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

with Eton, one of the two most renowned schools in Britain.
    Life at Harrow was tough. You had to get up at six o’clock, and lessons continued for twelve hours, with some breaks for mealtimes. Floggings administered on younger boys by senior boys and by masters were commonplace; for the floggers, they were a high point of the school routine.
    Academic standards could be high, but the syllabus was fairly unvaried. This was 1801, and the syllabus of Britain’s public schools was mostly classical, with the intention of turning young men (there were very few schools that gave much of a classical education to young women) into proxy citizens of the great Roman Empire that had collapsed due to Barbarian predations about 1,400 years ago, but which still had an enormous cultural hold on the Anglo-Saxon mentality. This was partly at least because the Britons admired the way the Romans had built up their empire: with violence, yes, but also with a genuine concern for the welfare of the governed.
    One of Byron’s school fellows was to become important in the life of Ada. This was the young Robert Peel, also born in 1788, though Peel was born on February 5 and so was Byron’s junior by exactly two weeks. Byron was later in his life to be generous about Peel’s talents.
    Byron was prone to bouts of depression, and may even have suffered from a form of manic depression (nowadays known as bipolar syndrome). Byron himself often seems to have used sex more as a diversion and as a way of forgetting his own low spirits than necessarily always as a supreme physical and spiritual pleasure. He was in addition often curiously passive in courtship; when he reached adulthood and had many female (and male) admirers, they often found it frustrating that they themselves had to initiate things.
    Indeed, Byron was also sometimes as intensely taken with chastity as with sexuality. His life’s work fills a closely-printed book of almost 900 pages, and a man who spends most of his life indulging himself sexually and who dies at the age of thirty-six, is not likely to produce such a vast body of work – maybe around one million words in total. So while certainly Byron had bouts of energetic indulgence in sex, he wasn’t always, so to speak, in the mood.
    He was certainly bisexual. While at Harrow, he fell ardently in love with a younger boy called John Edelston. The social and moral atmosphere of Harrow was much of the time literally a hotbed of homosexual activity. The poet and critic John Addington Symons (1840 – 1893), himself bisexual, was one of the first to write explicitly about homosexuality in nineteenth-century Britain, when homosexual practices were still an imprisonable offence. Addington Symons wrote this in his memoirs of Harrow, which he started attending in 1854:
    Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow’s bitch. Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk of the dormitories and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there, one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences.
    In the summer of 1808, Byron visited his friend Lord Grey de Ruthyn, who was about eight years older than Byron. Grey made advances to him which were evidently not repulsed. The poet and lyricist Thomas Moore writing in his own biography of Byron, said that an intimacy sprang up between Byron and Grey.
    Byron liked to use the phrase ‘pure relationship’ to describe one which did not involve actual penetrative intercourse. It is not, however, known what ‘intimacy’ meant in terms of Byron and Grey. All that is certain is that Byron was himself conscious of his early sexual initiation. In ‘Detached Thoughts’ – a journal he kept for a few months in 1821 – 1822 when he