The Times Great Victorian Lives

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, – It would be worse than idle, it would he hypocritical and unfeeling, if I were to disguise that I close this episode in my life with feelings of very considerable pain. For some 15 years, in this hall and in many kindred places, I have had the honour of presenting my own cherished ideas before you for your recognition; and, in closely observing your reception of them, have enjoyed an amount of artistic delight and enjoyment which, perhaps, it is given to few men to know. In this task, and in every other I have ever undertaken as a faithful servant of the public, always imbued with a sense of duty to them, and always striving to do his best, I have been uniformly cheered by the readiest response, the most generous sympathy, and the most stimulating support. Nevertheless, I have thought it well at the full floodtide of your favour to retire upon those older associations between us which date from much further back than these, and henceforth to devote myself exclusively to the art that first brought us together. Ladies and gentlemen, in but two short weeks from this time I hope that you may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings at which my assistance will be indispensable, but from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with one heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.’

While Pickwick charms us with its broad humour, it is in Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist that the power of Charles Dickens’s pathos shows itself. In those two works he evinced a sympathy for the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed which took all hearts by storm. This power of sympathy it was, no doubt, which has made his name a household word in English homes. How many a phase of cruelty and wrong his pen exposed, and how often he stirred others to try at least to lessen the amount of evil and of suffering which must be ever abroad in the world, will never be fully known. There was always a lesson beneath his mirth.

It only remains for us to add that he married in 1838 a daughter of the late Mr. George Hogarth, a musical writer of some eminence in his day, and a man of high literary attainments – who was formerly the friend and law agent of Sir Walter Scott, and well known in private life to Jeffrey Cockburn, and the other literary celebrities who adorned the society of Edinburgh some 40 or 50 years ago.

The relatively scant information about Dickens’s early life which was available to the general public during the novelist’s lifetime seems to have been scrupulously edited by Dickens himself. This obituary therefore makes no mention of his father’s shameful financial embarrassments and confinement in the Marshalsea Prison, of Dickens’s fragmented education and, above all, of his acute misery when he was employed as a twelve-year-old drudge at Warren’s Blacking. These facts were not exposed until Dickens’s friend John Forster published them in the first volume of his Life of Charles Dickens in 1872. Detailed revelations about the break-up of the novelist’s marriage to Catherine Hogarth and his subsequent intense relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan were not made until the second third of the twentieth century. Dickens had given his last Public Reading at St. James’s Hall in Piccadilly on 15 March 1870 to the largest audience ever assembled there. Hundreds more had been turned away at the doors. The hall was demolished in 1905.

GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE

American soldier: ‘one of the noblest soldiers who have ever drawn a sword in a cause which they believed just.’

12 OCTOBER 1870

EVEN AMID THE turmoil of the great European struggle the intelligence from America announcing that General Robert E. Lee is dead will be received with deep sorrow by many in this country, as well as by his followers and fellow-soldiers in America. It is but a few years since Robert Lee ranked among the great men of the present time. He was the able soldier of the Southern Confederacy, the bulwark of her northern frontier, the obstacle to the advance of the Federal armies and the leader who twice threatened by the capture of Washington to turn the tide of success, and to accomplish a revolution which would have changed the destiny of the United States. Six years passed by, and then we heard that he was dying at an obscure town in Virginia, where, since the collapse of the Confederacy, he had been acting as a schoolmaster. When at the head of the last 8,000 of his valiant army-the remnants which battle, sickness, and famine had left him – he delivered up his sword to General Grant at Appomattox Court House, his public career ended; he passed away from men’s thoughts; and few in Europe cared to inquire the fate of the General whose exploits had aroused the wonder of neutrals and belligerents, and whose noble character had excited the admiration of even the most bitter of his political enemies. If, however, success is not always to be accounted as the sole foundation of renown, General Lee’s life and career deserve to be held in reverence by all who admire the talents of a General and the noblest qualities of a soldier. His family were well known in Virginia. Descended from the Cavaliers who first colonized that State, they had produced more than one man who fought with distinction for their country. They were allied by marriage to Washington, and previous to the recent war were possessed of much wealth; General, then Colonel, Robert Lee residing, when not employed with his regiment, at Arlington Heights, one of the most beautiful places in the neighbourhood of Washington. When the civil war first broke out he was a colonel in the United States’ army, who had served with distinction in Mexico, and was recounted among the best of the American officers. To him, as to others, the difficult choice presented itself whether to take the side of his State, which had joined in the secession of the South, or to support the Central Government. It is said that Lee debated the matter with General Scott, then commander-in-chief, that both agreed that their first duty lay with their State, but that the former only put in practice what each held in theory. It was not until the second year of the war that Lee came prominently forward, when, at the indecisive battle of Fairoaks, in front of Richmond, General Johnston having been wounded, he took command of the army; and subsequently drove M’Clellau, with great loss, to the banks of the James river. From that time he became the recognized leader of the Confederate army of Virginia. He repulsed wave after wave of invasion, army after army being hurled against him only to be thrown back beaten and in disorder. The Government at Washington were kept in constant alarm by the near vicinity of his troops, and witnessed more than once the entry into their entrenchments of a defeated and disorganised rabble which a few days previous had left there a confident host. Twice he entered the Northern States at the head of a successful army, and twice in decisive battles alone preserved from destruction the Federal Government and turned the fortune of the war. He impressed his character on those who acted under him. Ambition for him had no charms; duty alone was his guide. His simplicity of life checked luxury and display among his officers, while his disregard of hardships silenced the murmurs of his harassed soldiery. By the troops he was loved as a father as well as admired as a general; and his deeply religious character impressed itself on all who were brought in contact with him and made itself felt through the ranks of the Virginian army. It is said that during four years of war he never slept in a house, but in winter and summer shared the hardships of his soldiers. Such was the man who in mature age, at a period of life when few generals have acquired renown, fought against overwhelming odds for the cause which he believed just. He saw many of his bravest generals and dearest friends fall around him, but, although constantly exposed to fire, escaped without a wound. The battles which prolonged and finally decided the issue of the contest are now little more than names. Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg are forgotten in Europe by all excepting those who study recent wars as lessons for the future and would collect from the deeds of other armies experience which they may apply to their own. To them the boldness of Lee’s tactics at Chancellorsville will ever be a subject of admiration; while even those who least sympathize with his cause will feel for the General who saw the repulse of Longstreet’s charge at Gettysburg, and beheld the failure of an attempt to convert a defensive war into one of attack, together with the consequent abandonment of the bold stroke which he had hoped would terminate the contest. Quietly he rallied the broken troops; taking all the blame on himself; he encouraged the officers dispirited by the reverse, and in person formed up the scattered detachments. Again, when fortune had turned against the Confederacy, when overwhelming forces from all sides pressed back her defenders, Lee for a year held his ground with a constantly diminishing army, fighting battle after battle in the forests and swamps around Richmond. No reverses seemed to dispirit him, no misfortune appeared to ruffle his calm, brave temperament. Only at last, when the saw the remnants of his noble army about to be ridden down by Sheridan’s cavalry, when 8,000 men, half-starved and broken with fatigue, were surrounded by the vast net which Grant and Sherman had spread around them, did he yield; his fortitude for the moment gave way; he took a last farewell of his soldiers and, giving himself up as a prisoner, retired a ruined man into private life, gaining his bread by the hard and uncongenial work of governing Lexington College. When political animosity has calmed down and when Americans can look back on those years of war with feelings unbiased by party strife, then will General Lee’s character be appreciated by all his countrymen as it is now by a part, and his name will be honoured as that of one of the noblest soldiers who have ever drawn a sword in a cause which they believed just, and at the sacrifice of all personal considerations have fought manfully a losing battle. Even amid the excitement of the terrible war now raging in Europe, some may still care to carry their thoughts back to the career of the great and good man who now lies dead in Virginia, and to turn a retrospective glance over the scenes in which a short time ago he bore so prominent a part. – Pall Mall Gazette

In a letter to The Times, Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards suggested that Lee was ‘the greatest soldier that America has produced’. The present obituary, printed after Fremantle’s letter on 15 October 1870, three days after Lee’s death, appeared as the Franco-Prussian War was drawing to a bloody close and as the Communards were defeated in Paris. This generous obituary offers a balanced appreciation of Lee, who, after the defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia, had retired, not to a schoolmastership, but to the ill-paid Presidency of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) at Lexington, Virginia. Honourable to the end, he had earlier refused an offer of $10,000 from a Virginia insurance company that sought to use his name. Lee had petitioned the government in Washington for the restoration of his US citizenship. His application, which had apparently been mislaid, was only granted in the 1970s.

CHARLES BABBAGE, F. R. S.

Mathematician: ‘The Father of the Computer.’

18 OCTOBER 1871

OUR OBITUARY COLUMN on Saturday contained the name of one of the most active and original of original thinkers, and whose name has been known through the length and breadth of the kingdom for nearly half a century as a practical mathematician-we mean Mr. Charles Babbage. He died at his residence in Dorset-street, Marylebone, at the close of last week, at an age, spite of organ-grinding persecutors, little short of 80 years.

Little is known of Mr. Babbage’s parentage and early youth, except that he was born on the 26th of December, 1792, and was educated privately. During the whole of his long life, even when he had won for himself fame and reputation, he was always extremely reticent on that subject, and, in reply to questioners he would uniformly express an opinion that the only biography of living personages was to be found, or, at all events, ought to be found, in the list of their published works. As this list, in Mr. Babbage’s own case, extended to upwards of 80 productions, there ought to be no dearth of materials for the biographer; but these materials, after all, as a matter of fact, are scanty, in spite of an autobiographical work which he gave to the world about seven years ago, entitled Passages in the Life of a Philosopher.

At the usual age Mr. Babbage was entered at the University of Cambridge, and his name appears in the list of those who took their Bachelor’s degree from Peterhouse in the year 1814. It does not, however, figure in the Mathematical Tripos, he preferring to be Captain of the Poll to any honours but the Senior Wranglership of which he believed Herschel to be sure. While, however, at Cambridge he was distinguished by his efforts, in conjunction with the late Sir John Herschel and Dean Peacock, to introduce in that University, and thereby among the scientific men of the country in general, a knowledge of the refined analytic methods of mathematical reasoning which had so long prevailed over the Continent, whereas we in our insular position, for the most part, were content with what has been styled ‘the cramped domain of the ancient synthesis.’ The youthful triumvirate, it must be owned, made a successful inroad on the prejudices and predilections which had prevailed up to that time. Keeping this object steadily in view, in the first place they translated and edited the smaller treatise on the Calculus by Lacroix, with notes of their own, and an Appendix (mainly, if not wholly, from the pen of Sir John Herschel) upon Finite Differences. They next published a solution of exercises on all parts of the Infinitesimal Calculus, a volume which is still of great service to the mathematical student, in spite of more recent works with a similar aim. To this publication Mr. Babbage contributed an independent essay on a subject at that time quite new, the solution of Functional Equations.

By steps and stages, of which the records at our command are scanty, these pursuits graduallyled Mr. Babbage on to that practical application of mathematical studies which may justly be considered to be his crowning scientific effort – we mean, of course, the invention and partial construction of the famous calculating engine or machine which the world has associated with his name. As a writer in the Dictionary of Universal Biography remarks:-

‘The possibility of constructing a piece of mechanism capable of performing certain operations on numbers is by no means new; it was thought of by Pascal and geometers, and more recently it has been reduced to practice by M. Thomas, of Colmar, in France, and by the Messrs Schütz, of Sweden; but never before or since has any scheme so gigantic as that of Mr. Babbage been anywhere imagined.’

His achievements here were twofold; he constructed what he called a Difference Engine, and he planned and demonstrated the practicability of an Analytical Engine also. It is difficult, perhaps, to make the nature of such abstruse inventions at all clear to the popular and untechnical reader, since Dr. Larduer, no unskilful hand at mechanical description, filled no less than twenty-five pages of the Edinburgh Review with but a partial account of its action, confessing that there were many features which it was hopeless to describe effectively without the aid of a mass of diagrams. All that can here be said of the machine is that the process of addition automatically performed is at the root of it. In nearly all tables of numbers there will be a law of order in the differences between each number and the next. For instance, in a column of square numbers – say, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, &c.– the successive differences will be 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, &c. These are differences of the first order. If, then, the process of differencing be repeated with those, we arrive at a remarkably simple series of numbers – to wit 2, 2, 2, 2, &c. And into some such simple series most tables resolve themselves when they are analyzed into orders of differences; an element – an atom, so to speak – is arrived at, from which by constant addition the numbers in the table may be formed. It was the function of Mr. Babbage’s machine to perform this addition of differences by combinations of wheels acting upon each other in an order determined by a preliminary adjustment. This working by differences gave it the name of the ‘Difference Engine.’ It has been repeatedly stated that the construction of this machine was suddenly suspended, and that no reason was ever assigned for its suspension. But the writer in the Dictionary already quoted above thus solves the mystery in which the matter has hitherto been shrouded:-

‘In spite of the favourable report of a Commission appointed to inquire into the matter, the Government were led by two circumstances to hesitate about proceeding further. Firstly, Mr. Clements the engineer or machinist employed as his collaborateur, suddenly withdrew all his skilled workmen from the work, and what was worse, removed all the valuable tools which had been employed upon it.’

-an act which is justified as strictly legal by Mr. Weld in his History of the Royal Society, though a plain common-sense man of the world may reasonably doubt its equity, as the tools themselves had been made at the joint expense of Mr. Babbage and the Treasury. ‘Secondly,’ says the same authority, ‘the idea of the Analytical Engine – one that absorbed and contained as a small part of itself the Difference Engine – arose before Mr. Babbage.’ Of course he could not help the fact that ‘Alps upon Alps should arise’ in such matters and that, when one great victory was achieved, another and still greater battle remained to be faced and fought. But sooner did Mr. Babbage, like an honest man, communicate the fact to the Government that the then Ministers, with Sir Robert Peel and Mr. H. Goulburn at the head of the Treasury, took alarm, and, scared at the prospect of untold expenses before then, resolved to abandon the enterprise. Mr. Babbage, apart from all help from the public purse, had spent upon his machine, as a pet hobby, no small part of his private fortune – a sum which has been variously estimated between 6,000l. and 17,000l. And so, having resolved on not going further into the matter, they offered Mr. Babbage, by way of compensation, that the Difference Engine as constructed should remain as his own property – an offer which the inventor very naturally declined to accept. The engine, together with the drawings of the machinery constructed and not constructed, and of many other contrivances connected with it, extending, it is said, to some 400 or 500 drawings and plans, was presented in 1843 to King’s College, London, where we believe they are to be seen in the museum, bearing their silent witness to great hopes dashed down to the ground, or, at all events, to the indefinite postponement of their realization.

In speaking at this length of Mr. Babbage’s celebrated machine, we have a little anticipated the order of events, and must return to our record of the leading facts of his life. In the year 1828 he was nominated to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics in his old University, occupying in that capacity a chair which had once been held by no less a man than Sir Isaac Newton. This chair he held during eleven years. It was while holding this Professorship, namely, at the general election of November, 1832 – which followed on the passing of the first Reform Bill – that he was put forward as a candidate for the representation of the newly-formed borough of Finsbury, standing in the advanced Liberal interest, as a supporter not only of parliamentary, financial, and fiscal reform, but also of ‘the Ballot, triennial Parliaments, and the abolition of all sinecure posts and offices.’ But the electors did not care to choose a philosopher; so he was unsuccessful, and we believe never again wooed the suffrages of either that or any other constituency.

We have mentioned the fact that Mr. Babbage was the author of published works to the extent of some 80 volumes. A full list of these, however, would not interest or edify the general reader, and those who wish to study their names can see them recorded at full length in the new library catalogue of the British Museum. Further information respecting them will be found in the 12th chapter of Mr. Weld’s History of the Royal Society, which we have already quoted. One or two of them, however, we should specify. The best known of them all, perhaps is his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, a work designed by him at once to refute the opinion supposed to be implied and encouraged in the first volume of that learned series, that an ardent devotion to mathematical studies is unfavourable to a real religious faith, and also to give specimens of the defensive aid which the evidences of Christianity may receive from the science of numbers, if studied in a proper spirit.

Another of his works which has found a celebrity of its own is a volume called The Decline of Science, both the title and the contents of which give reason to believe that its author looked somewhat despondingly on the scientific attainments of the present age. The same opinion was still further worked out by Mr. Babbage in a book on the first Great Exhibition, which he published just 20 years ago. Another of his works which deserve mention here is one on The Economy of Manufactures, which was one result of a tour of inspection which he made through England and upon the Continent in search of mechanical principles for the formation of Logarithmic Tables.

It is about 40 years since Mr. Babbage produced his Tables of Logarithms from 1 to 108,000, a work upon which he bestowed a vast amount of labour, and in the publication of which he paid great attention to the convenience of calculators, whose eyes, he well knew, must dwell for many hours at a time upon their pages. He was rewarded by the full appreciation of his work by the computers not only of his own, but of foreign countries; for in several of those countries editions from the stereotyped plates of the tables were published, with translations of the preface. Notwithstanding the numerous logarithmic tables which have since appeared, those of Mr. Babbage are still held in high esteem by all upon whom the laborious calculations of astronomy and mathematical science devolve.

Mr. Babbage was one of the oldest members of the Royal Society at the time of his death; he was also more than fifty years ago one of the founders of the Astronomical Society, and he and Sir John Herschel were the last survivors of that body. He was also an active and zealous member of many of the leading learned societies of London and Edinburgh, and in former years at least an extensive contributor to their published Transactions. His last important publication was the amusing and only too characteristic autobiographical work to which we have already referred as Passages in the Life of a Philosopher.

Shortly after this obituary appeared on 23 October 1871 Babbage’s nephew wrote to The Times to point out that the mathematician had been born in 1791 not 1792. His father, a banker who owned an estate at Bitton in south Devon, was at his death resident at 44 Crosby Row in the Walworth Road in south London. Babbage had been baptised at St Mary’s, Walworth, on 6 January 1792. He was educated at a succession of schools in Devon and London, matriculating at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1810 and transfering to Peterhouse in 1814. Without taking any examinations, he was granted an honorary MA in 1814. In his lifetime Babbage’s vastly innovative calculating machines seem to have been considered enigmatic. His first Difference Engine weighed an ungainly 15 tonnes. His second was not fully constructed until 1989-1991 when the Science Museum proved the accuracy of its calculations. Had it been realised in the nineteenth century his Analytical Engine, using punch cards, would have been the first programmable computer. Babbage was instrumental in establishing the standard gauge used on British railways and is credited with the invention of the ‘pilot’ or cow-catcher affixed to railway locomotives. A crater on the moon was named after him.