on the reeking, contaminated river scavenging coal, wood, rope, metal, lumps of fat, and anything else saleable from the muck of the foreshore and shallows. In Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 4 ("Those That Will Not Work" [1], 1861), his co-author John Binny reported that mudlarks are "boys and girls, varying in age from eight to fourteen or fifteen; with some persons of more advanced years. For the most part they are ragged, and in a very filthy state. . .As soon as the tide is out they make their appearance, and remain till it comes in" (pp. 366-367). Binny provided a "Narrative of a Mudlark" whom he guessed to be about 13:

About two years ago I left school, and commenced to work as a mudlark on the river, in the neighbourhood of Millwall [on the Isle of Dogs], picking up pieces of coal, and iron, and copper, and bits of canvas on the bed of the river, or of wood floating on the surface. . .When the barge-men heave coals to be carried from their barge to the shore, pieces drop into the water among the mud, which we afterwards pick up. Sometimes we wade in the mud to the ancle, at other times to the knee. Sometimes pieces of coal do not sink, but remain on the surface of the mud; at other times we seek for them with our hands and feet. . .

Some of the mudlarks are orphan boys and have no home. In the summer time they often sleep in the barges or in sheds or stables or cow-houses, with their clothes on. Some of them have not a shirt, others have a tattered shirt which is never washed, as they have no father nor mother, nor friend to care for them. Some of these orphan lads. . .are ragged and dirty, and covered with vermin. (pp. 371-372)

The Mudlark (1950)

The title character of the 1950 film The Mudlark, which is set in the late Victorian era, is just such an orphan—a boy named Wheeler (Andrew Ray) who is about 10 years old. One night while searching the body of a drowned sailor that has washed up on the foreshore he finds a cameo of Queen Victoria. He doesn't recognize the image, but is told by a fence that the queen is "the mother of all England." When he learns that the queen lives at Windsor Castle the motherless boy decides to go there to see her. He manages to sneak past the guards into Windsor, and wanders in the vast halls in a daze until he discovers an empty banquet room.

Wheeler (Andrew Ray) exploring Windsor Castle in The Mudlark (1950). Image source: RareFilmFinder

A formal dinner is being held that night, and when an Irish maid, Kate Noonan (Constance Smith) enters the banquet room to complete the final preparations she discovers Wheeler. She doesn't sound the alarm, but can't smuggle him out of the castle until after the banquet. As the queen and her guests enter, Wheeler hides behind the curtains. Lying in the darkness he falls asleep, and his snoring leads to his discovery. Consternation among the residents of Windsor and a good scrub and delousing for Wheeler follow. John Brown (Finlay Currie), the queen's personal servant and confidant, takes the boy in hand and, once he realizes that he means no harm, gives him a tour of the castle; others surrounding the queen want the boy to be punished, and rumors start to fly that he is part of an Irish plot on the queen's life.

Queen Victoria (Irene Dunne) is still secluded in mourning for her husband Prince Albert, who died nearly 15 years earlier. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (Alec Guinness) has tried to convince her to show herself to her subjects in support of his reform projects, to no avail.

Prime Minister Disraeli (Alec Guinness) and Queen Victoria (Irene Dunne) in The Mudlark. Image source: TMDB.org

But when the queen finally meets the mudlark—he hides away in Windsor Castle a second time—she realizes that the time has come for her to reconsider her isolation at Windsor and re-enter public life.

The Mudlark, written and produced by Nunnally Johnson, is based on the 1949 novel of the same title by San Francisco writer and editor Theodore Bonnet. The novel and film fictionalize and relocate in both time and place the real-life incursion of 14-year-old Edward Jones ("the boy Jones") into Buckingham Palace in December 1838. [2] The Mudlark's visit to Windsor to see the queen is set in 1875, around the time that Disraeli's government was proposing a series of reform bills in Parliament, including:

• The Factories (Health of Women, &c.) Act, 1874, which raised the minimum age of factory employees to those who would turn 10 by 1876; limited the work of women and children in factories to a maximum of 10 hours, and the longest period of continuous work before an (unpaid) 1-hour meal break to 4.5 hours (meaning that women and children could be on site for a total of 12 hours, 10 of which were paid); established the earliest (6 am) and latest (8 pm) hours that women and children could be required to do factory work; and limited the factory work week to 6 days, with Saturdays a "half day" of 6 hours of manufacturing labor plus a half hour on additional tasks (such as cleaning). The Act did not apply to adult men, agricultural laborers, or miners;
• The Artizans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act, 1875, which promoted slum clearance and the development of new housing for workers;
• The Conspiracy, and Protection of Property Act, 1875, which excluded workers who were nonviolently striking and picketing from being charged with crimes of conspiracy;
• The Employers and Workmen Act, 1875, which defined servants as employees under contract and enabled workers as well as employers to sue in the civil courts if the terms of those contracts were abrogated (though in practice the costs of bringing suits were generally prohibitive for workers);
• The Public Health Act, 1875, which promoted the construction of municipal sewage systems and required new housing to include running water and sheltered privies, though earthclosets (latrines) were still permitted;
• The Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1875, which forbade the adulteration of food and drugs;
• The Elementary Education Act, 1876, which required children to be educated to proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and restricted (but did not ban) the employment of children age 10 or younger.

Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, albumen cabinet card (detail) by Mayall, circa 1868. Image source: National Portrait Gallery NPG x46496

The Mudlark's writer-producer Johnson and director Jean Negulesco were Hollywood-based, but the bulk of the film's cast and crew were British. The only American actor is Irene Dunne, the star of Roberta (1935), The Awful Truth (1937), and My Favorite Wife (1940), among many other films, who was unrecognizable to me in her prosthetic padding and with her (credible) British accent. Alec Guinness also does not look very much like himself, but does bear a strong resemblance to the historical Disraeli—all the more remarkable given that in 1875 Disraeli would have been over 70, while at the time of filming Guinness was just turning 36. (The makeup was by David Aylott.)

Guinness's excellent performance as Disraeli is capped by a stirring speech in Parliament in defense of his proposed legislation for improving conditions for working-class children. Referring to Wheeler, he asks, "How did this child manage to escape us? How did he manage to reach the age of 10 in the face of all that we did to prevent it?" Astonishingly, this speech, which goes on for nearly 7 minutes of the film's 99-minute runtime, is shot in a single continuous take, and of course it wins the day for reform. In reality the end of child labor, along with the establishment of the 8-hour workday and the five-day workweek, would take many more years of working-class struggle to achieve in Britain, and in our century remain to be achieved for those who harvest our food, sew our clothes, and assemble our electronic devices. Despite its paternalistic picture of social change and its elision of Disraeli's mixed legacy as Prime Minister (including his support of British imperialism), The Mudlark is very much worth seeing for Guinness's performance and for its glimpse of mudlarking's grim past on the Thames.

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1. In addition to mudlarks, Mayhew classifies among "those who will not work" prostitutes, thieves, swindlers, and beggars, including "naval and military beggars," "shipwrecked mariners," "blown-up miners," "bodily afflicted beggars," "starved-out manufacturers" [i.e., factory workers], "unemployed agriculturalists" [i.e., farmworkers], and "hand-loom weavers, &c." who had been permanently replaced by machines. Mayhew had a curious sense of what constitutes an unwillingness to work. ^ Return
2. Queen Victoria was not in the palace at the time, but at Windsor. Jones, who was spotted, chased, arrested and acquitted, entered Buckingham Palace twice more, in 1840 and 1841, and both times was arrested and sent to prison. Later he was arrested twice for loitering in the vicinity of the Palace, and finally "encouraged" to emigrate to Australia. Not quite the charming urchin of The Mudlark. During her long reign Victoria would survive eight assassination attempts. ^ Return

“My sin was great, but my punishment was greater”: East Lynne

Mrs. Ellen Wood by Joseph Sydney Willis Hodges, 1875.
Photo credit: Worcester Guildhall, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND. Image source: Art UK

Ellen Wood's East Lynne (1861) is like half a dozen Victorian novels in one. It involves a murder mystery (as in Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853)), a murder trial (as in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848)), marital misapprehension (as in Emily Eden's The Semi-Attached Couple (1860)), a woman concealing her past (as in Maria Edgeworth's Helen (1834)), female self-sacrifice (as in Gaskell's Ruth (1853)), and not one but two death-bed scenes (as in Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)).

There are two intertwined main narratives in East Lynne. The first is the story of the murder of Afy Hallijohn's father by one of the flirtatious girl's many suitors. ("Afy" is pronounced "Affy"; her full name, fittingly, is Aphrodite.) Suspicion falls on Richard Hare, whose gun was used in the killing and who fled the town of West Lynne the night of the murder and hasn't been seen since. (Or has he?) Richard's father, a local magistrate who is upright to a fault, condemns his own son and vows to send him to the scaffold if he reappears. Believing him innocent, Richard's younger sister Barbara enlists the help of a longtime family friend, conscientious solicitor Archibald Carlyle, to try to clear her brother's name. Complicating matters is that Barbara is deeply in love with Mr. Carlyle, but he doesn't recognize it.

The second narrative concerns Mr. Carlyle's marriage to Lady Isabel Vane (the homophony with "vain," in the senses of foolish and proud, is probably not accidental). Lady Isabel's father died heavily in debt, leaving her "completely destitute." Mr. Carlyle sees her distress, and swayed by her youth, beauty, and "bitter dependence" on unsympathetic relatives, offers her his hand, heart, and comfortable home of East Lynne. Complicating matters is that Lady Isabel loves another man, the handsome but caddish Francis Levison.

. . .her head was aching with perplexity. The stumbling block that she could not get over was Francis Levison. She saw Mr. Carlyle approach from her window, and went down to the drawing-room, not in the least knowing what her answer was to be; a shadowy idea was presenting itself, that she would ask him for longer time, and write her answer.

In the drawing-room was Francis Levison, and her heart beat wildly; which said beating might have convinced her that she ought not to marry another. . .

"Mr. Carlyle. . .seems an out-and-out good fellow, Isabel, and I congratulate you."

"What!" she uttered.

"Don’t start. We are all in the family, and my lady [Lady Isabel's guardian] told; I won’t betray it abroad. She says East Lynne is a place to be coveted; I wish you happiness, Isabel."

"Thank you," she returned in a sarcastic tone, though her throat beat and her lips quivered. "You are premature in your congratulations, Captain Levison."

"Am I? Keep my good wishes, then, till the right man comes. I am beyond the pale myself, and dare not think of entering the happy state," he added, in a pointed tone. "I have indulged dreams of it, like others, but I cannot afford to indulge them seriously; a poor man, with uncertain prospects, can only play the butterfly, perhaps to his life’s end."

He quitted the room as he spoke. It was impossible for Isabel to misunderstand him, but a feeling shot across her mind, for the first time, that he was false and heartless. One of the servants appeared, showing in Mr. Carlyle; nothing false or heartless about him. He closed the door, and approached her, but she did not speak, and her lips were white and trembling. Mr. Carlyle waited.

"Well," he said at length, in a gentle tone, "have you decided to grant my prayer?"

"Yes. But——" She could not go on. What with one agitation and another, she had difficulty in conquering her emotion. "But—I was going to tell you——"

"Presently," he whispered, leading her to a sofa, "we can both afford to wait now. Oh, Isabel, you have made me very happy!"

"I ought to tell you, I must tell you," she began again, in the midst of hysterical tears. "Though I have said 'yes' to your proposal, I do not—yet——It has come upon me by surprise," she stammered. "I like you very much; I esteem and respect you; but I do not love you."

"I should wonder if you did. But you will let me earn your love, Isabel?"

"Oh, yes," she earnestly answered. "I hope so."

He drew her closer to him, bent his face, and took from her lips his first kiss. Isabel was passive; she supposed he had gained the right to do so. "My dearest! It is all I ask." (Ch. XII)

From her tearful confession to her future husband that she does not love him, to her acceptance of his kiss with the thought that "she supposed he had gained the right to do so," this proposal scene is a devastating depiction of Lady Isabel's emotional state as she enters her marriage. But as Mrs. Wood also makes clear, like many women of her time Lady Isabel has few alternatives.

Apart from her lack of romantic feelings for her husband—a condition surely shared by many Victorian wives—the first few years of the marriage involve additional tribulations for Lady Isabel. Although motherhood provides some consolation, the household at East Lynne includes Mr. Carlyle's domineering sister Cornelia, who refuses to yield to her the place of mistress of the house, countermands her orders to the servants, and even interferes in the raising of her children. 

Then Lady Isabel begins to notice that her husband is meeting with the beautiful Barbara Hare in odd places at odd hours. Their semi-clandestine meetings are to discuss developments in her brother's murder case, but of course Lady Isabel leaps to another conclusion. Her jealousy is inflamed by the insinuations of a guest who, at Mr. Carlyle's invitation, happens to be making an extended visit at their home: none other than Francis Levison, for whom seducing vulnerable women is mere sport. Lady Isabel's jealousy of her husband and her still-powerful attraction to the man who is now Sir Francis are a volatile combination.

Mr. Carlyle may be sincere, but he is not very perceptive of the feelings of the women in his life. He does not realize how upset Lady Isabel is becoming at his rendezvous with Barbara. Nor is he aware of Barbara's feelings—until one night as he is walking her home, when she can no longer keep them in check:

Her throat was working, the muscles of her mouth began to twitch, and a convulsive sob, or what sounded like it, broke from her. Mr. Carlyle turned his head hastily.

"Barbara! are you ill? What is it?"

On it came, passion, temper, wrongs, and nervousness, all boiling over together. She shrieked, she sobbed, she was in strong hysterics. . .Barbara struggled with her emotion—struggled manfully—and the sobs and shrieks subsided; not the excitement or the passion. . .

"Are you better, Barbara? What can have caused it?"

"What can have caused it?" she burst forth, giving full swing to the reins, and forgetting everything. "You can ask me that?"

Mr. Carlyle was struck dumb; but by some inexplicable law of sympathy, a dim and very unpleasant consciousness of the truth began to steal over him.

"I don’t understand you, Barbara. If I have offended you in any way, I am truly sorry."

"Truly sorry, no doubt!" was the retort, the sobs and the shrieks alarmingly near. "What do you care for me? If I go under the sod to-morrow," stamping it with her foot, "you have your wife to care for; what am I?"

"Hush!" he interposed, glancing round, more mindful for her than she was for herself.

"Hush, yes! You would like me to hush; what is my misery to you? I would rather be in my grave, Archibald Carlyle, than endure the life I have led since you married her. My pain is greater than I well know how to bear."

"I cannot affect to misunderstand you," he said, feeling more at a nonplus than he had felt for many a day. . ."But my dear Barbara. I never gave you cause to think I—that I—cared for you more than I did."

"Never gave me cause!" she gasped. "When you have been coming to our house constantly, almost like my shadow; when you gave me this"—dashing open her mantle, and holding up the locket to his view; "when you have been more intimate with me than a brother."

"Stay, Barbara. There it is—a brother. I have been nothing else; it never occurred to me to be anything else," he added, in his straightforward truth.

"Ay, as a brother, nothing else!" and her voice rose once more with her excitement; it seemed that she would not long control it. "What cared you for my feelings? What recked you that you gained my love?"

"Barbara, hush!" he implored: "do be calm and reasonable. If I ever gave you cause to think I regarded you with deeper feelings, I can only express to you my deep regret, my repentance, and assure you it was done unconsciously."

She was growing calmer. The passion was fading, leaving her face still and white. She lifted it toward Mr. Carlyle.

". . .If she had not come between us, should you have loved me?"

"Do not pursue this unthankful topic," he besought. . .

"I ask you, should you have loved me?" persisted Barbara, passing her handkerchief over her ashy lips.

"I don’t know. How can I know? Do I not say to you, Barbara, that I only thought of you as a friend, a sister? I cannot tell what might have been."

. . .Arrived at the back gate of the grove, which gave entrance to the kitchen garden. . .Mr. Carlyle took both Barbara’s hands in his.

"Good-night, Barbara. God bless you."

She had had time for reflection, and the excitement gone, she saw her outbreak in all its shame and folly. Mr. Carlyle noticed how subdued and white she looked.

"I think I have been mad," she groaned. "I must have been mad to say what I did. Forget that it was uttered."

"I told you I would."

"You will not betray me to—to—your wife?" she panted.

"Barbara!"

"Thank you. Good-night."

But he still retained her hands. "In a short time, Barbara, I trust you will find one more worthy to receive your love than I have been."

"Never!" she impulsively answered. "I do not love and forget so lightly. In the years to come, in my old age, I shall still be nothing but Barbara Hare." (Ch. XVII)

Mr. Carlyle's emotional obliviousness will ultimately bring tragedy to his marriage.

Ellen Wood, 1814-1887

Ellen Wood (née Price) did not become a novelist until she was in her mid-40s. She was the daughter of a Worcester glovemaker, Thomas Price, and his devout wife Elizabeth. When Ellen entered her teens she was diagnosed with curvature of the spine and confined to bed for four years. This treatment, unsurprisingly, did not correct the curvature; as an adult she could not stand fully upright and was less than five feet tall. In 1836 at the age of 22 she married Henry Wood, a businessman four or five years her senior, and the couple moved to Dauphiné in southeastern France.

The family returned to England in 1856 after Henry's business failed. Ellen had begun anonymously publishing short stories a few years previously, and initially she didn't receive any payment. By the late 1850s, though, she could no longer afford to work for free. She wrote her first novel Danesbury House (1860) in response to a contest sponsored by the Scottish Temperance League, and won the £100 first prize. However, after the novel was published she received no further recompense.

Her next novel, East Lynne (1861), was rejected by the publishers Chapman and Hall due to a poor report by their reader, George Meredith, who may have found that the story of a wife tempted by the prospect of an adulterous affair hit too close to home; just a few years earlier Meredith's wife had left him for another man. Wood's novel was also rejected by Smith, Elder & Co., publishers of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell.

When East Lynne was offered to Richard and George Bentley, though, they anticipated strong sales; its serial publication in The New Monthly Magazine beginning in January 1860 had significantly boosted that periodical's circulation.

First installment of East Lynne in The New Monthly Magazine, v. 118, 1860, p. 28. Image source: HathiTrust.org

For the right to publish the novel in book form Bentley and Son paid Mrs. Wood £600, about four times the usual fee for a novelist without proven popularity, and ordered a substantial first print run of 2750 copies. (By comparison, publisher Thomas Egerton paid £110 for the copyright of Jane Austen's second novel, Pride and Prejudice (1813), and it had a first print run of 1,000 copies.) Unusually, the Bentleys also agreed to give Mrs. Wood half of the profits realized from sales of the novel. In exchange they asked Mrs. Wood to revise or remove certain "objectionable" scenes, a request she politely but flatly refused. She knew the worth of her work, and despite her image of demure gentility, drove a hard bargain.

Title page of the first edition of East Lynne. Image source: HathiTrust.org

Bentley and Son had, if anything, underestimated East Lynne's sales potential. In the ten years after its initial publication it went through 24 editions, and by 1901 it had sold more than half a million copies. [1]

Over the next 7 years Mrs. Wood would produce another 15 novels, often having two serializations running at once. By 1867 her writing had generated enough income for her to purchase The Argosy magazine and take over as its chief editor. In the first years of her editorship she provided at least half of the content of each issue of the magazine, much of it anonymously, while continuing to publish an average of two books per year under her name.

Title page of The Argosy, Volume VII, 1869. Image source: HathiTrust.org

By the time of her death in 1887, Ellen Wood had published more than 40 books of fiction (several more would be published posthumously) and her writing generated an exceedingly comfortable income of £5–6,000 per year. Denis Goubert writes that "her books enjoyed a greater circulation than those of Trollope, and brought her a great deal more money." [2]

The influence of East Lynne was international. Leo Tolstoy had a copy in the library at his estate Yasnaya Polyana, and as Goubert has shown, likely drew from it in writing Anna Karenina (1878). Mrs. Wood was one of four English novelists that Tolstoy in an 1891 letter said had greatly influenced him; the others were Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope. [3]

In the late 19th century Mrs. Wood's popularity exceeded that of at least two of the other three English writers on Tolstoy's list. She also received critical recognition: East Lynne appears on the Daily Telegraph's 1899 list of the "100 Best Novels in the World," along with five novels by Dickens, one by Eliot, and one by Trollope. [4]

East Lynne on stage and screen

Shortly after East Lynne was published, multiple dramatic adaptations appeared, and they continued to be staged for decades; although Mrs. Wood received no royalties from the play versions their success likely helped to sustain the sales of the novel. In the early decades of the 20th century, several silent film versions of East Lynne were produced, one starring Theda Bara as Lady Isabel. Note that the poster states that the film is based on "the internationally famous stage success"; Mrs. Wood's name does not appear.

Poster for the silent film version of East Lynne (1916) starring Theda Bara. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

In 1931 a Pre-Code sound film starring Ann Harding as Lady Isabel came out; it was nominated for Outstanding Production (the early version of Best Picture) at the 4th Academy Awards, losing to Cimarron. (The actual best picture of 1931 was Chaplin's City Lights, although it was not even nominated; it wouldn't be the last time the film that should have won was overlooked.)

Poster for the 1931 film version of East Lynne starring Ann Harding. Image source: Amazon.com

The film was sufficiently popular that a Photoplay edition of the novel was issued. But the cover of the Photoplay edition, like the film poster, omits Ellen Wood's name or any mention of the novel. Although Mrs. Wood does receive credit inside the Photoplay edition, it is "fictionized by Arline De Haas" from the screenplay by Bradley King and Tom Barry.

Cover of Photoplay edition of East Lynne (1931). Image source: Archive.org

The history of East Lynne on the big screen may also include the 1969 Indian film Aradhana (Adoration), starring Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore. Although ostensibly based on the Hollywood film To Each His Own (1946) starring Olivia De Havilland, Aradhana contains scenes of maternal self-sacrifice for which East Lynne seems the more direct inspiration.

Poster for Aradhana (1969). Image source: TMDB

A BBC-TV adaptation of East Lynne from 1982 dates from a period before rising budgets brought a glossier look to BBC productions. Philip Mackie's script takes chunks of dialogue from the novel but omits some key scenes (Lady Isabel never confesses to her husband-to-be that she doesn't love him) and truncates others (Barbara's revelation to Carlyle of her feelings for him ends before she tells him that she will love him forever). Director David Green's pacing is stiff and stagy, as are many of the actors' line readings (not to mention the rustic characters' fake beards). The actor playing Archibald Carlyle, Martin Shaw, has a flat affect throughout; whether this is the fault of his acting or of Green's direction isn't fully clear.

With such major flaws it almost doesn't matter that small details are also off; in the novel Lady Isabel Vane is described as having "dark shining curls," Francis Levison as having "black hair," and Barbara Hare as "very fair, with blue eyes" and "light hair"; in the BBC adaptation Lady Isabel (Lisa Eichhorn) is blonde, Levison (Tim Woodward) has light brown hair, and Barbara Hale (Gemma Craven) has dark brown hair. (One reason this is worth noting is that when Lady Isabel reappears at East Lynne late in the novel, she is unrecognized due to the disfiguring effects of an accident, the tinted glasses she wears, and because her hair has turned gray—a greater contrast with dark hair than blonde hair.) This is a rare BBC adaptation to be avoided.

Ellen Wood today

Tolstoy's influencers Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope continue to be widely read and taught, are the focus of a sizeable scholarly literature, and each has been the subject of more than one biography. As the omission of Mrs. Wood's name from the publicity materials of the films may signal, as the 20th century progressed Mrs. Wood's readership and literary reputation went into steep decline, particularly after the 1930s. In the 21st century she has fallen into such obscurity that e-book versions of her novels, including East Lynne, are sometimes attributed to "Henry Wood," dropping the honorific "Mrs." and so suggesting that it was Ellen's husband who wrote her books.

Cover of East Lynne by "Henry Wood" downloaded from Apple Books.

Perhaps, though, there are signs of a revival of interest in Mrs. Wood. A scholarly edition of East Lynne was issued by Broadview Press in 2000, and the first book-length biography of Mrs. Wood, by Mariaconcetta Costantini, was published in 2020.

Victorian critic Alexander Japp wrote that Mrs. Wood "combined in a remarkable degree these two powers or qualities—realistic portraitures of men and women, with invention, construction, and surprises. She successfully used sensational elements for moral ends." [5] As Japp points out, most of Mrs. Wood's characters (Francis Levison perhaps excepted) are "realistic portraitures" rather than cardboard heroes or villains. Mr. Carlyle is a respectable solicitor, and yet into his home and into close contact with his family he invites a wanted man, and later welcomes a notorious rake who is dodging his creditors. Barbara Hare, a candidate for the novel's heroine, expresses jealousy and resentment (as seen above). And Lady Isabel makes several poor choices, but her excessive suffering makes her the focus of the reader's sympathies.

Of course, the plot of East Lynne features some conspicuous implausibilities, and our moral judgments no longer closely align with those of Mrs. Wood's time. However, the narrator's comments that appear throughout the novel function, in my view, not to reinforce our moral judgments against Lady Isabel, but to call them into question. As Lady Isabel tells her husband, "My sin was great, but my punishment was greater." East Lynne deserves a contemporary readership for its compelling story (including a jaw-dropping plot twist two-thirds of the way through) and its multilayered characters. They, like ourselves, act out of a mixture of motives, and discover that actions taken in the heat of an impulsive moment can bring lasting regret.

---

1. Jennifer Phegley, "Domesticating the sensation novelist: Ellen Price Wood as author and editor of the Argosy Magazine," Victorian Periodicals Review, Summer 2005, Vol. 38, No. 2, Interdisciplinary Work and Periodical Connections: An Issue in Honor of Sally H. Mitchell, pp. 180-198.
2. Denis Goubert, "Did Tolstoy read East Lynne?" The Slavonic and East European Review, January 1980, Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 22-39.
3. The list of influential novels that Tolstoy shared in his letter was published in the New York Times, 2 April 1978: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/02/archives/selection-tolstoy-was-impressed.html. According to Denis Goubert (see note 3), the 1939 edition of Tolstoy's Works states that his library held eight novels by Mrs. Wood, including East Lynne. A manuscript catalogue dating from the half-decade or so after his death lists only six.
   
4. The Dickens novels included on the list of the "100 Best Novels" are Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Dombey and Son, and Oliver Twist; not included are David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations or A Christmas Carol. The Eliot novel is Scenes of Clerical Life; not included are Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, or Middlemarch. The Trollope novel is Orley Farm, not included are any of the Chronicles of Barsetshire, the Palliser novels, or The Way We Live Now.
5. Quoted in Phegley, p. 194.

The Look of Love

Mark Morris Dance Group, The Look of Love. Image source: The Look of Love

In the summer of 1993 a good friend invited me to go see the opening night of soul legend Jerry Butler's five-night stand at the Kimball's East nightclub in Emeryville, a small city on San Francisco Bay wedged between Berkeley and Oakland. Butler, of course, had hits with "For Your Precious Love" (with the Impressions), "He Will Break Your Heart" (with Curtis Mayfield), "Never Give You Up," "Only the Strong Survive," and many other songs, and co-wrote Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)." But the mid-90s were three decades past Butler's 1960s peak, and at the start of his 75-minute set his voice was a gravelly echo of the mellow baritone familiar from his classic records. It was great to see him in such an intimate club, but it seemed like the voice might no longer be fully under his command.

But it only took a song or two for his voice to warm up, and soon the years had fallen away. Midway through the set he sang a song that wasn't familiar to me, but the power and emotion of his performance brought us all to our feet. Here is Butler's original recording from 1962:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvuk9KddXb8

I later learned that "Make It Easy On Yourself" was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. This was Bacharach and David? I had always thought of them as the Kings of Easy Listening, writing songs that seemed wilfully disconnected from the musical and social currents of their time.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s as rock 'n' roll, doo wop, R&B and Motown were surging onto the pop charts, Bacharach was churning out bland Brill Building pop for Frankie Avalon, Perry Como, Bobby Vinton, and Andy Williams. A few years later, around the time of the release of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the blistering sets by Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival, Bacharach and David were writing the score of the painfully unfunny James Bond spoof Casino Royale for Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. [1]

In 1969, the year of Woodstock and Altamont, B.J. Thomas had a hit with "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," one of my least favorite Bacharach/David songs (and one that makes no sense in its original context in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). The following summer, The Carpenters' version of "Close To You" spent more weeks at number one (four) than The Beatles' final single, "The Long and Winding Road" (two) or Edwin Starr's "War" (three). [2]

After hearing Butler's stunning performance of "Make It Easy On Yourself," though, I clearly needed to reassess Bacharach and David. And I soon discovered that I'd dismissed their music far too quickly. Songs like "Anyone Who Had A Heart," "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself," "Always Something There to Remind Me," and "One Less Bell To Answer" are miniature pop symphonies, with complex melodies that incorporate wide vocal ranges, unexpected key changes, shifting time signatures, and unusual syncopation. They are memorable but intricate; try singing along with any of them and you'll encounter surprises.

Of course, Bacharach and David's greatest exponent was Dionne Warwick:

https://youtu.be/GswJOWEkLJM?t=2

Mark Morris's The Look of Love (seen at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, 19 February 2023), choreographed to Bacharach/David songs, is a follow-up to 2017's Sgt. Pepper homage Pepperland. Once again, instantly familiar music from the 1960s is defamiliarized by the jazzy, frequently off-kilter arrangements of MMDG Music Ensemble's director and pianist Ethan Iverson; once again, the dancers wear brightly colorful 1960s-Pop-inspired costumes (this time by Isaac Mizrahi channeling Pepperland's Elizabeth Kurtzman channeling Carnaby Street's Mary Quant).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhH5sjrj-QU

Seeing the Mark Morris Dance Group is always pleasurable, but the elements of this piece didn't quite cohere. Morris's choreographic invention did not seem to be at its peak in this work; some of the elements and gestures seemed either borrowed from earlier pieces, or too directly illustrative of the lyrics (although it would be difficult to resist having the dancers all point in the same direction during "Do You Know The Way To San Jose?" or walk past each other in "Walk On By"). "Thin" is the way my partner described it, not a word we usually associate with Morris.

One danger in using such well-known music is that comparisons with the original versions are inevitable, and in this case did not favor the MMDG Music Ensemble. Iverson's stripped-down arrangements for piano, trumpet, bass and drums meant that the orchestral lushness of many of the songs was missing, and from our seats at the back of the mezzanine trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson was consistently too loud in the mix. Lead vocalist Marcy Harriell's bright soprano was at times noticeably flat (this was the third performance in a three-performance run, and a matinee after an evening performance, so she may have been a little tired; also, she was competing with our memories of Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield). Iverson's spiky arrangement of "Raindrops," like his deconstruction of "When I'm Sixty-Four" from Pepperland, helped us hear overfamiliar music in a fresh way, and "Do You Know The Way To San Jose" and "I Say A Little Prayer" are pretty irresistible in any form. But after the show we wondered whether we would have gone to a club to hear this music performed by the band alone, and the answer was no.

But at least The Look of Love sent me back to Bacharach's music and to the exploration of the riches of YouTube—such as this performance of "I Say A Little Prayer" by the incomparable Aretha Franklin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ifw8JhDBvs [3]

---

1. For some context, here are signature songs by Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival. 
2. "Close to You" was originally recorded in 1963 by Richard Chamberlin. A warning: once Chamberlain's version is heard, it can't be un-heard.
3. I can't resist linking to another live version of this song, which is notable both for another remarkable performance by Aretha, and also because the cameramen and director are clearly enamoured of her gorgeous backup singers.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, 2015). Image source: The Beat, the blog of comics culture

It's an uncanny feeling to open a book and have the sense that it was written specifically for you. I had that feeling almost continuously while reading Sydney Padua's The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, 2015).

Augusta Ada Byron King, Lady Lovelace, was the daughter of Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke and the poet Lord Byron. Ada's mother separated from Byron after a year of marriage and raised her daughter to have an anti-Byronic cast of mind: rational, scientific, mathematical. Before their marriage Byron called Annabella "my Princess of Parallelograms"; afterwards he called her the "Mathematical Medea."

Annabella Milbanke by George Hayter, 1812, three years before her marriage to Byron. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Lady Byron's plan to suppress her daughter's imagination through rationality, however, was destined to be foiled by how truly strange math is. One of Ada's tutors, William Frend (who had also taught Annabella as a young woman), refused to believe in the existence of negative numbers, because how could anything be less than nothing? Numbers can also be irrational (if they can't be expressed as a ratio of two integers, such as π) and even imaginary (if they involve the square root of a negative number, such as i, where i² = –1). Ada outpaced most of her teachers.

Ada Byron at 16, 1832, artist unknown. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

In June 1833, at age 17, Ada met the mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, then the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. [1]

Engraving of Charles Babbage, 1832 (age 40) by John Linnell, published by Paul and Dominic Colnaghi & Co., 1 January 1833. Image source: National Portrait Gallery NPG D16124

In a letter dated Friday 7 June 1833 to Ada's tutor Dr. William King, Lady Byron wrote:

Ada was more pleased with a party she was at on Wednesday [5 June], than with any of the assemblages in the grand monde [Ada had been presented at court on 10 May and had since attended several court balls]—she met there a few scientific people—amongst them Babbage, with whom she was delighted—. . .Babbage was full of animation—and talked of his wonderful machine (which he is to shew us) as a child does of its plaything. [2]

Babbage was working on a mechanical calculator he called the Difference Engine, and had produced a small working prototype which he demonstrated for Ada and her mother. In a letter to King on Friday 21 June, Lady Byron wrote,

We both went to see the thinking machine (for such it seems) last Monday [17 June]. It raised several Nos. to the 2nd & 3rd powers, and extracted the root of a Quadratic Equation.—I had but faint glimpses of the principles by which it worked.

Sophia Frend, William's daughter, also attended the demonstration and later wrote that in contrast to Lady Byron, "Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention." [3]

"Portion of Babbage's Difference Engine," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. XXX, No. CLXXV, December 1864, p. 34, digitized from the collections of the University of California Berkeley. Image source: HathiTrust.org

In 1834, with the Difference Engine still far from completion, Babbage began working on an even more sophisticated device he called the Analytical Engine. He envisioned a punchcard control system that would specify the mathematical operations to be performed. The principle was similar to the way punchcards controlled the mechanical Jacquard looms used to weave complex patterned cloth (and which had been the targets of the Luddite weavers who had been thrown out of work).

Portion of the mill of the Analytical Engine with printing mechanism, designed by Charles Babbage and under construction at the time of his death, London, 1834-1871. (Trial model). Image source: Science Museum Group Collection Online

In 1835 Ada Byron married William King (a different William King than her tutor). Thanks to Ada's family connections—her mother was the cousin of the prime minister, Lord Melbourne—William was created the first Lord Lovelace in 1838, and so Ada became Lady Lovelace. [4]

Ada King by Margaret Carpenter, 1836. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Motherhood, family concerns and social demands took Ada away from her mathematical studies, but after the birth of her third child in four years of marriage she was eager to resume them. She began a correspondence with the mathematician Augustus De Morgan, husband of Sophie Frend and friend of Charles Babbage. De Morgan later wrote to Lady Byron:

But I feel bound to tell you that the power of thinking on these matters which Lady L. has always shewn from the beginning of my correspondence with her, has been something so utterly out of the common way for any beginner, man or woman. . .Had any young beginner, about to go to Cambridge, shewn the same power, I should have prophesied first that his aptitude at grasping the strong points and the real difficulties of first principles. . .would have certainly made him an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence. [5]

In 1840 Babbage gave a lecture on the Analytical Engine in Turin; mathematician (and future prime minister of Italy) Luigi Menabrea attended, and two years later published an article describing the machine in the journal Bibliothèque universelle de Genève—the first publication about the Analytical Engine.

L.-F. Menabrea, "Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage." Bibliothèque universelle de Genève, Nouvelle Série, tome XLI (Sept.-Oct. 1842), pp. 352-376. Image source: HathiTrust.org

Shortly after it appeared Ada began working on a translation of Menabrea's article; her translation was published the following year in Richard Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, Vol. III, Part XII. The 25-page-long "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq." by Menabrea was accompanied by 41 pages of "Notes by the Translator," signed A.A.L. (for Augusta Ada Lovelace). [6]

Ada shared the notes with Babbage as she was writing them, but was understandably exasperated if he made revisions without her agreement. As her drafts were traveling back and forth between their houses she wrote him, "I am much annoyed at your having altered my Note. You know I am always willing to make any alterations myself, but that I cannot endure another person to meddle with my sentences." [7]

A.A.L., "Notes by the Translator" [to accompany L. F. Menabrea, "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq." (pp. 666-690)] in Richard Taylor, ed. Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, and Foreign Journals, Vol. III, Part XII (Aug. 1843), pp. 691-731. Image source: HathiTrust.org

Ada's notes to Menabrea's article include instructions for the calculation of Bernoulli numbers by the Analytical Engine, an algorithm that has been called the first computer program.

Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, 2015), p. 25 (detail). Image source: Goodreads

Ada's copious Notes, which often themselves have footnotes, were clearly an inspiration for the format of Thrilling Adventures. Marketed as a graphic novel, it's a hybrid mix of graphics and text: virtually every page features extensive footnotes, and, in a droll touch, the footnotes have even more extensive endnotes (which, like Ada's "Notes by the Translator," also have footnotes). The fascinating dual subjects of the book deserve that extensive scholarly apparatus, even if its purpose is partially parodic. As someone who writes blog posts whose footnotes are sometimes longer than the post itself, I felt an immediate sympathy. [8]

Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, 2015), p. 22; right-click to enlarge. Image source: Science Museum Group Journal

In her Notes Ada had made a huge leap; she'd recognized that the Analytical Engine could perform operations on any data to which an algorithm could be applied:

The operating mechanism. . .might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. [9]

With this insight Ada anticipated the development of the modern computer a century later.

Ada Lovelace, daguerreotype by Antonie Claudel, ca. 1843. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Babbage teased Ada (who was slight of build) by calling her a fairy; in a letter to him as she was working on the Notes she embraced that supernatural identity:

That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show; (if only my breathing & some other etceteras do not make too rapid a progress towards instead of from mortality). Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I haven’t sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do. [10]

It was not to be. Instead of plumbing the mysteries of the universe, Ada used her mathematical talents to develop a betting system for horse racing. Initially both her husband and Babbage joined her in placing bets using the system. However, when it became clear that the system didn't work, the men stopped using it. Ada continued, disastrously, and fell deeply in debt; she secretly pawned her jewels, twice, and had to ask her mother to redeem them.

As the reference to her breathing in the letter above suggests, Ada's health was also not robust. Victorian doctors prescribed opium in various forms (pills or dissolved in alcohol as laudanum) for a host of maladies, including to ease the breathing difficulties whose actual cause was likely the thick pall of London coal and wood smoke. The inhibition-lowering properties of opium may have played a role in her reckless gambling, although high-stakes betting seems to have been endemic among the British upper classes.

Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, 2015), p. 28 (detail). Image source: Pinterest

Ada was also frequently in pain, and in mid-1852 she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Perhaps as a memento, her husband commissioned a final portrait of her by the artist Henry Wyndham Phillips; despite her condition, she sat for the painting throughout August. On 13 August Lord Lovelace recorded in his diary that "the suffering was so great that she could scarce avoid crying out"; although she was in agonizing pain, "she sat at the piano some little time so that the artist could portray her hands." [11]

Daguerreotype by an unknown photographer of a portrait of Ada Lovelace by Henry Wyndham Phillips, 1852 (detail). Image source: Bodleian Library

Babbage was forbidden by Lady Byron from visiting Ada after mid-August. After months of suffering Ada died on Saturday 27 November 1852, two weeks before her 37th birthday.

In the decades following the publication of Ada's article, Babbage made few advances toward building the Analytical Engine. Progress remained stalled pretty much as described by an anonymous article entitled "Addition to the memoir of M. Menabrea on the analytical engine" published in The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science in September 1843 (immediately after the publication of Ada's translation and Notes in Scientific Memoirs). The article, almost certainly written by Babbage, states:

The present state of the Analytical Engine is as follows:—
All the great principles on which the discovery rests have been explained, and drawings of mechanical structures have been made, by which each may be carried into operation. . .
Mechanical Notations have been made both of the actions of detached parts and of the general action of the whole, which cover about four or five hundred large folio sheets of paper.
The original rough sketches are contained in about five volumes.
There are upwards of one hundred large drawings. [12]

The plans for the Analytical Engine were clearly of daunting complexity, and it's no wonder that they were not realized. Babbage was a spiky personality and an eccentric polymath, and spent a good deal of time and energy not only on other projects, but pursuing cantankerous campaigns against street musicians, hoop-rolling, and other public nuisances. At the time of his death in 1871 a partial model of the Analytical Engine was still incomplete (see above).

In 2009 over a beer at a pub animator Sydney Padua was commissioned by Suw Charman-Anderson, who was planning the first annual Ada Lovelace Day, to produce a short web comic on Ada's life. In the preface to Thrilling Adventures Padua writes, "Lovelace died young. Babbage died a miserable old man. There never was a gigantic steam-powered computer. This seemed an awfully grim ending for my little comic. And so I threw in a couple of drawings at the end, imagining for them another, better, more thrilling comic-book universe to live on in" (p. 7).

Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, 2015), p. 32. Image source: The Beat, the blog of comics culture

Those "couple of drawings" grew into the 300-page Thrilling Adventures. Each adventure takes place in a steampunk alternate universe in which a full-scale Analytical Engine has been built. Over the course of Thrilling Adventures Lovelace and Babbage encounter the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Queen Victoria, the novelist George Eliot, the logician George Boole, and the world of the Alice stories written by Lewis Carroll. [13]

Padua's Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is an exhilaratingly witty and imaginative journey through computer history and the Victorian scientific, political, and literary worlds. It is also an illuminating portrayal of Ada Lovelace, whose pioneering work, while still underappreciated, has begun to receive the attention it deserves. The annual Ada Lovelace Day, on the second Tuesday in October, is now a global grassroots celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics; in 2023 the 15th annual Ada Lovelace Day will take place on 10 October. [14]

And in the alternate universe of Thrilling Adventures, there is a happy ending for Lovelace and Babbage, as the Analytical Engine is completed and they can spend many contented hours in conversation and calculation:

Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, 2015), pp. 286-287. Image source: Mark Riedl, Medium.com

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1. Lucasian Professors have included Isaac Newton (1669–1702) and Stephen Hawking (1979–2009). ^ Return
2. Quoted on p. 299-300 in Velma R. Huskey and Harry D. Huskey, "Lady Lovelace and Charles Babbage," Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 299-329, Oct.-Dec. 1980, doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1980.10042 (subscription or institutional access required). ^ Return
3. Quoted in Huskey, p. 300. ^ Return
4. William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, was the widower of Caroline Lamb, who had been the lover of Ada's father, Lord Byron, before his marriage to Annabella. For details, see An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England. ^ Return
5. Quoted in Huskey, p. 326. ^ Return
6. Notes A - F are signed A.A.L.; Note G is signed A.L.L., likely a typographical error for A.A.L. The suggestion for signing the notes with her initials came from Ada's husband. ^ Return
7. Quoted in Huskey, p. 316. ^ Return
8. In Thrilling Adventures Sydney Padua offers the following footnote: "Lovelace added seven footnotes to her translation of Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine; they are a little over two and a half times longer than the original paper. . .Together they take up 65 pages of the September 1843 edition of Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, a journal dedicated to publishing English translations of work from continental Europe" (p. 25).
   
   This isn't quite right. Lovelace's "Notes by the Translator," lettered A. to G., are endnotes, not footnotes (Ada also added footnotes on 10 of the original article's 25 pages); the notes are two-thirds again as long as the original article (41 pages of notes to 25 pages of article), not over two and a half times longer; together with the original paper they take up 66, not 65, pages of Vol. III of Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, each volume of which was published in parts, not "editions"; and finally, Part XII of Scientific Memoirs, according to the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 4, No. 28 (Jun. - Dec., 1843), p. 19, and Ada's correspondence as quoted in Huskey, was published in August, not September, 1843.
   
   There are some other minor errors as well. In the first footnote on p. 22 (see above) Padua writes "Babbage was forty-two and Lovelace eighteen when they met." Babbage was born on 26 December 1791, and Lovelace on 10 December 1815; in June 1833 his 42nd and her 18th birthdays would still have been six months away. ^ Return
9.  A.L.L., "Notes by the Translator," p. 694. ^ Return
10. Quoted in Huskey, p. 315. ^ Return
11. Ursula Martin, "Only known photographs of Ada Lovelace in Bodleian Display," Ada Lovelace: Celebrating 200 years of a computer visionary, https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/2015/10/14/only-known-photographs-of-ada-lovelace-in-bodleian-display/ ^ Return
12. [Charles Babbage,] "Addition to the memoir of M. Menabrea on the analytical engine. Scientific memoirs, vol. III. Part XII. p. 666," The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, Vol. XXIII, No. CLI, September 1843, pp. 235-239. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89048308431&view=1up&seq=249 ^ Return
13. Thrilling Adventures is also a corrective to the sexualized and misogynistic treatment of Ada in the 1990 William Gibson and Bruce Sterling novel The Difference Engine, in which a steam-powered computer revolution based on Babbage's Engines takes place in Britain in the mid-19th century. In that novel "persistent sexual slurs" are used to describe Ada; "the insistence on misogynistic imagery. . .perpetuates rather than interrogates nineteenth-century stereotypes" (Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 112).  ^ Return
14. For information about Ada Lovelace Days, see the website Finding Ada. ^ Return