ladders had not even the braces at the bottom’), the entire wooden frame collapsed around him; workmen had to be called to release him from the wreckage of spars.175
On 31 December 1783, New Year’s Eve, over a foot of snow had fallen, and the sky was overcast. William however postponed celebrations, and insisted on the last sweep of the year. Caroline gives the impression that he was particularly impatient, and perhaps shouting at her more than usual. ‘About 10 o’clock a few stars became visible, and in the greatest hurry all was got ready for observing. My Brother at the front of the Telescope [was] directing me to make some alterations in the lateral motion.’ As she hurried round the base of the telescope, ‘having to run in the dark on ground covered foot deep in melting snow’, she slipped and tripped over a hidden wooden stake. These stakes were used to peg down the telescope frame with guy ropes, and had large iron hooks facing vertically upwards, ‘such as butchers use for hanging their joints on’.
Caroline painfully recounted what followed. ‘I fell on one of these hooks which entered my right leg about six inches above the knee. My brother’s call-make haste!-I could only answer by a pitiful cry-I am hooked!’ She was impaled, like a fish on a barb, and could not move. Herschel was still high up on the observation platform, in complete darkness, and did not immediately realise what had happened. It seems he continued to call down through the dark, ‘Make haste!’, while Caroline continued to gasp back in agony, ‘I am hooked!’176
Finally he grasped the situation, and called for help from the assistant who had been adjusting the telescope frame. ‘He and the workman were instantly with me, but they could not lift me without leaving near 2 oz. of my flesh behind. The workman’s wife was called but was afraid to do anything.’ Caroline was carried back to the house, but astonishingly no doctor was called. She bandaged the wound herself, retired to bed, and proudly recorded that she was back on telescope duties within a fortnight. It seems that the extreme cold had an antiseptic effect on the large, open wound, and prevented fatal gangrene.
No doubt it was characteristic of Caroline to treat this wound lightly, and not make any fuss. Yet there is an uneasy sense throughout her account that William did not treat her with sufficient tenderness or care: ’I was obliged to be my own surgeon by applying acquabaseda and tying a kerchief about it for some days.’ The local Windsor physician, Dr James Lind, only heard about the accident a week later, ‘and brought me ointment and lint and told me how to use it’. The deep wound did not heal easily, but there is still no mention of William’s concern at any point. Eventually Dr Lind was called back to Datchet in early February 1784. ‘At the end of six weeks I began to have some fears about my poor Limb and had Dr Lind’s opinion, who on seeing the wound found it going on well; but said, if a soldier had met with such a hurt he would have been entitled to 6 weeks nursing in a hospital.’177 It is curious that Dr Lind compared Caroline to someone in military service, and it is hard to overlook a certain note of reproach in his words.♣
Caroline surely intended some irony when she added in the Memoir: ‘I had however the comfort to know that my Brother was no loser through this accident for the remainder of the night was cloudy and several nights afterwards afforded only a few short intervals favourable for sweeping, and until 16 January before there was any necessity for exposing myself for a whole night to the severity of the season.’
The wound had largely healed by the summer, but it would later return to give her chronic pain in old age. Her pitiful cry-‘I am hooked!’-is curiously symbolic of her relations with her brilliant, domineering brother at this period, at a time when he was obsessed by his astronomical ideas to the exclusion of all else. Including, it might seem, his sister’s well-being; although we have only her word for this.178
It is hardly surprising that Herschel was a little distracted. In 1784 and 1785 he drew together his most radical ideas about the cosmos, and published two revolutionary papers in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. These completely transformed the commonly held idea of our solar system being surrounded by a stable dome of ‘fixt stars’, with a broad ‘galaxy’ or ‘via lactae’ (meaning a ‘path or stream of milk’) of smaller, largely unknown stars spilt across it, roughly from east to west. This was a celestial architecture or ‘construction’, inspired fundamentally by the idea of a sacred temple, which had existed from the time of the Babylonians and the Greeks, and had not seriously been challenged by Flamsteed or even by Newton.179
‘An Investigation of the Construction of the Heavens’, published in June 1784, quietly set out to change this immemorial picture. It was based on all Herschel’s ceaseless telescope observations, relentlessly pursued with Caroline over two years, with his new twenty-foot reflector telescope. He had identified 466 new nebulae (four times the number recently confirmed by Messier), and for the first time suggested that many, if not all, of these must be huge independent star clusters or galaxies outside our own Milky Way.180
This led him on to propose a separate, three-dimensional shape to the apparent flat ‘milk stream’ of the Milky Way. His proposal was based on his new method of ‘gauging’ the number of stars in any direction as seen from the earth, and then deducing from the different densities observed the likely shape of this galactic star cluster as it would be seen looking ‘inwards’ from another galaxy. This was a daring mixture of observation and speculation. Herschel’s first galactic diagram appeared like a curious oblong box or tilting parallelogram of stars.181 But his later calculations produced the now-familiar discus shape of the Milky Way, with its characteristic arms spinning out into space, and the slight bulge of stars at its centre.182 He was never sure where the solar system was located in the galaxy, and at one point observed that its overall shape was relative, depending on the view as seen by ‘the inhabitants of the nebulae of the present catalogue…according as their situation is more or less remote from ours‘.183
In the second paper, called simply ‘On the Construction of the Heavens’ (1785), Herschel began to develop these ideas into a startling new ‘natural history’ of the universe. He opened by arguing that astronomy required a delicate balance of observation and speculation. ‘If we indulge a fanciful imagination and build worlds of our own…these will vanish like Cartesian vortices.’ On the other hand, merely ‘adding observation to observation’, without attempting to draw conclusions and explore ‘conjectural views’, would be equally self-defeating.184
His own conjecture would be radical. The heavenly ‘construction’ was not something architecturally fixed by the Creator, but appeared to be constantly changing and even evolving, more like some enormous living organism. His telescopes seemed to show that all gaseous nebulae were actually ‘resolvable’ into stars. They were not amorphous zones of gas left over from the Creation. They were enormous star clusters scattered far beyond the Milky Way, and were dispersed throughout the universe as far as his telescopes could penetrate. The nebulae themselves were active. Their function seemed to be that of constantly forming new stars out of condensing gas, in a process of continuous creation. They were replacing stars which were lost.
Herschel found a memorable phrase for this astonishing speculation: ‘These clusters may be the Laboratories of the universe, if I may so express myself, wherein the most salutary remedies for the decay of the whole are prepared.’
