In October, 1821, Caroline Herschel wrote this melancholy “Finis” to what seemed to herself the only part of her life worth living. “Here closed my day-book; for one day passed like another, except that I, from my daily calls, returned to my solitary and cheerless home with increased anxiety for each following day.”
Eighteen months after her loss of “the dearest and best of brothers,” she at last gathered fortitude to put on paper her recollections of the “heartrending occurrences” witnessed by her during the closing months of her fifty years’ sojourn in England. In every line of what she then wrote, her absorbed fidelity to him, growing more and more tenacious as the end drew visibly nigher, comes out with unconscious pathos. The anguish with which she watched each symptom of decay seared her heart, but was refused any outward expression. She played out her rôle of self-suppression until the curtain fell. A last gleam of hope visited her July 8th, 1822, when she marked down in an almanac the cheering circumstance that her invalid had “walked with a firmer step than usual above three or four times the distance from the dwelling-house to the library, in order to gather and eat raspberries in his garden with me. But,” she added sadly, “I never saw the like again.”
In the impetuosity of her grief, she made an irreparable mistake. Only a month earlier she had surrendered to her impecunious brother Dietrich her little funded property of £500; now, without reflecting on the consequences, she “gave herself, with all she was worth, to him and his family.” She was in her seventy-third year; her only remaining business in life, it seemed to her, was to quit it; the virtual close of her career had come; the actual close could not long be delayed. So she retired to her native place to die promptly, if that might be, but, at any rate, to mark the chasm that separated her from the past. She soon recognised, however, that she had taken a false step. “Why did I leave happy England?” was the cry sometimes on her lips, always in her heart, for a quarter of a century. She was taken aback by her own vitality. She found out too late that her powers of work, far from being exhausted, might have been turned to account for her nephew as they had been for her brother. And it was to him and his mother, after all, that her strong affections clung. Her relatives in Hanover, although they treated her with consideration, were hopelessly uncongenial. “From the moment I set foot on German ground,” she said, “I found I was alone.” Fifty years is a huge gap in a human life. Miss Herschel had been all that time progressing from the starting point where they had remained stationary. Their tastes were then necessarily incongruous with hers; nor could her interests be transplanted at will from the soil in which they were rooted. She was unable to perceive that the change was in herself. The “solitary and useless life” she led resulted, she was convinced, from her “not finding Hanover, or anyone in it, like what I left when the best of brothers took me with him to England in August, 1772!”
An exile in her old home, she felt pledged to remain there. She would not “take back her promise.” For a person of her frugal habits, she was well off. Her pension of fifty pounds would have supplied her small wants, and she was reluctantly compelled to accept the annuity of £100, left to her by her brother. And since she was most generous in the bestowal of her spare cash, her presence was of some material advantage to a poor household. It gave them credit, too; and notwithstanding that they “never could agree” in opinions, she faithfully nursed Dietrich Herschel until his death in January, 1827.
“I am still unsettled,” she wrote to her nephew, December 26th, 1822, “and cannot get my books and papers in any order, for it is always noon before I am well enough to do anything, and then visitors run away with the rest of the day till the dinner-hour, which is two o’clock. Two or three evenings in each week are spoiled by company. And at the heavens there is no getting, for the high roofs of the opposite houses. But within my room I am determined nothing shall be wanting that can please my eye. Exactly facing me is a bookcase placed on a bureau, to which I will have some glass doors made, so that I can see my books. Opposite this, on a sofa, I am seated, with a sofa-table and my new writing-desk before me; but what good I shall do there the future must tell.”
Seated at that “new desk,” she completed her most important work. This was the reduction into a catalogue, and the arrangement into zones, of all Sir William Herschel’s nebulæ and clusters. Despatched to Sir John Herschel in April, 1825, it made his review of those objects feasible. From it, he drew up his “working-list” for each night’s observations; and from it, in constructing his “General Catalogue” of 1864, he took the places of such nebulæ as he had not been able to examine personally. In the course of the needful comparisons, “I learned,” he said, “fully to appreciate the skill, diligence, and accuracy which that indefatigable lady brought to bear on a task which only the most boundless devotion could have induced her to undertake, and enabled her to accomplish.” For its execution, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society was awarded to her in 1828—an honour by which she was “more shocked than gratified.” Her “Zone-Catalogue” was styled by Sir David Brewster “an extraordinary monument of the unextinguished ardour of a lady of seventy-five in the cause of abstract science.”
In 1835, she was created an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society, Mrs. Somerville being associated with her in a distinction never before or since conferred upon a woman. Three years later, she was surprised by the news that the Royal Irish Academy had similarly enrolled her. “I cannot help,” she wrote, “crying out aloud to myself, every now and then, What is that for?” The arrival, on another occasion, of presentation-copies of Mrs. Somerville’s “Connexion of the Physical Sciences,” and of Baily’s “Account of Flamsteed,” agitated her painfully. “Coming to me with such things,” she exclaimed, “an old, poor, sick creature in her dotage.” “I think it is almost mocking me,” she added in 1840, “to look upon me as a Member of an Academy; I that have lived these eighteen years without finding as much as a single comet.”
Her local celebrity, nevertheless, diverted her. It struck her as a capital joke that she was “stared at for a learned lady.” Down to 1840 she regularly attended plays and concerts, and rarely left the theatre without a “Wie geht’s?” from His Majesty. And to find herself—“a little old woman”—conspicuous in the crowd, produced a sense of exhilaration. Her presence or absence was a matter of public concern, and she very seldom appeared otherwise than alert and cheerful. When close upon eighty her “nimbleness in walking,” she remarked, “has hitherto gained me the admiration of all who know me; but the good folks are not aware of the arts I make use of, which consist in never leaving my room in the daytime except I am able to trip it along as if nothing were the matter.” Music gave her unfailing pleasure. She heard Catalani in 1828; shared in the Paganini furore of 1831, and conversed with him through an interpreter. With Ole Bull she was “somewhat disappointed,” finding his performance “more like conjuration than playing on a violin.”
But her “painful solitude” was most of all cheered by the visits and communications of eminent men. No one of distinction in science came to Hanover without calling upon her. Humboldt, Gauss, Mädler, Encke, Schumacher, paid her their respects, personally or by letter, if not in both ways. “Next to listening to the conversation of learned men,” she told the younger Lady Herschel, “I like to hear about them; but I find myself, unfortunately, among beings who like nothing but smoking, big talk on politics, wars, and such-like things.” Her situation remained, to the end, displeasing to her. She made the best of it; but the best was, to her thinking, bad. Having wilfully flung herself out of the current of life, she was nevertheless surprised at being stranded. She recurred, with inextinguishable pain, to the crippling effects of circumstances and old age.
“I lead a very idle life,” she wrote in 1826. “My sole employment consists in keeping myself in good humour, and not being disagreeable to others.” And in 1839: “I get up as usual, every day, change my clothing, eat, drink, and go to sleep again on the sofa, except I am roused by visitors; then I talk till I can talk no more—nineteen to the dozen!” While at nights “the few, few stars I can get at out of my window only cause me vexation, for to look for the small ones on the globe my eyes will not serve me any longer.”