A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age Read Free Page A

a mark that a child born with one would be destined for greatness. Dried, cauls were believed to prevent their owner from drowning. Some were sold for significant sums to sailors. There is a reference to this practice in the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield (1850). There were no takers for David’s caul, but baby George’s was given to a professional sailor Catherine knew.
    George was also born with a deformed right foot, which was to cause him both physical and psychological pain throughout his life. The deformity was at the time referred to as a club foot. Today, the condition is known medically as dysplasia and is characterised by the very problems that Byron suffered: his right leg was thinner than it should have been, and his long narrow foot curved inwards and was stiff so that it affected to some extent the movement of the ankle. Byron’s walk, throughout his life, had a certain sliding gait to it which everyone noticed. All the same, this was a time when many people had something more or less wrong with them, so Byron’s problem would not have been as conspicuous as it would have been today.
    Catherine was deeply (and, based on his track record, most likely accurately) concerned that even now her husband, living in Paris, was accruing more debts. Certainly, the pressure on what money Catherine still had was apparently endless. Mad Jack was unable to get credit and was reduced to living only on bread. He was by now also dangerously ill with tuberculosis. On June 21 1791, he made his will, thoughtfully making his penniless son (four years old at the time) responsible for his, the father’s, debts. Six weeks later, on August 2 1791, John Byron died at the age of thirty-five.
    Catherine bravely contrived to manage on what money she had left. She sent George to a variety of schools in London. Finally she returned to Scotland and there, in 1794, when George Byron was six years old, he was enrolled at Aberdeen Grammar School.
    Mad Jack’s demented older brother, the Wicked Lord, was still alive at this point, but when he died four years later the ten-year-old George became the sixth Lord Byron. On hearing the news, the headmaster of Aberdeen Grammar School called George into his office, informed the boy of his momentous social elevation, and gave him a glass of port, as if determined to welcome the boy symbolically into the bibulous world of the aristocracy.
    In 1798, becoming a peer was seen as becoming a new kind of being. Early in August of that year, Catherine and the ten-year-old Lord Byron, accompanied by his nanny Mary Gray, whom he called May, journeyed to Newstead Abbey, where he took possession of his estate. The boy was delighted with Newstead Abbey, and spent a month or so roaming the grounds.
    Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home Lord Byron inherited at the age of ten.
    Nanny May was woman of considerably loose virtue; she had regular romantic adventures with young men of about her own age, seventeen or eighteen. 1
    According to Byron’s friend John Hobhouse – who later in Byron’s life was told about these events by the poet himself – during this time when May Gray was Byron’s nursemaid, she started taking the boy into her bed and masturbating him. Her interest in Byron, though, was not only that of a sexual initiator. She liked to alternate the masturbation with beatings; for which actual or imagined offences is not clear. May even enjoyed showing off to her male companions the power she had over Byron and she enjoyed beating the boy while they looked on. Very likely, the young Byron also witnessed the drunken copulations of May and her friends.
    It was the beatings, not the masturbation, that young George Byron finally reported to his mother. When Catherine heard from her son that May was flogging him, Catherine dismissed May and removed Byron from Newstead Abbey. His education continued in London. At the age of thirteen, Byron entered Harrow School, at that time,