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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: Icon Science
- Sprache: Englisch
Having escaped domestic servitude in Germany by teaching herself to sing, and established a career in England, Caroline Herschel learned astronomy while helping her brother William, then Astronomer Royal. Soon making scientific discoveries in her own right, she swept to international scientific and popular fame. She was awarded a salary by George III in 1787 – the first woman in Britain to make her living from science. But, as a woman in a male-dominated world, Herschel's great success was achieved despite constant frustration of her ambitions. Drawing on original sources – including Herschel's diaries and her fiery letters – Claire Brock tells the story of a woman determined to win independence and satisfy her astronomical ambition.
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This edition published in the UK in 2017 byIcon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPemail: [email protected]
Originally published in 2007 by Icon Books Ltd
Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia byFaber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,74–77 Great Russell Street,London WC1B 3DA or their agents
Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia byGrantham Book Services, Trent Road,Grantham NG31 7XQ
Distributed in the USA byPublishers Group West,1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed in Canada byPublishers Group Canada,76 Stafford Street, Unit 300,Toronto, Ontario M6J 2S1
Distributed in Australia and New Zealand byAllen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500,83 Alexander Street,Crows Nest, NSW 2065
Distributed in South Africa byJonathan Ball, Office B4, The District,41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925
ISBN: 978-178578-166-7
Text copyright © 2007 Claire BrockThe 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
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, 1860–1918 (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 Science’s international Singer Prize (2005) and received a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award (2012–14) for British Women Surgeons and their Patients.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION Astronomical ambition
CHAPTER I Early life
CHAPTER II Escape to Bath
CHAPTER III From stage ornament to celebrated female astronomer
CHAPTER IV Distinguished at last
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Advert
Acknowledgements
With grateful thanks to the following for all their generous support: Imogen Aitchison and Aaron Davies; Ann and the late Fred Brock; Siân 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 Hoskin’s work on the Herschels has been inspiring; future scholars of the career of Caroline Herschel have him to thank for editing and making available Herschel’s autobiographies.
Thanks are also due to the British Library for kind permission to quote from Caroline Herschel’s correspondence. Herschel’s 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.
Introduction
Astronomical ambition
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, o’Clock 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.1
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.
Herschel’s 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. Herschel’s reputation was such that a letter written to her from the director of the Paris Observatory, Joseph Jérôme de Lalande, could be addressed simply to ‘Mlle Caroline Herschel, Astronome Célèbre, Slough’.2
In 1844, at the age of 94, Caroline Herschel was engaged in writing her memoirs for her nephew and his family. Looking back upon an extremely long life, she found herself exceptionally frustrated with her now useless body, the loss of her precious eyesight and, most vitally, her inability to be of use either to herself or to others. Typically, she phrased this by placing herself in brackets: ‘I am so out of humour with myself at my inability at being of any farther use to any one; (or even to myself), that for these last three months I have not been able to add a single line to my Memoir.’3 Despite physical feebleness, Caroline Herschel’s mind was still acutely alert, and as she battled to force her body to keep pace with her brain, she assessed how her life could best be explained to her family. Although first offering the suggestion as a joke, Herschel repeated an intriguing idea more seriously in a second letter. What had started off as the mock fictional Life and Adventures of Miss Caroline Herschel Solely for the Amusement of Lady Herschel in April 1844 had become, by September of the same year, something far more fascinating. Fearing that she may not live to write anything substantial, Herschel directed her niece’s attention to another possibility: ‘[This] may serve my grand Niece Arabella (perhaps; with the assistance of some notes I found among the papers which my Nephew will find in the uper draw of my secretair) to twist into a Novel entitulet The Life and Adventures of Miss C. H. &c &c’.4
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.’5 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 Herschel’s 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 Herschel’s career, the similarities are striking. In 1895 Agnes M. Clerke’s The Herschels and Modern Astronomy concluded the chapter on Caroline Herschel with the following summary:
[H]er faculties were of no common order, and they were rendered serviceable by moral strength and absolute devotedness. Her persistence was indomitable, her zeal was tempered by good sense; her endurance, courage, docility, and self-forgetfulness went to the limits of what is possible to human nature. With her readiness of hand and eye, her precision, her rapidity, her prompt obedience to a word or glance, she realised the ideal of what an assistant should be.
Herself and her performances she held in small esteem. Compliments and honours had no inflating effect upon her. Indeed, she deprecated them, lest they should tend to diminish her brother’s glory.6
In 2004, Patricia Fara’s examination of the place of women, science and power in the Enlightenment, Pandora’s Breeches, traced Herschel’s use of a canine metaphor to come to much the same conclusion as Clerke:
Male astronomers, [Herschel] wrote, were the huntsmen of science, while she was merely a pointer, eagerly awaiting friendly strokes and pats from her masters. […] Like animals, men claimed, women were governed by their passions and needed to be controlled. In pictures they were shown together, twin models of fidelity and obedience to their master. Mary Wollstonecraft railed against the subservience exhibited by women like Caroline Herschel.7
And yet by invoking the eighteenth-century feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft here, Fara points unconsciously to an area unexplored by historians of Herschel’s career.
In her infamous polemic of 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft did indeed despise the fawning female, but her main concern was to draw attention to the reasons why women behaved in this way. For Wollstonecraft, the fault lay in education – or the lack of it – which rendered women trivial creatures, obsessed with physical appearance and eager solely to gain power through their sexuality. The only ambitions such ill-educated women aspired to achieve involved raising ‘emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character’.8 True ambition, claimed Wollstonecraft, manifested itself in the pursuit of reasonable pleasure and the conspicuousness of dignified virtue.9 And at the basis of every virtue, Wollstonecraft placed ‘independence’. Independence itself was both intellectual and financial; women would be able to succeed only in specifically female domestic tasks unless they became enlightened citizens, by earning their own subsistence and becoming independent from men in the same fashion as one man is independent of another.10 For Wollstonecraft, virtue, independence and ambition formed a noble triumvirate.
Far from potentially despising Caroline Herschel for her canine attributes in the face of male superiority, Mary Wollstonecraft supported the virtues of female independence, and this accords only too well with Herschel’s profoundly ambitious nature. From a very early age, Herschel expressed a desire to succeed in whatever she could. If, to re-employ the canine metaphors, she ‘did nothing for [her] Brother than what a well-trained puppy Dog would have done’,11 she contributed fundamentally to her own training, first in music and then in astronomy, through a lifelong belief in the value of independence. Caroline Herschel may have followed her brother’s instructions, but she was determined to achieve more than anyone could ask of her. Indeed, several of her cometary discoveries were made when she was alone. In this sense, ambition and independence, while still maintaining a dignified, virtuous appearance, were as much Caroline Herschel’s desired mode de vie as they were Mary Wollstonecraft’s. Perhaps the patience and persistence involved in ‘minding the heavens’ suited the contemporary character of the ideal woman, but Caroline Herschel did not carry out her observations in order to prove her stoic femaleness. As she informed the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne in September 1798: ‘I do own myself to be vain, because I would not wish to be singular; and was there ever a woman without vanity? or a man either? only with this difference, that among gentlemen the commodity is generally styled ambition.’12 Unlike other women, Caroline Herschel’s discoveries had allowed her to direct her ambitions to worthy causes.
Rehabilitating Caroline Herschel will involve not only reconsidering women’s place in the history of science through an investigation into the career of a woman who actually made scientific discoveries, but also examining how eighteenth and early nineteenth-century women could exercise their ambitions in a society which forbade them political representation. While historians must beware of exaggerating, distorting or overstating the lives of scientific women and converting them into feminist heroines,13 this is certainly not the intention of this book. The career and writings of Caroline Herschel offer an insight into the position of women at the time, as well as revealing that women were not only able to understand the ‘harder’ physical sciences of mathematics and astronomy, but also to participate in their progression through original discovery and explication, both to specialists and to larger public audiences. In order to evaluate Caroline Herschel’s place in the history of science, therefore, it is necessary to examine her position within eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century society. All important are the reactions of her contemporaries and, most fundamentally, how Herschel herself conceived of her own social, cultural and scientific role. By filling in the gaps and allowing Herschel to speak for herself, it will be possible to gauge how this one woman had the opportunity to make her indelible mark upon the nascent scientific community of her time.
Work, independence and ambition mattered enormously to Caroline Herschel, but so did astronomy. Her embarrassment at the awards she received nearly 30 years after her last original discovery was not shame at the publicity, but rather irritation that her age had prevented her from living up to her distinction in recent years. Alert still in her eighties and nineties, Caroline Herschel desired to remain involved in the astronomical world, whose news kept her living with ‘morsels […] to feed upon’.14 Nor was she averse to advising her nephew where in the heavens to investigate stellar formations, annoyed that she could not join him in his sweeps. Her death in January 1848 at the age of 97 brought to a close one of the most extraordinarily varied and successful careers of the late eighteenth century. In Caroline Herschel’s own estimation, she had never achieved enough, wasted too much time, never become as independent as she would have wished. But for others, including the members of the Astronomical Society of London, she had more than fulfilled her astronomical ambitions, both as an assistant and, most importantly, as a recognised astronomer in her own right. Reading through his aunt’s autobiographical account in May 1827, John Herschel informed her that she ‘under-rate[d] both the value and the merit of [her] own services in [William Herschel’s] cause’, but that this was counterbalanced by her deserved reputation. The world, indeed, did Caroline Herschel more justice.15
Chapter I
Early Life
When she looked back upon her life, Caroline Herschel found the period of her childhood brought back the most painful memories. In a letter written to her nephew John Herschel’s wife Margaret in September 1838, she offered a reason why her youth had been joyless and unpleasant: ‘But as it was my Lot to be the Ashenbröthle of the Family (being the only Girl) I never find time for improving myself in many things’.1 At the age of 88, the frustrating fact that Caroline Herschel had been prevented from following her ambitions of improvement still rankled with her profoundly. Forced into becoming what can best be translated as a Cinderella figure, she was compelled to perform mundane household tasks while others went to the ball. For Herschel, the ballroom was something far more important than an evening soirée. It was something more abstract – a room without walls, indeed. To go to the ball would mean a chance to escape from household drudgery and obtain independence.
Carolina Lucretia Herschel2 was born on 16 March 1750 in the German city of Hanover, where she would live for the first 22 and the last 26 years of her life. The eighth child of ten, six of whom survived to adulthood, Caroline Herschel was very low on the list of parental priorities. Her only surviving sister, Sophia, was almost seventeen years older, and married when Caroline was only five years old. Thus, Herschel’s suggestion that her slave-like existence was founded on her femaleness is ostensibly true. With four older brothers – the eldest of whom, the detested Jacob, was almost sixteen when his youngest sister was born – and one younger, it is only too easy to see how Caroline was compelled to learn the womanly duties expected of her before her time. Her intense dislike of Jacob was mirrored by the irritation she felt for her illiterate and overbearing mother Anna. A ray of hope in Caroline Herschel’s young life was her father Isaac, whom she worshipped, and who never ceased to encourage an intelligent daughter always eager to profit from his lessons. The affection for her beloved brother William, to whom she would later devote her time and energy by acting both as a concert singer and an assistant in astronomy, is also apparent from the outset. Caroline loved only those who encouraged and distinguished her, for, by the rest of the family, and especially by Jacob and by Anna, her desires were either ignored, suppressed or mocked.
The socially and intellectually unequal marriage of Isaac and Anna Herschel contributed undoubtedly to their youngest daughter’s divided loyalties. Isaac came from a creative if autodidactic family, and revelled in the pursuit of music and art, as well as mathematics. His background was quite lowly: his own father Abraham was a gardener in the fashionable ornamental pleasure gardens in Hohentziatz, while his mother was the daughter of a tanner from Loburg. Their pretensions to higher status were signalled by the classical names given to their two elder children, Eusebius and Appolonia. Isaac, the youngest, was expected to follow in the family trade as a gardener, but a love of music distracted him from his future career; not the last time a Herschel would wilfully ‘try’ something else. Caroline and William Herschel were certainly their father’s children in this respect. Losing interest in horticulture, Isaac taught himself to play the oboe and soon perfected the instrument enough to find permanent employment in the musical profession. Finally settling in Hanover after a peripatetic existence trying to find a post in Prussia, he joined the band of the Hanoverian Foot Guards in August 1731. At the age of 24, Isaac was ready to start a new life with a job in which he displayed talent and, most importantly, one which he enjoyed.
A year later, he met and married Anna Ilse Moritzen, who was born and brought up only three miles from Hanover. Anna’s provincial outlook was matched by her lack of education, and such an unlikely marriage with the aspiring Isaac can be explained by the fact that Anna was already pregnant with their first child Sophia when they married in October 1732.3 Caroline Herschel and her siblings were thus brought up by two very different parents: one, artistic and hard-working; the other, illiterate and lazy. Isaac’s sense of purpose, his generous desire to aid his children in their interests, can be contrasted dramatically in Caroline Herschel’s writings with Anna’s meanness. While Isaac was constantly doing something and filling his time with useful tasks, Anna never actually does anything, except visit friends4 and stunt Caroline’s emotional and intellectual growth. Although Isaac had not been educated to any but the most moderate standard, or even that far beyond his wife, his belief in his children’s abilities was suffused with the pride and ambition of the autodidact. In her memoirs Caroline Herschel remembered primarily the expansiveness of her idolised father, and compared it continually and scathingly with the narrow-mindedness of her mother.
Anna sought to hold on to her unpaid house-keeper by preventing her youngest daughter from following any interests outside the home as a child. Caroline seems to have been a burden for her mother, who frequently sent her on useless errands and then berated or simply forgot about her. One searing recollection occurs in both of the autobiographies Herschel wrote for her family later in life, and particularly upsets her. Fearful of conflict with the French, the King of Great Britain and ruler of Hanover, George II, ordered the Hanoverian Guards to Britain as precautionary reinforcement troops in March 1756; a step that proved fortuitous, as what became known as the Seven Years War would begin between the two countries in May.5 Isaac Herschel and his two elder sons, Jacob and William, who had followed their father into the military band after leaving school, were sent with the Guards.6 As he had requested a discharge from the band in order to attempt to further his musical career in more congenial surroundings, Jacob returned to Hanover in the autumn of 1756; his father and younger brother would follow a few months later. Aware of their impending return, Anna, who was preparing a special homecoming meal, sent the six-year-old Caroline out to search for Isaac and William. The determined little girl searched endlessly, despite extreme cold and tiredness; her desire to fulfil all her tasks apparent even at this very early age. In her second autobiography, written in her eighties, the elderly woman remembered painfully the double discomfort of a stomach ache to add to her considerable woes.7 Returning home disconsolate, Herschel was astonished to witness the whole family merrily tucking into their dinner. In both accounts, only her beloved William welcomed her home. The others carried on with their meal, ‘nobody greeting’ the frozen child, as they were ‘too happy in the Thumult of their joy at seeing one another again’. Herschel remembered mournfully that her ‘absence had never been perceived’.8
The little girl seemed a constant irritation to her mother. When she was not at school, she was forced out of the house by Anna and by her older sister Sophia, whom Caroline had never met before she moved in with her parents when her husband, Griesbach, also a member of the band of the Hanoverian Guards, accompanied his father and brothers-in-law to Britain. Sophia despised ‘having children about her’, and her little sister was easily dispensed with. In her old age, Herschel recalled being sent to ‘play auf dem Walle’ with her brother Alexander, who was five years her senior, or with the neighbours’ children. As she was so young, Herschel was unable to join in with their games, and was compelled to hang around on the embankment and watch her brother skating ‘till he chose to get home’. Isolated and friendless, the little girl simply stood and shivered. ‘In short’, she claimed, with some understandably succinct bitterness, ‘there was no one who cared anything about me’. Tellingly, ‘anything’ of the finalised version had replaced ‘much’ of the original draft.9
With her father and favourite brother absent, Herschel noted how she was compelled to act as a footman or waiter for her mother, who would frequently entertain their landlord. At around seven years old, she was, of course, incapable of balancing plates or waiting efficiently on adults. And yet this inevitable childish deficiency did not stop Anna giving her daughter ‘many a wipping for being too awkward’,10 or, in fact, using her to finish off her own work when she was unable or unwilling to complete it herself. With Sophia recovering from the birth of her first child and Anna ‘comforting’ her eldest daughter, the eight-year-old Caroline was left to complete the task of ‘furnishing the Army with Tents and Linnen’. After a day at school, the little girl returned to wear her fingers to the bone sewing for her mother. Herschel did not mean this metaphorically. Her small hands were simply unable to use a thimble. Despite the physical suffering caused by all the needlework, Caroline was determined to succeed at her task, and stuck to it doggedly, touchingly performing it ‘with all [her] might’ to prove herself able and useful.11
In the parts of The First Autobiography originally written for her younger brother Dietrich, Herschel’s upset at this loveless first decade of her life caused her literally to break down mid-sentence. Describing Jacob’s attempts to hide from military press-gangers when Hanover was occupied by the French during the Seven Years War, Herschel started to recount the following: ‘The next time I saw him was when he came running to my Mother with a letter, the contents of which …’ Breaking off abruptly, Herschel notified Dietrich that: ‘After reading over many pages, I thought it best to destroy them, and merely to write down what I remember to have passed in our family at home and abroad.’12 The only way Herschel could continue to narrate her life, she suggested here, was to stick rigidly to the facts; the feelings were as searing as the flames which destroyed the memories.
If her domestic surroundings caused Herschel distress, her geographical location frustrated her equally. When she returned to Hanover after William’s death in 1822, Herschel had nothing but contempt for the Hanoverian people. In letters written in the 1830s to her nephew and his wife and other correspondents, Herschel expressed disdain for ‘this dissipated City’, ‘this Horrible Hannover’.13 And it was not only the city that the elderly Herschel despised. The people were pleasure-seeking and vain: ‘neither Man, Woman or Chield in Han. to be found but they must spend the evening at Balls, Plays Routs, Clubs &c and not a Month goes over our Heads, without a Jubily is celebrated at enormous expenses’.14 ‘[S]tupid Hannoverians’ caused ‘Botheration and intrusion’; they were a ‘mongrel breed’.15 In a defiant exclamation, Caroline cried: ‘I will be no Hannoverian!’16 Despite the fact that Hanover was her birth-place and the city in which she had grown up, Herschel felt no ties to the place that she linked inextricably with servitude and oppression. Portraying her own country in this way, Herschel sought to distance herself from contemporary assumptions about Germanic people as dull, dreary and domestic. The British, French and Italians especially looked down upon the Germans, and statistically the German states appeared backward, with a 75 per cent peasant population in the eighteenth century.17 This figure compared unfavourably with around 60 per cent in France and 30 per cent in Britain.18 The German novelist and author of the sentimental fiction The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim (1771), Sophie von La Roche, indirectly expressed how many other Europeans viewed Germany when she visited Britain in 1786 and commented upon the progress of print culture in comparison to that of her own nation:
At home we think we have done a great deal for the common man by inserting a modicrum of good sense in the calendars, which are only issued to the people annually; but in England and in London there are 21 daily newspapers, containing news of foreign parts and states and excellent articles on all kinds of subjects, poetry, humorous and witty passages, satires and moral maxims, historical and political essays in addition. I already mentioned the Ipswich paper at Mistress Norman’s in Helveetsluys on that account, for this is only a provincial town, and yet so many ideas for one’s enlightenment are contained in it.19
In the periodical the Deutsche Chronik, Christian Daniel Schubart informed his readers exactly what the rest of Europe thought of them. In 1774, he noted the proud superiority of the British, who viewed the Germans as subhuman and feared their own monarch travelling in such barbarous lands (this is, ironically, in spite of the fact that from 1714 to 1837, Great Britain was ruled by Hanoverians). German travellers were disbelieved, and astounded their British hosts when they told them that freedom existed in what they believed was a terrifying and hellish country. The ignorance about German customs and culture was not simply confined to the uneducated or the illiterate. Even Jonathan Swift, author of one of the bestselling works of the eighteenth century, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), found the Germans to be the ‘most stupid people on earth’.20
It is not even historically accurate to discuss eighteenth-century Germany or a particularly German character in this period, because as a geographical entity, Germany simply did not exist. If Caroline Herschel and others did not feel pride in their nation, it was because that nation was made up of 294 states or 2,303 territories and jurisdictions which comprehend those areas known now as Germany.21 Hanover suffered a double dislocation, as, from 1714, its ruler was also King of Great Britain. Thus, for most of the eighteenth century, Hanover was the only German state without a resident prince. While George I visited Hanover an amazing six times in a reign of thirteen years, and George II twelve times in 27 years, George III expressed similar views to Caroline Herschel about a state that he viewed as a parasitic burden: it was a ‘horrid electorate, which has always lived upon the very vitals of this poor country’ and proved ‘an enormous expense’.22 After the British and Hanoverian defeat at the Battle of Hastenback in August 1757, Hanover was occupied by French troops until February 1758. Herschel described this traumatic time as ‘depressing’: ‘we were almost immediately in the power of the French troops, each house being crammed with men. In that where we were obliged to bewail in silence our cruel fate.’23 The occupation indeed signalled the declining British interest in Hanoverian fortunes, and it took the army of Frederick the Great of Prussia to defeat the French and restore Hanover. George III’s waning desire to continue to bolster Hanover was reflected in the Peace of Paris and the subsequent Treaty of Hubertusburg which ended the Seven Years War in 1763, whereby both Britain and France effectively turned their backs on potential and actual German possessions. This was due, largely, to financial concerns. The British wanted an alliance which would protect Hanover from future invasion, but the central and eastern European powers would not defend the electorate for nothing. From now on, Hanover was on its own.24
Historians disagree as to whether this absence of a central powerful figure caused economic and cultural stagnation or in fact encouraged a more laissez-faire attitude to commerce and culture.25 All agree, however, that Hanover’s apparently headless state retarded further progress. The electorate had potential: a coastline on the North Sea, and access to the major rivers, the Weser and the Elbe, which reached into the heart of the German states. But these possibilities went unexplored. The coastline remained ill-adapted to economic development and the mouths of the rivers were not Hanoverian, but were dominated by Bremen and Hamburg – Imperial cities. External trade was weak and Britain did not encourage preferential trading treatment. Economically speaking, Hanover, with its declining exports of raw linen, had little to offer the increasingly powerful British industries.26 The opportunities which may have existed for economic and political development in eighteenth-century Hanover required the leadership and attention of a strong executive authority; but the departure of George I for Britain in 1714 effectively destroyed the possibility of progress and improvement within the state.27 Caroline Herschel saw herself as doubly disadvantaged. Prevented from improving herself at home, she was also confined to surroundings which were similarly noted for their lack of progression.
Formal education might have offered a potential outlet for Herschel. Paradoxically, and in spite of the attitudes of other Europeans, German education was among the most advanced and progressive in Europe during the eighteenth century. Statistically, literacy levels were also impressively high. By 1800, about 65 per cent of French men and 35 per cent of women could sign their names, and probably more could read. Britain, Holland, Scandinavia and parts of Germany (Protestant areas in the North) registered a higher rate. It is possible, indeed, that the highest literacy levels in Europe may have been reached in Prussia, because of the introduction of obligatory elementary schooling from 1717.28 The British may have scoffed at the ill-educated, boorish Germans, but schooling in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, despite high literacy rates, was notoriously poor, especially for girls. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft condemned the regimented approach to teaching children in single-sex schools in Britain, whereby they were forced to ‘recite what they did not understand’, in ‘parrot-like prattle’. Women were educated solely for show, ‘obliged to pace with steady deportment stupidly backwards and forwards, holding up their heads and turning out their toes’.29 As a schoolchild in Musselburgh, Scotland in the 1790s, boarding at the benevolent-sounding Miss Primrose’s School, Mary Somerville noted the focus on the trivial and showy:
