scenes. The work for which she is probably still best remembered is her translation of Laplace’s Mécanique céleste as The Mechanism of the Heavens in 1831; her most ambitious work was probably On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), which ran to nine British editions in her lifetime; but there is also Physical Geography, two vols. (1848), which, as she points out in her Recollections, ‘went through nine editions, has been translated into German and Italian […] and went through various editions in the United States’ (p. 162); and On Molecular and Microscopic Science, which she published when she was in her 89th year, and which The Morning Post suggests was her magnum opus.
Mary Somerville was born on 26 December 1780 in the manse at Jedburgh, the home of her mother’s sister, who was married to the local minister, the Rev. Dr Thomas Somerville. She was the fifth child of Lieutenant (later Vice-Admiral) William George Fairfax and his second wife, Margaret Charters. Fairfax had just embarked on a long period of sea duty and his pregnant wife was living at her sister’s home when the child was born. Mrs Fairfax was ill after the confinement and the baby, Mary, was suckled by her aunt. Mary Somerville points out that since her second husband was her aunt’s elder son, she was nursed by her mother-in-law (p. 9). The Fairfax family was from Yorkshire and was connected to Sir Thomas Fairfax, commander of the New Model Army, which defeated Charles I; the family also had American connections (p. 150). The Charters family was also an old family, related to several other notable Scottish families.
Four of Margaret Charters’s seven children survived: Samuel, Mary, Margaret and Henry. They were brought up in Burntisland in a house that is still standing. In her Personal Recollections Mary Somerville describes her childhood and adolescence in Burntisland and at school in Musselburgh, as well as her social life as a fairly well-connected young lady in Edinburgh. The explanation of the difficulties she surmounted to acquire the education she craved is best experienced through her own words.
By 1804, when she married her cousin, Samuel Greig, her unconventional desire to learn geometry, algebra and the classics was already well established, in spite of the obstacles placed in her way, even by those who loved her. Greig was the son of Admiral Sir Samuel Greig, who had gone to Russia in 1763 to organise Catherine II’s navy. To allow the young couple to marry, Greig was appointed Russian consul in London and Mary moved into his house there. Neither the house nor the marriage seems to have been very comfortable. Samuel Greig died in 1807, aged only 29, leaving Mary Somerville with two young children, Woronzow, called after the Russian Ambassador in London, and William George. As a widow back in her parents’ home, Mary Somerville had the means and the independence to pursue her studies. And this she did until in 1812 she married again, again to a cousin, William Somerville, an army doctor. The story of this happy union is embedded in the Recollections. There was at first a brief period in Edinburgh, then the family settled in London, where in 1819 William Somerville, after some vicissitudes, became Physician at Chelsea Hospital. During the next two decades the Somervilles played a significant part in the intellectual life of London: their acquaintance embraced the worlds of science, arts and politics.
Mary Somerville was in her late 40s when she embarked on her life as a writer on science. Her first work, the translation of the Mécanique céleste of the French astronomer and mathematician, Laplace, was undertaken, as she explains, at the suggestion of Henry Brougham (p. 131). It was published in 1831 to general acclamation: the trajectory of Mary Somerville’s professional life was set. William Somerville’s health sent the family travelling to Italy in 1838; in 1840 he retired and the Somervilles lived in various locations in Italy. William Somerville died in 1860 and Mary herself in Naples in 1872.
Mary Somerville’s successful life, nevertheless, included private tragedy. William George Greig died at only nine; the first child, a boy, of her second marriage died in infancy; and, worst of all, the Somervilles’ eldest girl, Margaret, from whom they had expected much, died in 1823, aged ten. Woronzow Greig married Agnes Graham in 1837 and became a successful barrister but died without legitimate issue in 1865, seven years before his mother. The remaining daughters, Martha Charters and Mary Charlotte Somerville, died unmarried only a few years after their mother. Her heirs were the children of her younger brother, Henry Fairfax.
The Personal Recollections were published the year after Mary Somerville’s death. According to her daughter and editor, Martha Somerville, they were mostly ‘noted down’ during the last years of her life (p. 2) and they have, even after editing, all the immediacy of a diary – the seeming freshness of youth informs them throughout. It turns out, however, that ‘noted down’ does less than justice to the care with which Mary Somerville prepared her Recollections. They exist in three versions in the Somerville Collection, deposited in the Bodleian Library – a rough outline in an 1859 notebook;1 a first draft, wholly in Mary Somerville’s hand, probably completed about 18692 and a second draft in Martha Somerville’s hand with interpolations in Mary Somerville’s hand.3
Mary Somerville undoubtedly intended the memoirs for publication before or after her death. In the original rough notes, she gives as her reason for writing ‘to prevent others misrepresenting me after my death, and to encourage other women’. There would be little point in such an aim if the autobiography was to remain private. But since she could have changed her mind, it is worth citing a letter from Sir John Herschel, Mary Somerville’s lifelong friend, and adviser on her scientific manuscripts. In March 1869 Sir John writes to Mary Somerville apologising for having taken more than a month to respond to the manuscript of her autobiography, which she had sent to him.4 Herschel is, he says, in almost every respect impressed by the narrative, but he is equivocal about immediate publication, believing that the exemplary life that it unfolds might have more effect on the public, ‘the many-headed monster’, after its subject’s death. He also recommends the excision of some fairly lengthy passages which involve a ‘recital of specific features in the history of scientific progress andmoderndiscovery’: he believes that the lay reader will find them dull and the expert reader inadequate. Both suggestions seem to have been accepted.
Herschel is impressed with the unaffectedness of the autobiography – ‘Nothing can be more pleasing and simple than the personal narration, the account of your strong early interest in those studies which you ultimately pursued with such extraordinary success and your self-taught progress in them under the most discouraging circumstances.’ The case for offering this edition of the Recollections to a new public more than 100 years after original publication depends in part on my belief that Herschel’s comment still holds, that Mary Somerville’s life remains an exemplary one, from which we have much to learn. I presume that the memoirs of a once-celebrated individual will have a special force and interest and additionally Mary Somerville’s representation of the age – and here the age means nearly a century, during which both Europe and the world beyond changed radically – is presented in a clear and penetrating manner in her Recollections.
The Recollections were very well received on their initial publication, reviewed in a number of national and local newspapers and journals. There had been a number of obituaries the year before, Mary Somerville’s achievements were still before the public. Those who were against the further advancement of women could use her example to point out how few women were like her and those who supported women’s causes could argue for how much women could achieve, even under adverse circumstances, if they would but persevere. But, as far as women’s rights were concerned, Mary Somerville was of a previous generation, a previous era indeed, and shortly after her death advocates of the cause closer to the moment were needed. And so it was that her personal life-writing, like her scientific works, fell out of print until AMS Press in 1975 reprinted the American edition of 1876.5 This has not, however, really made the Recollections accessible to a general readership and
