because the details of daily life are so sharp and because Mary Somerville’s love for her father and mother and her future father-in-law emerges so clearly at this point. But some silences are verging on the obsessive in their insistence on privacy, and the silences seem to be Mary Somerville’s, not Martha’s. She never mentions, for example, that her mother was William Fairfax’s second wife, his first wife also being from Burntisland (EP, 1). More understandably, perhaps, she fails to mention that William Somerville had been married before, and that he also had a natural child (EP, 7). Yet the existence of James Craig Somerville was never repudiated. William Somerville acknowledged his son and brought him back with him from South Africa, naming him after Sir James Craig and educating him until he graduated as a doctor of medicine from Edinburgh University. Nor did he exclude this son from his life with Mary Somerville: indeed, James Craig Somerville was fairly close to Woronzow Greig, Mary Somerville’s surviving son from her first marriage. Mary Somerville’s mother, writing in July 1831, asks that her ‘kindest love be given to Dr James and his pretty wife’.21
Dr James Craig had certainly been privy to the skeleton in Woronzow’s cupboard that his mother also hides from public view: it came to light at Woronzow’s death that he too had had an illegitimate child, fathered when he was 19 or 20, a daughter to whom he had given financial support but whose existence he kept secret from his wife, Agnes. This obviously caused a fair amount of family commotion. Mary Somerville seems to have been a little tactless, but there was no breach of relations between mother and daughter-in-law. Nor was Mary Somerville particularly shocked, consistent with her principle that charity was to be preferred to chastity; Woronzow had lived a decent Christian life and had helped his natural daughter and her family.22
It does not take a very percipient reader to guess that all was not well with Mary Somerville’s first marriage, although inattention and selfishness seem to have been the problems rather than anything more sinister. The short passages that I have restored from the first draft underline Samuel Greig’s selfishness (p. 62). Frances Power Cobbe, reviewing the Recollections for the Academy claims that Greig was ‘to the last degree harsh, stern, and unsympathising… Mr Greig, we believe, expressing at the last his consciousness that his widow would have had but little reason to regret his memory’ (Sat., 3 Jan. 1874, 2). It is likely, however, that Cobbe was reacting with irritation to obituaries that credited Samuel Greig with assisting his wife in her studies, presumably on the assumption that no woman could master mathematics without male support. Like Martha Somerville and, indeed, Mary Somerville herself (p. 63), Frances Cobbe wants to stress his lack of sympathy and perhaps paints him blacker than he was. At any rate, he had the decency to die quickly and give Mary Somerville the independence she needed.
About the second, happy and supportive, marriage, little more need be done than to point to the testimony of the Recollections. But it is something of an irony that William Somerville’s supportive behaviour towards his talented wife goes along with what we might now feel was an inadequately professional attitude towards his own work. His post at the Chelsea Hospital seems to have been close to a sinecure and certainly permitted a great deal of time off before his final decision to give up the position for health reasons. But, after all, this went largely unremarked at the time. And William Somerville seems to have been a remarkable man in his way. To have moved with ease and without apology through some of the highest intellectual society of Europe, always allowing the superior abilities of his wife without losing anything of his own dignity, must have required a firm sense of self which, nevertheless, seems to have been in no danger of becoming complacent. The story of his good-humoured negotiation of the problems of an over-holy Sunday (p. 178) are characteristic of a personality strong enough to be quietly assertive without giving the outward appearance of being so.
FRIEND
One of the most attractive aspects of the Personal Recollections is its revelation of important friendships. The friendship with Sir John Herschel is, of course, the one that most links the various Mary Somervilles that we have encountered: he is her scientific adviser, but he also writes to her as a father and husband, because she is so clearly herself mother and wife as well as intellectual woman. Female friendships too were of great importance to Mary Somerville, notably those with Maria Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie and, latterly, Frances Power Cobbe. We are grateful that Martha decided to include letters from Maria Edgeworth and Joanna Baillie; the latter, in particular, greatly assist the formation of a whole picture of Mary Somerville. Like Mary Somerville herself, Joanna Baillie was capable of sharp remarks despite also being little and shy.
Among lesser acquaintance, occasionally one feels rather bombarded by noble names. Yet one feels this as an effect of innocence, of a kind of naivety perhaps, and in a moment I want to suggest that this naivety is a positive quality. Nor again is any real distinction made between the high and the low – both are usually part of the everyday. One of the problems for an editor is that it is tempting to spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to find out who everyone mentioned is. Do we need to know that the Somervilles’ medical adviser was Professor Zanetti? And do we need to know if he was ‘someone’? Well, Mary Somerville seems to feel that to mention her medical adviser without mentioning his name would be discourteous. She tries to show proper courtesy to everyone who crosses her path, servant or prince.
It was, as I have already indicated, the wish of Mary Somerville’s daughters to provide a much more seamless version of her than I have permitted. But what does link all the Marys, that no amount of selection or editing seems to be able to fudge, is the special voice of the woman. It is, indeed, remarkable that, through all the daughterly fiddling with her text, this voice refuses to be blurred. Here we may go again to Sir John Herschel to find out what its characteristics were for her coevals. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘can be more pleasing and simple than the personal narration… nor anything more naive, more natural and unaffected then your account of your own success – no assumption, no vanity – but only an admission (and that rather by implication) of such an amount of private satisfaction, which one must be more or less than human not to feel.’23
We have come to feel that naivety is not a virtue, because it is so often affected, yet to recover its special value brings us closer to Mary Somerville’s unique qualities. If we think of a voice informed by naive wisdom, we go some way to defining what makes it special. This naive wisdom can be discerned in all the Mary Somervilles that I have discussed: the same unpretending clarity informs her dealings with both people and ideas.
Hers is a wholly distinctive voice, which has neither antecedent nor follower. A couple of examples may clarify its special quality: when Somerville is reporting her father’s illiberality, she dramatises with the direct perception of a novelist: ‘By G—, when a man cuts off his queue, the head should go with it’ (p. 36). Here, the very excess of the sentiment makes the speaker more loveable than sinister. And, again, when the cruel practices of the navy are discussed, Somerville writes dispassionately and hence devastatingly. Yet, immediately afterwards, she proceeds to discuss her father’s place in the very institution that she is condemning (pp. 56–58). This sophisticated perception that institutions may contain parts infinitely superior to the whole is made with a clear-mindedness so unaffected, so naive, that it is devastating. Much later, she cites the lady who believed that all those who worshipped in the Temple of Neptune must be ‘in eternal misery’. Somerville asked, ‘How could they believe in Christ when He was not born till many centuries after? I am sure she thought it was all the same’ (p. 101). The absence of fuss in the syntax makes the implicit judgment more telling.
On larger political issues, the same naive wisdom is evident. Garibaldi is a man of genius but potentially injurious to his country (p. 245). On the slave trade and slavery she refuses to compromise (p. 299), but tolerance in religious matters is always for her a virtue (p. 277). On the right of women to education, on the other hand, she is both tart and uncompromising. Science and religion she manages to reconcile by always
