It was, however, balked by an extraordinary turn of affairs; a turn at first not at all to her liking. After the lapse of half-a-century she still set it down as the grievance of her life that “I have been throughout annoyed and hindered in my endeavours at perfecting myself in any branch of knowledge by which I could hope to gain a creditable livelihood.”
William Herschel, when Caroline joined him at Bath, was just feeling his way towards telescope-making. The fancy did not please her. The beginnings of great things are usually a disturbance and an anxiety. They imply a draft upon the future which may never be honoured, and they often play sad havoc with the present. And Miss Herschel was business-like and matter-of-fact. But her devotion triumphed over her common-sense. Keeping her misgivings to herself, she met unlooked-for demands with the utmost zeal, intelligence, and discretion. She was always at hand when wanted, yet never in the way. Through her care, some degree of domestic comfort was maintained amid the unwonted confusion of optical manufacture. During the tedious process of mirror-polishing, she sustained her brother physically and mentally, putting food into his mouth, and reading aloud “Don Quixote,” and the “Arabian Nights.” She was ready with direct aid, too, and “became in time as useful a member of the workshop as a boy might be to his master in the first year of his apprenticeship.” “Alex,” she continued, “was always very alert, assisting when anything new was going forward; but he wanted perseverance, and never liked to confine himself at home for many hours together. And so it happened that my brother William was obliged to make trial of my abilities in copying for him catalogues, tables, and sometimes whole papers which were lent him for his perusal.” Musical business, meantime, received due attention. Steady preparation was made for concerts and oratorios; choruses were instructed, rehearsals attended, parts diligently written out from scores. But the discovery of Uranus swept away the necessity for these occupations; and with a final performance in St. Margaret’s Chapel, on Whit-Sunday, 1782, the musical career of William and Caroline Herschel came to a close.
Miss Herschel’s “thoughts were anything but cheerful” on the occasion. She saw the terrestrial ground cut from under her feet, and did not yet appreciate the celestial situation held in reserve for her. Music, in her opinion, was her true and only vocation; the contemplation of herself in the guise of an assistant-astronomer moved her to cynical self-scorn. As usual, however, her personal wishes were suppressed. Housewifely cares, too, weighed upon her. The dilapidated gazebo at Datchet provided no suitable shelter for a well-regulated establishment. It was roofed more in appearance than in reality; the plaster fell from the ceilings; the walls dripped with damp; rheumatism and ague were its rightful inmates. Then the prices of provisions appalled her, especially in view of the scarcity of five-pound notes since the opulence of Bath had been exchanged for the penury of a court precinct.
Yet she set to work with a will to learn all that was needful for her untried office. Not out of books. “My dear brother William,” she wrote in 1831, “was my only teacher, and we began generally where we should have ended; he supposing I knew all that went before.” The lessons were of the most desultory kind. They consisted of answers to questions put by her as occasions arose, during breakfast, or at odd moments. The scraps of information thus snatched were carefully recorded in her commonplace book, where they constituted a miscellaneous jumble of elementary formulæ, solutions of problems in trigonometry, rules for the use of tables of logarithms, for converting sidereal into solar time, and the like. Nothing was entrusted to a memory compared by her instructor to “sand, in which everything could be inscribed with ease, but as easily effaced.” So that even the multiplication table was carried about in her pocket. She appears never to have spent a single hour in the systematic study of astronomy. Her method was that in vogue at Dotheboys Hall, to “go and know it,” by practising, as it were, blindfold, what she had been taught. Yet a computational error has never, we believe, been imputed to her; and the volume of her work was very great.
Its progress was diversified by more exciting pursuits. She began, in 1782, to “sweep for comets,” and discovered with a 27-inch reflector, in the autumn of 1783, two nebulæ of first-rate importance—one a companion to the grand object in Andromeda, the other a superb elliptical formation in Cetus. She was by this time more than reconciled to her astronomical lot; Von Magellan, indeed, reported in 1785, that brother and sister were equally captivated with the stars.
The original explorations, in which she was beginning to delight, were interrupted by the commencement of his with the “large twenty-foot.” Her aid was indispensable, and from December, 1783, she “became entirely attached to the writing-desk.” She was no mere mechanical assistant. A wound-up automaton would have ill served William Herschel’s turn. He wanted “a being to execute his commands with the quickness of lightning”; and his commands were various. For he was making, not following precedents, and fresh exigencies continually arose. Under these novel circumstances, his sister displayed incredible zeal, promptitude, and versatility. She would throw down her pen to run to the clock, to fetch and carry instruments, to measure the ground between the lamp-micrometer and the observer’s eye; discharging these, and many other successive tasks with a rapidity that kept pace with his swift proceedings. Fatigue, want of sleep, cold, were disregarded; and although nature often exacted next day penalties of weariness and depression for those nights of intense activity, the faithful amanuensis never complained. “I had the comfort,” she remarked simply, “to see that my brother was satisfied with my endeavours to assist him.” The service was not unaccompanied by danger. One night poor Caroline, running in the dark over ground a foot deep in melting snow, in order to make some alteration in the movement of the telescope, fell over a great hook, which entered her leg so deeply that a couple of ounces of her flesh remained behind when she was lifted off it. The wound was formidable enough, in Dr. Lind’s opinion, to entitle a soldier to six weeks’ hospital-nursing, but it was treated cursorily at Datchet; the patient consoling herself for a few nights’ disablement with the reflection that her brother, owing to cloudy weather, “was no loser through the accident.”
Busy days succeeded watchful nights. From the materials collected at the telescope, she formed properly arranged catalogues, calculating, in all, the places of 2,500 nebulæ. She brought the whole of Flamsteed’s British Catalogue—then the vade mecum of astronomers—into zones of one degree wide, for the purpose of William’s methodical examination; copied out his papers for the Royal Society; kept the observing-books straight, and documents in order. Then, in the long summer months, when “there was nothing but grinding and polishing to be seen,” she took her share of that too, and “was indulged with the last finishing of a very beautiful mirror for Sir William Watson.”
On August 1st, 1786, her brother’s absence leaving her free to observe on her own account, she discerned a round, hazy object, suspiciously resembling a comet. Its motion within the next twenty-four hours certified it as such, and she immediately announced the apparition to her learned friends, Dr. Blagden and Mr. Aubert. The latter declared in reply, “You have immortalised your name,” and saw in imagination “your wonderfully clever and wonderfully amiable brother shedding,” upon receipt of the intelligence, “a tear of joy.” This was the first of a series of eight similar discoveries, in five of which her priority was unquestioned. They were comprised within eleven years, and were made, after 1790, with an excellent five-foot reflector mounted on the roof of the house at Slough. Considering that she swept the heavens only as an interlude to her regular duties, never for an hour forsaking her place beside the great telescopes in the garden, her aptitude for that fascinating pursuit must be rated very high. It was not until 1819 that Encke identified her seventh comet—detected November 7th, 1795—with one previously seen by Méchain in January, 1786. None other revolves so quickly, its returns to perihelion occurring at intervals of three and a quarter years. It has earned notoriety, besides, by a still unexplained acceleration of movement.
Caroline Herschel was the first woman to discover a comet; and her remarkable success in what Miss Burney called “her eccentric vocation,” procured for her an European reputation. But the homage which she received did not disturb her sense of subordination. “Giving the sum of more to that which hath too much,” she instinctively transferred her meed of praise to her brother. She held her comets, notwithstanding, very dear. All the documents relating to them were found after her death neatly assorted in a packet labelled “Bills and Receipts of my Comets”; and the telescopes with which they had been observed ranked among the chief treasures of her old age. She presented the smaller one before her death to her friend Mr. Hausmann; the five-foot to the Royal Astronomical Society, where it is religiously preserved.
The “celebrated comet-searcher” was described by Miss Burney in 1787 as “very little, very gentle, very modest, and very ingenuous; and her manners are those of a person unhackneyed and unawed by the world, yet desirous to meet and return its smiles.” To Dr. Burney, ten years later, she appeared “all shyness and virgin modesty”; while Mrs. Papendick mentions her as “by no means prepossessing, but an excellent, kind-hearted creature.” She was, in 1787, officially appointed her brother’s assistant, with a salary of fifty pounds a year; “and in October,” she relates, “I received twelve pounds ten, being the first quarterly payment of my salary, and the first money I ever in all my lifetime thought myself to be at liberty to spend to my own liking.” The arrangement was made in anticipation of her brother’s marriage, when—to quote her one bitter phrase on the subject—“she had to give up the place of his housekeeper.” She did not readily accommodate herself to the change; and a significant gap of ten years in her journal suggests that she wrote much during that time of struggle which her calmer judgment counselled her to destroy. Her strong sense of right and habitual abnegation, however, came to her aid; the family relations remained harmonious; and she eventually became deeply attached to her gentle sister-in-law. But from 1788 onwards, she lived in lodgings, either at Slough or Upton, whence she came regularly to the observatory to do her daily or nightly work.