Caroline found her own way of stubbornly preparing for her escape. She practised singing the solo parts of oratorios ‘with a gag between my teeth’, so she could not be heard at home; and she secretly knitted enough cotton stockings for Dietrich to last him ‘two years at least’.
Finally Herschel himself went over to Hanover, and won his mother over by pointedly promising to settle an annuity on her to pay for a maid to replace Caroline. He never succeeded in getting his elder brother’s agreement, however. Jacob was away attending the Queen of Denmark at a court festival, and blustering letters arrived ‘expressing nothing but regret and impatience’ at the whole plan. William simply ignored them, and Caroline left ‘without receiving the consent of my eldest brother’. They departed on 16 August 1772, and from this moment William became the real head of the family.
Caroline still spoke practically no English. Her elfin face, badly marked by the childhood smallpox scars, made her painfully shy. At less than five feet she was of such diminutive stature that at times she seemed like a pixie out of some German folk tale. She had an almost childlike enthusiasm, energy and sense of mischief. The one known portrait of her at this age, a charming miniature silhouette, confirms this impression. Her profile is fine, pert, almost boyish, but with full, slightly pouting lips, and a neat, very determined little chin. Her hair bubbles round her head in a mass of curls, and falls down her back, where it is secured with a ribbon. She has a sprite-like quality about her.
Caroline adored the journey to England, keeping a wide-eyed diary of the trip, like an excited teenager. In Holland her hat was gloriously blown off into a canal. At night William made her sit outside on the top of the carriage so he could show her the constellations. On the crossing to Norfolk, one of their ship’s masts was carried away in a storm. Anchoring off the beach at Great Yarmouth (future home of Dickens’s Lil’ Emily), they were transferred with their bags to an open boat, rowed through the swell, and unceremoniously ‘thrown like balls’ onto the shore by two strapping English sailors.
Outside Norwich, the horses ran away with their carriage and they went ‘flying into a dry ditch’. In London they walked round the streets, seeing St Paul’s and the Bank, admiring the lights and examining the shops. But William would only pause outside those selling optical instruments-‘I do not think we stopped at any other.’ By the time they arrived by the overnight coach in Bath, Caroline reckoned she had only slept in a bed twice in eleven days. That was what it was going to be like living with her brother. ‘I was almost annihilated,’ she wrote triumphantly. William covered the whole journey in one sentence in his journal. ‘Set off on my return to England in company with my sister.’71
6
William now hustled Caroline into her new life. Summoning her to a seven o’clock breakfast, he began immediately to give her lessons in English and arithmetic, and showed her ‘booking and keeping household accounts of cash received and laid out’. He said he would give her three singing lessons a day, while she practised the harpsichord, dealt with the household linen and prepared the menus. She was given rooms in the attic with Alexander, but was commanded to act as hostess in the salon.
William treated her affectionately but sternly, insisting that she go out to shop on her own in the market at Bath, even though she still only spoke a few words of English, which she had, as she put it, ‘on our journey learned like a Parrot’.72 She found herself ‘alone among fishwomen, butchers, basket-men etc’, and also had to contend with the ‘hot-headed old Welsh woman’ who cooked. She felt she was encountering a ‘natural antipathy’ which the lower class of the English had against foreigners.73 But she could also be fierce herself: William’s neighbour, the motherly Mrs Bullman, she quickly dismissed as ‘very little better than an Idiot’, a term much favoured by Caroline.74
At first she struggled against Heimweh (homesickness) but she showed herself unexpectedly dauntless, and gradually settled into the taxing new routine. Breakfast was shortly after 6 a.m. (’much too early for me, who would rather have remained up all night’), followed by household accounts, shopping, laundry, three-hourly singing lessons, instruction in English and arithmetic, music copying, formal practice on the harpsichord kept in the front room, and reading out loud from English novels.75 ‘By way of relaxation’, she and William talked of nothing but astronomy. She never forgot ‘the bright constellations with which I had made acquaintance during the fine night we spent on the Postwagen travelling through Holland’. But she also remembered that William had promised to train her up as a professional concert singer, who would one day be independent.
It took time for the full emotional rapport to renew itself between the tall, handsome thirty-four-year-old bachelor brother, driven and ambitious, and the shy, tiny, awkward twenty-two-year-old sister, who had never before travelled outside her native Hanover, but who was bursting with unfulfilled dreams and longings. To begin with their relationship seemed formal, almost like that between father and daughter. In many ways William was quite withdrawn-enthusiastic and talkative in the mornings, but remote in the evenings after any guests had departed. ‘I seldom saw my Brother in the evening…He used to retire to bed with a basin of milk or glass of water, and Smith’s Harmonics and Optics, Ferguson’s Astronomy etc, and so went to sleep buried under his favourite authors; and his first thoughts on rising were how to obtain instruments for viewing those objects himself of which he had been reading.’ At breakfast, Caroline was usually subjected to ‘ample stuff for an astronomical Lecture’.76
William loved Caroline tenderly, but he also bullied her, in what he saw as a kindly pedagogical way. He could be an unsparing disciplinarian. She in turn adored him, but also feared him and grew impatient with him. He was always fierce in his domestic demands, and constantly required her to better herself: her English, her mathematics, her music and her astronomy. But gradually she learned to tease him and criticise him, while he came more and more to depend on her. In his daily notes and instructions he began to address her by the affectionate diminutive ‘Lina’, with its moonlike echo. Sometimes he even wrote it teasingly in French-‘Lina adieu’-or transliterated into Greek letters, ‘as you understand Greek’.77 Caroline always referred to him simply as ‘my dearest Brother’, or else ‘my beloved Brother’. For Caroline, William was initially the great liberator who had taken her out of the German house of bondage. But later their roles would subtly change. As William would observe to Nevil Maskelyne, it was not always self-evident which was the planet and which was the moon.
With the household running more smoothly, Herschel could now begin regular astronomical observations in their garden at night. Once Caroline had arrived, he found more time to explore the construction of telescopes. First he hired a two-and-a-half-foot-long Gregorian reflector telescope, which was too small; then in autumn 1772 he tried to construct an eighteen-foot refractor on the Huygens model. But its tube, which Caroline was instructed to make out of papier-mâché, was so long that it kept bending, like an elephant’s trunk. They substituted one made out of tin, but it was still not satisfactory. Then he wrote to London for materials to construct a five-foot reflector, but was told that no one made glass mirrors large enough (at least five inches in diameter) to fit it. It was then that Herschel took the crucial decision to try to cast, grind and polish his own metal mirrors or specula. To start with, he acquired some metal grinding and polishing tools from John Michel, a Quaker astronomer who had retired to Bath nursing some strange, unacceptable ideas-such as the existence of ‘black holes’ in space from which light itself could not escape.
The accelerating pace of
