Claire Brock - The Comet Sweeper: Caroline Herschels Astronomical Ambition

This edition published in the UK in 2017 by
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Originally published in 2007 by Icon Books Ltd

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ISBN: 978-178578-166-7

Text copyright 2007 Claire Brock
The author has asserted her moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

Caroline Herschel, from an oil painting by Tielemann, 1829 ( National Maritime Museum, London).

The gold medal of the Astronomical Society of London (later the Royal Astronomical Society), awarded to Caroline Herschel in 1828. The telescope is William Herschels 40-foot reflector, the symbol of the Astronomical Society; the motto of the Society, Whatever shines is to be noted down, appears above it. Isaac Newton is on the other side, with an excerpt from a Latin poem by Edmond Halley which appeared in the opening pages of Newtons Principia: the cloud [of ignorance] dispelled by science.

For Ben Dew

Claire Brock is Associate Professor in the School of Arts at the University of Leicester. She is the author of The Feminization of Fame (Palgrave, 2006) and British Women Surgeons and their Patients, 18601918 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and the editor of New Audiences for Science: Women, Children, and Labourers (Pickering and Chatto, 2013). Claire Brock won the British Society for the History of Sciences international Singer Prize (2005) and received a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award (201214) for British Women Surgeons and their Patients.

With grateful thanks to the following for all their generous support: Imogen Aitchison and Aaron Davies; Ann and the late Fred Brock; Sin and Paul Brock; Helen Brock and Joseph Giddings; Vera and Francis Connolly; Nicky Dawson and Simon Dew; Kathy and Chris Dew; Andy Lamb; and Julie Latham.

Simon Flynn of Icon Books and Jenny Uglow provided generous encouragement from the outset. Duncan Heath at Icon has been an astute reader and editor of the manuscript. Michael Hoskins work on the Herschels has been inspiring; future scholars of the career of Caroline Herschel have him to thank for editing and making available Herschels autobiographies.

Thanks are also due to the British Library for kind permission to quote from Caroline Herschels correspondence. Herschels intermingling of English and German, as well as her idiosyncratic spelling have been retained throughout. All translations from French or German texts, unless otherwise acknowledged, are my own.

Last, but certainly not least, I dedicate this book to Ben Dew, for everything and more.

At the beginning of August 1786, Caroline Herschel made the usual entries in her Book of Work Done. With her brother William away, she was at leisure to survey the heavens, once she had completed her daily tasks. Very calmly, she entered the following:

Aug 1. I have calculated 100 nebulae today, and this evening I saw an object which I believe will prove to morrow night to be a Comet.
2. To day I calculated 150 Nebulae. I fear it will not be clear to night, it has been raining throughout the whole day, but seems now to clear up a little 1, oClock the object of last night is a Comet .
3. I did not go to rest till I had wrote to Dr Blagden and Mr Aubert to announce the Comet.

At the age of 36, Caroline Herschel had discovered her first comet. Just over a year later, in October 1787, with the award of 50 per year from George III, she would become the only woman in Britain to earn her living from the pursuit of science and, historically, the first woman to earn her living from astronomy.

Herschels wages were ostensibly for assistance to her brother, William, whose discovery, in 1781, of the planet which would later become known as Uranus had propelled him on an unusual trajectory from a career in music at Bath to royal astronomer. Yet she was not simply an amanuensis or general dogsbody. Caroline Herschel made her own original findings, separate from the work she carried out for her illustrious brother. Her astronomical discoveries earned an international reputation and the highest accolades ever awarded, at that time, to a woman from the scientific community: a Gold Medal in 1828 and Honorary Membership in 1835 of the Astronomical Society of London. She was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy three years later, and was presented with the Gold Medal of Science from the King of Prussia when she was in her nineties. Herschels reputation was such that a letter written to her from the director of the Paris Observatory, Joseph Jrme de Lalande, could be addressed simply to Mlle Caroline Herschel, Astronome Clbre, Slough.

In 1844, at the age of 94, Caroline Herschel was

Although unable to carry on writing herself, Caroline Herschel was more than keen to see the story of her life handed down to posterity and preserved publicly for the benefit of future generations. A fictional treatment would secure the subject from instant identification, while simultaneously making only too clear whose life was being discussed. Caroline Herschel distrusted journalists and newspapers; as she so characteristically put it herself ten years earlier: [I have been] looking over my store of astronomical and other memorandums of upwards of 50 years collecting and destreuing all what might produce noncence when coming through the hands of a Block-kopff in the Zeitungen. This way, her reputation could be managed posthumously by concerned and trustworthy family members, and compiled from her own papers.

Arabella Herschel never wrote the novel suggested by her great aunt. But Caroline Herschel had been right about one thing: her life, from its unpromising beginnings to its later, brilliant successes, made a perfect fiction. These fictional qualities have, however, also ensured that the subject has been suppressed by the legend. Until now, she has been treated almost exclusively as a dutiful sister to her more important brother. Much has been made about her selfless devotion to his studies, her long nights of waiting for his commands to write down stellar positions, her placing bits of food into his mouth when, due to excessive concentration on work, he had forgotten or was too tired to eat himself. This ceaseless support of William Herschel does indeed shine through in her memoirs, letters and diaries, which reveal sacrifice, stoicism, tireless labour and incredible self-abnegation. From the second half of the nineteenth century, Caroline Herschels story has been told again and again, always with the same conclusions. For more than a century and a half, one viewpoint has prevailed. Comparing a late nineteenth-century assessment with a recent twenty-first-century analysis of Herschels career, the similarities are striking. In 1895 Agnes M. Clerkes