Those who had voice and spirit had tempers like a tornado.
Herschel decided to educate a soloist and assistant. To marry a woman for the sake of educating her was risky business—he knew of men who had tried it—for men have tried it since the time of the Cavemen.
A bright thought came to him! He would go back to Deutschland and get one of his sisters, and bring her over to England to help him do his work—just the very thing!
t was a most fortunate stroke for Herschel when he went back home to get one of his sisters to come over into Macedonia and help him. No man ever did a great work unless he was backed up by a good woman. There were five of these Herschel girls—three were married, so they were out of the question, and another was engaged. This left Caroline as first, last and only choice. Caroline was twenty-two and could sing a little.
She had appeared in concerts for her father when a child. But when the father died, the girl was set to work in a dressmaking and millinery shop, to help support the big family. The mother didn't believe that women should be educated—it unfitted them for domesticity, and to speak of a woman as educated was to suggest that she was a poor housekeeper.
In Greece of old, educated women were spoken of as "companions"—and this meant that they were not what you would call respectable. They were the intellectual companions of men. The Greek term of disrespect carried with it a trifle of a suggestion not intended, that is, that women who were not educated—not intellectual—were really not companionable—but let that pass. It is curious how this idea that a woman is only a scullion and a drudge has permeated society until even the women themselves partake of the prejudice against themselves.
Mother Herschel didn't want her daughters to become educated, nor study the science of music nor the science of anything. A goodly grocer of the Dutch School had been picked out as a husband for Caroline, and now if she went away her prospects were ruined—Ach, Mein Gott! or words to that effect. And it was only on William's promise to pay the mother a weekly sum equal to the wages that Caroline received in the dressmaking-shop that she gave consent to her daughter's going. Caroline arrived in England, wearing wooden shoon and hoops that were exceeding Dutch, but without a word of English. In order to be of positive use to her brother, she must acquire English and be able to sing—not only sing well, but remarkably well. In less than a year she was singing solo parts at her brother's concerts, to the great delight of the aristocrats of Bath.
They heard her sing, but they did not take her captive and submerge her in their fashionable follies as they would have liked to do.
The sister and the brother kept close to their own rooms. Caroline was the housekeeper, and took a pride in being able to dispense with all outside help. She was small in figure, petite, face plain but full of animation. All of her spare time she devoted to her music. After the concerts she and her brother would leave the theater, change their clothes and then walk off into the country, getting back as late as one or two o'clock in the morning. On these midnight walks they used to study the stars and talk of the wonderful work of Kepler and Copernicus. There were various requests that Caroline should go to London and sing, but she steadfastly refused to appear on a stage except where her brother led the orchestra. About this time Caroline wrote a letter home, which missive, by the way, is still in existence, in which she says: "William goes to bed early when there are no concerts or rehearsals. He has a bowl of milk on the stand beside him, and he reads Smith's 'Harmonics' and Ferguson's 'Astronomy.' I sit sewing in the next room, and occasionally he will call to me to listen while he reads some passage that most pleases him. So he goes to sleep buried beneath his favorite authors, and his first thought in the morning is how to obtain instruments so we can study the harmonics of the sky." And a way was to open: they were to make their own telescopes—what larks! Brother and sister set to work studying the laws of optics. In a secondhand store they found a small Gregorian reflector which had an aperture of about two inches.