I have conflated my notes and those from the original edition. When the notes are not mine, this is clearly signalled. Instead of dealing with the many people that Mary Somerville encountered in her long life in notes, I have chosen to offer brief biographies. These are signalled in the text by a degree sign. In preparing the biographies, I have been indebted to all the usual reference sources (national dictionaries of biography, subject dictionaries of biography, and the major encyclopaedias), but also particularly to Elizabeth Patterson’s Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science. These debts are signalled by ‘EP’ with a page number where appropriate. I have followed Elizabeth Patterson’s practice in giving the dates of assumption as Fellows of the Royal Society, thus showing how even the apparently non-scientific, like Woronzow Greig indeed, had amateur commitments to science.
Reading these brief biographies gives a conspectus of the life of Europe over more than a century. These are many of the people who made the modern world and a number of them were acquaintances or friends or at least in some way crossed the path of this remarkable woman.
The brief biographies do not cover everyone named in the Recollections. Some who are little more than names are not noted, although, if they are very interesting in themselves, I have tried to give some indication of what made them significant in their day. A number of private individuals are not included, since it is what Mary Somerville remembers of them that is significant; their achievement, in other words, is to have been remembered by her. Others, like Scott, are too famous to require to be noted. Some of the very famous, like Byron, are mentioned simply to indicate at which points their lives crossed with Mary Somerville’s. Occasionally, as with Joanna Baillie, I have indulged myself with slightly longer entries, which either signal their importance for Mary Somerville or, following her own gentle but persistent feminism, privilege women who have been obscure until relatively recently.
The text is that of the first edition (London: John Murray, 1873), with interpolated passages from the first and second drafts of the autobiography in the Somerville Collection of papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
The original printed text has been edited so that it is generally brought into line with modern spelling and punctuation, as in the use of italics for titles, rather than the quotation marks of the original. The exception is the letters, which are left with the idiosyncrasies that distinguish them as letters, although I have removed obvious errors such as ‘Finders’ for ‘Flinders’ on p. 94.
I have edited the passages from the drafts, silently removing spelling mistakes, of which there are fewer than might be imagined from Mary Somerville’s insistence that she was a bad speller, adding light punctuation for intelligibility, and expanding ampersands; where I have added words to complete the sense, I indicate this by square brackets. Since Mary Somerville was obviously quite happy to accept the corrections of her compositors (p 97), I do not think any useful purpose is served by trying to reproduce the manuscripts exactly, especially since I use only selected passages from them. My aim throughout has been to produce a readable text while still allowing readers to see something of the original process of editing out ‘unacceptable’ passages.
I have brought the spelling of foreign names in both the printed text and the drafts into line with generally accepted spellings so that readers may go directly to the name in the list of brief biographies without being distracted by an uncommon or erroneous spelling.
The Bodleian shelf marks of the drafts are as follows: First draft: Somerville Collection, Dep. c.355, box 5, MSAU-2 (signalled in the text by 1D and page number/s). Second draft: Somerville Collection, Dep. c.355, box 5, MSAU-3 (signalled in the text by 2D and page number/s).
DM
Introduction – Parentage – Life in Scotland in the Last Century – Early Education – School
[1D, 1–2: this is how Mary Somerville begins her Recollections. In her daughter’s editing it will be seen that much of this is taken into the initial explanatory text:
This memoir is dedicated to Martha and Mary Somerville by their affectionate mother
The Author
MY life has been domestic and quiet. I have no events to record that could interest the public. My only motive in writing it, is to show my country women that self education is possible under the most unfavourable and even discouraging circumstances. I avoid gossip, and think it dishonourable to publish letters written in confidence between friends; the only instance in which I have transgressed this law, is when they are intimately connected with the circumstances of my scientific life. In my youth the prejudice was strong against learned women, it was still more so in the preceding generation. My mother whose maiden name was Margaret Charters learnt to read she scarce knew how, and had only three months’ instruction in writing and accounts, yet she was the daughter of Samuel Charters a gentlemanly fine-looking man as I remember him, of good family and Solicitor General of the Customs for Scotland. My grandfather married Christian Murray of Kynynmont who died before I was born. Her elder sister who was an heiress was married to the great grandfather of the present Earl of Minto° who took the name of Kynynmont in addition to his own. My grandmother had a large family, four sons and five daughters. All the sons had an excellent education and went to India; the eldest Samuel Charters who died chief judge of Patna was sent to travel after leaving college while it was thought self sufficient for the daughters to be able to read the Bible, write, and manage the house; however, Martha Charters the eldest, who married the Reverend Thomas Somerville° and was afterwards my mother in law, had a little more instruction than the rest. Besides she was clever, witty and fond of reading: she knew Shakespeare almost by heart.]
[The life of a woman entirely devoted to her family duties and to scientific pursuits affords little scope for a biography. There are in it neither stirring events nor brilliant deeds to record; and as my Mother was strongly averse to gossip, and to revelations of private life or of intimate correspondence, nothing of the kind will be found in the following pages. It has been only after very great hesitation, and on the recommendation of valued friends, who think that some account of so remarkable and beautiful a character cannot fail to interest the public, that I have resolved to publish some detached Recollections of past times, noted down by my mother during the last years of her life, together with a few letters from eminent men and women, referring almost exclusively to her scientific works. A still smaller number of her own letters have been added, either as illustrating her opinions on events she witnessed, or else as affording some slight idea of her simple and loving disposition.
Few thoughtful minds will read without emotion my mother’s own account of the wonderful energy and indomitable perseverance by which, in her ardent thirst for knowledge, she overcame obstacles apparently insurmountable, at a time when women were well-nigh totally debarred from education; and the almost intuitive way in which she entered upon studies of which she had scarcely heard the names, living, as she did, among persons to whom they were utterly unknown, and who disapproved of her devotion to pursuits so different from those of ordinary young girls at the end of the last century, especially in Scotland, which was far more old-fashioned and primitive than England.
Nor is her simple account of her early days without interest, when, as a lonely child, she wandered by the seashore, and on the links of Burntisland, collecting shells and flowers; or spent the clear, cold nights at her window, watching the starlit heavens, whose mysteries she was destined one day to penetrate in all their profound and sublime laws, making clear to others that knowledge which she herself had acquired, at the cost of so hard a struggle.
It was not only in her childhood and youth