In the light of Mary Somerville’s resigned, even depressed, acquiescence in the secondary position of women as innovative scientists, it is obviously important that John Couch Adams told her husband that it was a suggestion from On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences that put it into his head to calculate the orbit of Neptune. Furthermore it was the impact of Mary Somerville’s Connexion of the Physical Sciences that produced the word ‘scientist’ in the first place. Reviewing the book in the Quarterly, William Whewell speaks of Mary Somerville’s laudable insistence on connection at a time when there was an ‘increasing proclivity to separation and dismemberment’ in the sciences and he proposes the use of a new term, one possibility being ‘scientist’, on the model of ‘artist, sciolist, economist and atheist’.15 It is also in this review that Whewell rehearses arguments about female and male intellect that are with us still. He does believe that ‘there is a sex in minds’ and while he does not simply privilege male over female, the sex of his own mind is never far away:
One of the characteristics of the female intellect is a clearness of perception as far as it goes; with them action is the result of feeling; thought of seeing; their practical emotions do not wait for instruction from speculation; their reasoning is undisturbed by the prospect of its practical consequences. (QR, 65)
Diminishing though this seems, Whewell plucks out of it a kind of victory for female intellect:
But, from the peculiar mental character to which we have referred, it follows, that when women are philosophers, they are likely to be lucid ones; that when they extend the range of their speculative views, there will be a peculiar illumination thrown over the prospect. If they attain to the merit of being profound, they will add to this the great excellence of being also clear. (QR, 66)
Yet, as soon as difference is admitted, and both men and women at the time did admit it, it becomes impossible within the historical context to do other than privilege the male in the very act of elevating the female. It cannot really be denied that in spite of all the attention and assistance that Mary Somerville received and the accolades she won, this was still a man’s world. With the exceptions of Mary Somerville herself and Ada Lovelace, most of the other women involved in the scientific world were involved because of the assistance they gave their husbands or because, like Jane Marcet, they were popularisers in a way that Mary Somerville never was. Yet it was Jane Marcet who first inspired Faraday (p. 92), and that is surely something. But Mrs Kater, Mrs Sabine, Mrs Lyell gave their devoted services to their husbands and are remembered as helpmeets, although Elizabeth Sabine translated Humboldt’s Kosmos. Sometimes, indeed, it has been necessary, as with Mrs Lowry, to go to a biography of a husband to get any information about a wife. In this sense, Mary Somerville is assisted by not having had a scientific partner.
The public honours she received, although numerous and welcome, were also usually secondary: she was generally an honorary, not a full, member of learned societies. When Herschel writes to William Somerville (p. 175) that he hears that a recent vote of the Astronomical Society makes Mary Somerville his colleague he is exaggerating, since her membership of the Society, like that of his aunt, Caroline Herschel, was an honorary one. Nevertheless, Mary Somerville’s pension from the Civil List was in line with the awards made to her male contemporaries: she received, as she explains (p. 144), £200 from Robert Peel’s administration and when the succeeding Whig administration added £100 to this, Mary Somerville was in receipt of an amount equivalent to the pensions of Airy, Faraday and Brewster among others (EP, 161).
THE SCOTSWOMAN:
Whewell concludes his review by quoting the verses that I have chosen as my epigraph, which compare Mary Somerville to Hypatia and Madame Agnesi, the only two earlier women believed to be distinguished in mathematics: ‘Three women in three different ages born, /Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.’ Accepting the justice of the claim, Whewell, nevertheless, points out that Madame Agnesi and Mary Somerville were born in the same century and that, ‘though Hypatia talked Greek as Mrs Somerville does English, the former was an Egyptian, and the latter, we are obliged to confess, is Scotch by her birth, though we are very happy to claim her as one of the brightest ornaments of England’ (QR, 68). Mary Somerville was a Scot living outside Scotland at a time when nationality was a peculiarly pressing issue and the positioning of an intellectual north or south of the border was a contentious business. For example, if Mary Somerville could not have been great without leaving Scotland, we might well feel that Scott could not have been great if he had done. But Scott died the year after the Mechanism of the Heavens was published. Scotland’s intellectual heyday was fading despite the continued ascendancy of ‘Scotch Reviewers’.
Mary Somerville’s relationship with her native country was complex. Her closeness to Joanna Baillie may well have derived from the shared sense of both being and not being Scottish. They both retained their Scottish accents: Joanna Baillie’s was apparently even more marked,16 but Mary Somerville was always self-conscious about her accent (p. 97). However far she travelled physically and intellectually from her native land, she carried its continued impress in her speech.
Her religious sense too was shaped by Scotland, both in what underpinned it and in what she rejected. Her love for the natural world, which affected every aspect of her personal and professional life, came out of her early years in Burntisland and Jedburgh. As is, of course, very often the case with memoirs, the sections which deal with childhood experiences are among the most vivid and most moving. It is from these early experiences that she derived a feeling for the history inherent in things and places that anchors her to the beauties of the living world:
Some of the plum and pear trees were very old, and were said to have been planted by the monks. Both were excellent in quality, and very productive. […] The precipitous banks of red sandstone are richly clothed with vegetation, some of the trees ancient and very fine, especially the magnificent one called the capon tree, and the lofty king of the wood, remnants of the fine forests which at one time had covered the country. (p. 30)
And it was in these early days too that she developed the love for birds that she carried with her to the end.
But if Scotland taught her how to love God’s creation, it also gave her much to reject in the narrowness of the Calvinism of some of her religious teaching. On the whole, Mary Somerville makes light of the gloomier and harsher aspects of Scottish Calvinism but clearly it was one of the factors that made her less than wholly sorry to leave her native land. Nevertheless, she carries with her on her first departure from Scotland a sense of democratic community in the ‘Scotch Kirk’ that she misses in the ‘coldness and formality of the Church of England’ (p. 63). That sense of closeness of the individual to the creation and the Creator never left Mary Somerville. She did not need to commit herself to the narrowness of the Evangelical movement to be close to God. And her tolerance of the views of others, even of atheism, derives from an early security in the goodness of Christians like her mother and her uncle and father-in-law, the Rev. Thomas Somerville.
At the same time, she was aware that continued residence in Scotland would have stifled her intellectual life and it was important to her that her second husband, William Somerville, had travelled widely and was ‘emancipated from Scotch prejudices’ (p. 73). A letter written from Scotland in 1837 to her daughters in London recommends them to think hard before marrying Scotsmen and make it quite clear that she regards her departure from her native country as a fortunate escape (EP, 185–86). The letter is crossed ferociously, partly to conceal its contents from a casual glance: it is very difficult to decipher:
I never should have written a word and you two would have been worried to death and stupid [?] like the rest, so all is for the best. Jedburgh my birthplace I saw without pleasure and left without regret,