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(#litres_trial_promo) He began to be preoccupied with various cosmological problems: what was the relation between music, mathematics and star patterns? Was there life on the moon? What was the structure and composition of the sun? How far away were the nearest stars? What was the true size and shape of the Milky Way? Many of these problems would emerge in his earliest scientific papers, and would continue to fascinate him for the rest of his life.
He was approaching thirty, and to all appearances he was alone and adrift in a foreign land. But he was not disorganised or depressed. Much of his father’s military discipline, and his own professionalism, now stood him in good stead. He worked immensely hard, with an energy and determination that never left him. His musical appointments were increasingly important, regular and better paid. At Halifax he was conducting an orchestra, playing the organ, giving singing lessons, and composing his own music. He was also learning Italian.
After a period of physical weakness in his late teens (which Caroline had anxiously remarked on), William had grown into a tall, commanding figure, with a high, intellectual forehead, and very striking dark eyes. Outwardly at least, he was cheerful and sociable. It is evident that he made friends wherever he went. At one concert he was joined by the Duke of York, brother of the new King George III, who accompanied him (rather badly) on the violoncello. On another occasion he was invited to conduct one of his own symphonies at St Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh. At the reception afterwards, he chanced to meet the philosopher David Hume, and was promptly invited out to dinner.
(#litres_trial_promo) There was something about Herschel’s mixture of intensity and innocence that simply charmed people. And talented German exiles were, of course, popular.
Herschel was brought back to Hanover by a combination of circumstances. His work at Halifax had led to the first really serious opportunity of his career: the possibility of being appointed the organist of the new Octagon Chapel at Bath, when its building was completed. Bath was fast becoming the most fashionable city in England-nearly ready for Beau Brummell-and all kinds of other musical work would obviously be available there. Herschel immediately thought of his brothers, Jacob and Alexander. He had heard too that his father Isaac was ill, and not likely to live much longer. There may also have been worries about the younger children under Jacob’s care-Caroline and little Dietrich.
(#litres_trial_promo) At all events, the prodigal son suddenly reappeared in Hanover in the summer of 1764. He arrived saying he had just observed an eclipse of the sun as he rode over the Luneburger Heath.
Caroline was then fourteen, and her appearance following her illness must have shocked him. But there was little that he could do for her immediately, and after an absence of nearly seven years his visit to Hanover lasted a mere fortnight. It was a sober reunion. Isaac, obviously failing, could not persuade him to remain, and instead William spoke of future plans for his brothers as musicians in England. Nothing was said of Caroline at this point. William must have known it was the last time he would see his father alive.
Caroline remembered William’s departure after his flying visit with grief and frustration. It was the day of her first communion, and William had particularly admired her appearance in a new black silk dress. But she was sent to church by Jacob, and not allowed to see William off. She never forgot that moment. ‘The church was crowded and the door open. The Hamburg Postwagen passed at eleven, bearing away my dear brother…It was within a dozen yards from the open door; the postillion giving a smettering blast on his horn. Its effect on my shattered nerves, I will not attempt to describe, nor what I felt for days and weeks after.’ She walked home alone, ‘in feverish wretchedness’, wearing her new dress and painfully aware that she was carrying the bouquet of artificial flowers that her elder sister Sophia had worn on her ill-fated wedding day.
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Their father died of a stroke in 1767, but William did not return for the funeral. He would not come back to Hanover for another eight years.
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5
William was offered the organ post in August 1766, and officially moved to Bath in December of that year. Before the chapel was opened he found a lucrative position in the famous Pump Room Band, run by the impresario James Linley. The Pump Room and Theatre was then the very height of fashionable entertainment. Linley’s daughter, the singer ‘Angel’ Linley, later became a star at Drury Lane, and married the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Early on, Herschel had a quarrel with Linley over orchestral arrangements in the Pump Room, which got into the newspapers and caused a brief but diverting scandal in Bath society. The disagreements were minor-the appointment of singers, the provision of music stands-but there was some suggestion that Linley was exploiting Herschel as a German outsider. What was remarkable was the sudden revelation of Herschel’s fiery temper and determination when roused. Far from conceding to Linley, he took out a series of advertisements against his concerts in the Bath Chronicle. He referred openly to Linley’s ‘low Cunning and dark Envy’, and set up a competing programme with a rival diva, the Italian singer Signora Farinelli. This proved a great success.
After one season of musical warfare Linley made peace with Herschel, and their combined concerts resumed at the Pump Room, to general satisfaction. After Linley left for London, Herschel became sole director. Moreover Linley became a great admirer of Herschel, and sent his son Ozias to him to learn the violin. It was perhaps no coincidence that when Ozias went on to Oxford, he studied mathematics and astronomy.
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William rented a modest house ten minutes’ walk from the Pump Room, in the upper part of Bath, at Rivers Street. He continued composing for the oboe, taught guitar, harpsichord and violin, conducted oratorios and gave singing lessons. In June 1767 he was joined by Jacob for a visit, and took up his appointment as organist and choirmaster at the Octagon Chapel, which was opened on 4 October.
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It was during this hectic period that his other secret passion exerted itself. In February 1766 the twenty-seven-year-old William Herschel started his first Astronomical Observation Journal. He recorded an eclipse of the moon, and the hazy appearance of Venus.
(#litres_trial_promo) Hard as he worked as a musician, he was now steadily training himself as an astronomer. He devoured books on astronomical calculation, Flamsteed’s star tables and Thomas Wright’s cosmological speculations. He attended James Ferguson’s astronomy lectures at the Pump Room in 1767, and at last met this early astronomical hero of his.
(#litres_trial_promo) He spent hours star-gazing in the little Rivers Street garden at night. Even when teaching his music pupils in the evening, it was said that he sometimes broke off and took them outside to look at the moon. He began to build up a small arsenal of second-hand refractor telescopes, and carefully examined their construction. He was considering what his father Isaac used to call ‘one of his contrivances’.
The refractor is the classic type of straight-through telescope originally developed by Galileo, and refined by Kepler and the great seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens. It has magnifying lenses at each end of the tube, one fixed and the other adjustable (the eyepiece), advancing or retreating to focus the image. In extendible or retractable form, it was often used by soldiers or sailors on active service, until the arrival of the binoculars. It was just such a refractor telescope that Nelson would-or would not-put to his blind eye at the battle of Copenhagen in 1798. The snapping closed of the retractable mechanism became a gesture of decision and command.
Herschel found that most refractor telescopes were satisfactory for simple low-magnification viewing of the moon or the planets. But astronomical versions were absurdly cumbersome (some up to twenty-five foot long), and almost useless for high-magnification observation of the stars. The curve or bulge in the magnifying lens acted like a prism, and broke up the white stellar light into distorting rainbow-coloured fringes at the edges. (This became known as ‘chromatic aberration’. A shortsighted person can see these rainbow aberrations of starlight with the naked eye, because his pupil is also distorted at the edges.) Newton, observing this in his famous prism experiments at Cambridge, had invented an entirely different type of telescope, the reflector. But his, which he donated to the Royal Society, was only six inches long, with a magnifying power of forty.
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Confined to refractors, most eighteenth-century British astronomers had paid little attention to stellar astronomy, except where it served for navigation purposes. (The John Dolland achromatic telescope, which corrected some prismatic distortion, was only invented in 1758, and did not come into general use-as improved by his son Peter Dolland-until the turn of the century.
(#litres_trial_promo)) The newly appointed Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, based at the Greenwich Observatory, was largely concerned at this time with observing lunar eclipses, planetary transits and passing comets. His special interests lay in establishing tables for use at sea as a mariner’s almanac, and in the calculation of longitude. He noted that since his seventeenth-century predecessor at Greenwich, John Flamsteed, had thoroughly mapped the heavens, he himself kept only thirty-one stars under regular observation.
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Since his long nights of riding over the moors, Herschel’s interests had roamed far beyond the safe family of the solar system, with its restricted circuit of sun, moon and six known planets. He had the courage, the wonder and the imagination of a refugee. His whole instinct was to explore, to push out, to go beyond the boundaries. Gradually he began to think about the possibilities of Newtonian reflector telescopes. Newtonians were based on a different principle from the traditional refractors. They produced increased ‘light-gathering’, rather than simple magnification. As their name implies, the primary component of a reflector telescope is a large mirror, or speculum, highly polished and subtly curved inwards (concave) so as to gather and concentrate starlight at a much greater intensity than the lens of the naked eye. This concentrated light is then viewed through a simple adjustable eyepiece inserted into the side of the tube, the whole set-up producing wonderfully bright images and little chromatic aberration.
Instead of conventional magnification, Herschel began to think in terms of something he called ‘space-penetrating power’. This was a concept he had partly developed from Robert Smith’s Opticks.
(#litres_trial_promo) Conventional eighteenth-century astronomers still studied the night sky as if it were a flat surface, or rather the interior surface of a decorated dome, inlaid with constellations. Flamsteed’s beautiful Celestial Atlas, first published as a large decorative folio in 1729, presented the sky like this. Its second edition of 1776 still remained the standard European book of reference for stellar identification.
Each constellation was given a double-page spread, showing the mythological figures that gave them their names drawn in flat engraved outlines, as well as the known stars belonging to the group. The brighter stars were identified by their home constellation and a Greek letter of the alphabet. So Alpha Orionis, also known by its Arabic name Betelgeuse, was the bright star on the shoulder of Orion the Hunter; and Zeta Tauri (which would later catch Herschel’s attention) was a third-magnitude star in Taurus the Bull.
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But Herschel began to conceive of deep space. He began to imagine a telescope which might plunge deep down into the sky and explore it like a great unplumbed ocean of stars. This was something a reflector telescope might be able to do supremely well, if its concave mirror were sufficiently large. But because even small astronomical mirrors were expensive, and large ones had not yet been developed (even by London lens-makers like Dolland), Herschel realised that he would have to make them himself. Moreover, to achieve the exquisitely fine reflective surface he required, they would have to be cast in metal, not glass.
Meanwhile the other Herschel brothers began to shuttle between Bath and Hanover. Jacob came over for a brief visit in summer 1767, following Isaac’s death, but after giving virtuoso performances in the Pump Room he preferred to return to his high life in Hanover. Young Dietrich, now aged fifteen, came the following summer, and was given a fine holiday. Finally Alexander came and settled in 1770.
(#litres_trial_promo) William moved to a larger house at 7 New King Street, and Alexander was given the attic rooms, while William took over the first floor and had the reception rooms redecorated and furnished with a new harpsichord for his singing and music lessons.
All the time he was evidently worrying about Caroline, and finally in the spring of 1772, after long discussion with Alexander, he wrote to Hanover to ask if Caroline (then aged twenty-one, and having reached her majority) would like to join them at Bath. Knowing the opposition his proposal would face from their mother and Jacob, William put his suggestion in the most plain and practical terms, as Caroline recalled. She should make a trial as to whether ‘by his instructions I might not become a useful singer for his winter concerts and oratorios’. She could also become her brothers’ housekeeper. If after two years this ‘did not answer our expectations’, William would send her back. Significantly, he mentioned not a word of astronomy.
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Caroline longed to accept. But her mother fiercely objected, and so of course did Jacob. ‘I had set my heart upon this change in my situation, [but] Jacob began to turn the whole scheme to ridicule…[although] he never heard the sound of my voice except in speaking.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Caroline found her own way of stubbornly preparing for her escape. She practised singing the solo parts of oratorios ‘with a gag between my teeth’, so she could not be heard at home; and she secretly knitted enough cotton stockings for Dietrich to last him ‘two years at least’.
Finally Herschel himself went over to Hanover, and won his mother over by pointedly promising to settle an annuity on her to pay for a maid to replace Caroline. He never succeeded in getting his elder brother’s agreement, however. Jacob was away attending the Queen of Denmark at a court festival, and blustering letters arrived ‘expressing nothing but regret and impatience’ at the whole plan. William simply ignored them, and Caroline left ‘without receiving the consent of my eldest brother’. They departed on 16 August 1772, and from this moment William became the real head of the family.
Caroline still spoke practically no English. Her elfin face, badly marked by the childhood smallpox scars, made her painfully shy. At less than five feet she was of such diminutive stature that at times she seemed like a pixie out of some German folk tale. She had an almost childlike enthusiasm, energy and sense of mischief. The one known portrait of her at this age, a charming miniature silhouette, confirms this impression. Her profile is fine, pert, almost boyish, but with full, slightly pouting lips, and a neat, very determined little chin. Her hair bubbles round her head in a mass of curls, and falls down her back, where it is secured with a ribbon. She has a sprite-like quality about her.
Caroline adored the journey to England, keeping a wide-eyed diary of the trip, like an excited teenager. In Holland her hat was gloriously blown off into a canal. At night William made her sit outside on the top of the carriage so he could show her the constellations. On the crossing to Norfolk, one of their ship’s masts was carried away in a storm. Anchoring off the beach at Great Yarmouth (future home of Dickens’s Lil’ Emily), they were transferred with their bags to an open boat, rowed through the swell, and unceremoniously ‘thrown like balls’ onto the shore by two strapping English sailors.
Outside Norwich, the horses ran away with their carriage and they went ‘flying into a dry ditch’. In London they walked round the streets, seeing St Paul’s and the Bank, admiring the lights and examining the shops. But William would only pause outside those selling optical instruments-‘I do not think we stopped at any other.’ By the time they arrived by the overnight coach in Bath, Caroline reckoned she had only slept in a bed twice in eleven days. That was what it was going to be like living with her brother. ‘I was almost annihilated,’ she wrote triumphantly. William covered the whole journey in one sentence in his journal. ‘Set off on my return to England in company with my sister.’
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6
William now hustled Caroline into her new life. Summoning her to a seven o’clock breakfast, he began immediately to give her lessons in English and arithmetic, and showed her ‘booking and keeping household accounts of cash received and laid out’. He said he would give her three singing lessons a day, while she practised the harpsichord, dealt with the household linen and prepared the menus. She was given rooms in the attic with Alexander, but was commanded to act as hostess in the salon.
William treated her affectionately but sternly, insisting that she go out to shop on her own in the market at Bath, even though she still only spoke a few words of English, which she had, as she put it, ‘on our journey learned like a Parrot’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She found herself ‘alone among fishwomen, butchers, basket-men etc’, and also had to contend with the ‘hot-headed old Welsh woman’ who cooked. She felt she was encountering a ‘natural antipathy’ which the lower class of the English had against foreigners.
(#litres_trial_promo) But she could also be fierce herself: William’s neighbour, the motherly Mrs Bullman, she quickly dismissed as ‘very little better than an Idiot’, a term much favoured by Caroline.
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At first she struggled against Heimweh (homesickness) but she showed herself unexpectedly dauntless, and gradually settled into the taxing new routine. Breakfast was shortly after 6 a.m. (’much too early for me, who would rather have remained up all night’), followed by household accounts, shopping, laundry, three-hourly singing lessons, instruction in English and arithmetic, music copying, formal practice on the harpsichord kept in the front room, and reading out loud from English novels.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘By way of relaxation’, she and William talked of nothing but astronomy. She never forgot ‘the bright constellations with which I had made acquaintance during the fine night we spent on the Postwagen travelling through Holland’. But she also remembered that William had promised to train her up as a professional concert singer, who would one day be independent.
It took time for the full emotional rapport to renew itself between the tall, handsome thirty-four-year-old bachelor brother, driven and ambitious, and the shy, tiny, awkward twenty-two-year-old sister, who had never before travelled outside her native Hanover, but who was bursting with unfulfilled dreams and longings. To begin with their relationship seemed formal, almost like that between father and daughter. In many ways William was quite withdrawn-enthusiastic and talkative in the mornings, but remote in the evenings after any guests had departed. ‘I seldom saw my Brother in the evening…He used to retire to bed with a basin of milk or glass of water, and Smith’s Harmonics and Optics, Ferguson’s Astronomy etc, and so went to sleep buried under his favourite authors; and his first thoughts on rising were how to obtain instruments for viewing those objects himself of which he had been reading.’ At breakfast, Caroline was usually subjected to ‘ample stuff for an astronomical Lecture’.
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William loved Caroline tenderly, but he also bullied her, in what he saw as a kindly pedagogical way. He could be an unsparing disciplinarian. She in turn adored him, but also feared him and grew impatient with him. He was always fierce in his domestic demands, and constantly required her to better herself: her English, her mathematics, her music and her astronomy. But gradually she learned to tease him and criticise him, while he came more and more to depend on her. In his daily notes and instructions he began to address her by the affectionate diminutive ‘Lina’, with its moonlike echo. Sometimes he even wrote it teasingly in French-‘Lina adieu’-or transliterated into Greek letters, ‘as you understand Greek’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Caroline always referred to him simply as ‘my dearest Brother’, or else ‘my beloved Brother’. For Caroline, William was initially the great liberator who had taken her out of the German house of bondage. But later their roles would subtly change. As William would observe to Nevil Maskelyne, it was not always self-evident which was the planet and which was the moon.
With the household running more smoothly, Herschel could now begin regular astronomical observations in their garden at night. Once Caroline had arrived, he found more time to explore the construction of telescopes. First he hired a two-and-a-half-foot-long Gregorian reflector telescope, which was too small; then in autumn 1772 he tried to construct an eighteen-foot refractor on the Huygens model. But its tube, which Caroline was instructed to make out of papier-mâché, was so long that it kept bending, like an elephant’s trunk. They substituted one made out of tin, but it was still not satisfactory. Then he wrote to London for materials to construct a five-foot reflector, but was told that no one made glass mirrors large enough (at least five inches in diameter) to fit it. It was then that Herschel took the crucial decision to try to cast, grind and polish his own metal mirrors or specula. To start with, he acquired some metal grinding and polishing tools from John Michel, a Quaker astronomer who had retired to Bath nursing some strange, unacceptable ideas-such as the existence of ‘black holes’ in space from which light itself could not escape.
The accelerating pace of Herschel’s experiments is caught in a memorandum of his purchases made over five months in 1773.
May 10th. Bought a book of Astronomy, and one of Astronomical tables.
May 24th. Bought an object glass of 10 foot focal length.
June 1st. Bought many eyeglasses, and tin tubes; made a pair of steps.
June 7th. Glasses paid for, and the use of a small reflector paid for.
June 14th. The hire of a 2 foot reflecting telescope for 3 months paid for.
Sept. 15th. Hired a 2 foot reflector.
Sept. 22nd. Bought tools for making a reflector. Had a metal [mirror] cast.
Oct. 2nd. Bought a 20 foot object glass, and 9 eyeglasses. Emerson’s Optics. Attended private [music] scholars as usual.
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In June 1773 Herschel decided to attempt to make his own large reflector telescope, using metal mirrors as big as six inches in diameter.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a complicated and above all laborious task, requiring the casting, grinding and polishing of ‘speculum metal’, made of an alloy of white tin and brass. Three-inch mirrors were quite common, but a six-inch-diameter mirror with a precise concave surface required a technical feat that had never been achieved before. It called for a series of ingenious ‘contrivances’, which took Herschel back to his boyhood days, and all his old enthusiasm and ingenuity bubbled back.
The casting first required the construction of a small iron furnace and special moulds. These, Herschel found after many experiments, could best be made from a dried non-porous natural loam, formed from pounded horse-dung.
(#ulink_2e81b9f2-1837-5bda-a0ee-e64f8767fceb) Once cast, the speculum metal had to be hand-ground with a solution of ‘coarse emory and water’ to achieve the required concave curve, and finally polished, ‘with putty or oxide of tin or pitch’, for hours on end to achieve an absolutely smooth reflective surface. It was an exhausting, and occasionally dangerous, physical process, needing endless trial and error. The furnace was liable to explode, and Herschel found that the polishing had to be done without pausing-sometimes for many hours on end.
(#litres_trial_promo) If the polishing paused for even a few seconds in the final stages, the metal would harden and mist over, and the mirror would be useless.
All the work had to be carried out at 7 New King Street, turning the elegantly furnished house (intended of course for music-making and teaching) into a pungent, chaotic workshop. Initially Caroline was appalled at this transformation: ‘To my sorrow I saw almost every room turned into a workshop. A Cabinet-maker making a Tube and stands of all descriptions in a handsome furnished drawing room! Alex putting up a huge turning machine…in a bedroom for turning patterns, grinding glasses & turning eye-pieces etc. At the same time Music durst not lay entirely dormant during the summer, and my Brother had frequent rehearsals at home.’
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Caroline was gradually becoming William’s closest assistant. She was up at all hours, turning her hand to every practical need, housekeeping, shopping in the market, dealing with visiting music scholars, taking Pump Room choirs for singing practice, ‘lending a hand’ in the workshop, even reading aloud from inspiring fiction (in her bad accent) while William sweated over the mirror-polishing.
(#litres_trial_promo) Their choice of books seems intended to relieve the monotony of the work: Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy-all tales of fantastic adventures or eccentric heroes. Caroline does not seem to have been permitted the most fantastic and eccentric of them all, William’s favourite, Paradise Lost.
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Sometimes she even provisioned William while he worked, literally putting drinks and bits of food into his mouth. On at least one momentous occasion, this extraordinary provisioning process lasted for sixteen hours without a break. It was as if Caroline was a mother bird feeding a demented nestling. Something of William’s obsessional dedication, and Caroline’s ambivalent feelings about it, come out in the way she described this in her journal: ‘My time was so much taken up with copying Music and practising, besides attendance on my Brother when polishing, that by way of keeping him alife I was even obliged to feed him by putting the Vitals by bits into his mouth-this was once the case when at the finishing of a 7 foot mirror he had not left his hands from it for 16 hours together…And generally I was obliged to read to him when at some work which required no thinking, and sometimes lending a hand, I 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.’
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Much later, Victorian illustrators would make this into a comfortable domestic scene, a harmonious couple in an elegant drawing room, with convenient refreshments on a nearby table. In fact these epic polishing sessions took place downstairs, at the workbench of the unheated, stone-flagged basement in New King Street. Here William and Caroline were surrounded by tools and chemicals, and the distinct, pungent smell of the horse-dung moulds. It was dirty, monotonous and exhausting work, for which they wore rough clothes, and ignored ordinary household routines and niceties.
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Caroline’s account is light-hearted and self-denigrating, in her usual manner, and yet faintly resentful. Her sense of herself as William’s ‘boy’ apprentice suggests a measure of physical subordination and discipline. It also hints at an undignified negation of her sex. Here William was her ‘master’, not her kindly brother or patient teacher. Moreover, she saw herself as his ‘first year’ boy, at a time when apprenticeships normally lasted seven years. Though willingly undertaken, the work must have been frustrating and even perhaps humiliating for her. (What, for example, did she do if William needed to urinate during his epic polishing sessions?) Once again her account of the brother-sister relationship is problematic.
Meanwhile Herschel revealed extraordinary mechanical ability, combining the manual dexterity of a musician with almost ruthless determination and stamina. On one occasion he insisted on sharpening his instruments on the landlord’s grindstone in the yard after midnight, and came back fainting, with one of his fingernails ripped off. On another, the casting exploded in the basement workshop, and a stream of white-hot metal shot across the stone floor, cracking it from end to end and nearly laming them both.
By 1774 Herschel had successfully assembled his first five-foot reflector telescope, with a home-made metal speculum mirror of six-inch diameter (about the size of a side-plate). His Observation Journal records proudly: ‘December. At night I made astronomical Observations with telescope of my own construction.’
(#litres_trial_promo) As if to distinguish it from the standard tubular refractors, he had a beautiful octagonal case of gleaming mahogany panels made for it by their cabinet-maker. With its bright brass eyepiece and small sighting scope, it looked like a fine piece of Georgian furniture, not unworthy of Chippendale himself.
It was immediately apparent that Herschel had created an instrument of unparalleled light-gathering power and clarity. He saw, for example, what very few astronomers even suspected: that the Pole Star-which had been the key to navigation, and the poet’s traditional emblem of steadiness and singularity, for centuries-was not in fact one star at all, but two stars. This observation was not officially confirmed until Herschel received a letter from Joseph Banks, as President of the Royal Society, nearly ten years later, in March 1782.
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The first objects Herschel studied from his garden were his old travelling companion, the moon, and then two of the most prominent of the mysterious nebulae, or ‘star-clouds’, about which almost nothing was yet known. The first nebula was the one in the skirts of Andromeda, just visible with the naked eye as a faint primrose gaseous whorl beyond Cassiopeia; the other was in Orion, the mysterious blue star cluster, two stars down on the Hunter’s sword blade. These colour-tints were immensely enhanced by Herschel’s reflector, and he was soon producing wonderfully evocative colour descriptions of stars and planets. The nine-teenth-century observer T.H. Webb would complain that Herschel was rather too ‘partial to red tints’, though whether this was a purely subjective problem, a physiological one, or down to his speculum metal being a better reflector at the long-wavelength end of the spectrum, is still open to debate. The modern Hubble images are even more cavalier about colouring deep-space objects.
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From the start, Herschel’s observations have a note of authority, and he is ready to challenge current astronomical thinking. His Observation Journal for 4 March 1774 reads: ‘Saw the lucid spot on Orion’s Sword, thro’ a 5 ½ foot reflector; its shape was not as Dr Smith has delineated in his Optics; tho’ something resembling it…From this we may infer that there are undoubtedly changes among the fixt stars, and perhaps from a careful observation of this spot something might be concluded concerning the Nature of it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Even at this early stage Herschel has the notion of a changing universe, and that nebulae might hold some clue to this mystery. Each winter between 1774 and 1780 he made detailed drawings of Andromeda and the Orion nebula to see if any alterations could be identified.
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The nebulae represented a new field of sidereal or stellar astronomy. Only thirty nebulae were known in the 1740s, at the time of Herschel’s birth. By the time Herschel began to study them in the mid-1770s, Charles Messier in Paris had catalogued just under a hundred. Within a decade, by the mid-1780s, Herschel would have increased this tenfold, to over a thousand nebulae.
(#litres_trial_promo) No one really knew their composition, origins or distance. In general they were thought to be a few loose clouds of gas, hanging static in the Milky Way, some loose flotsam of God’s creation, and of little cosmological significance. Herschel suspected that they were star clusters at immense distances, whose composition might hold a clue to an entirely new kind of universe.
Sometimes, to observe the northern sky, he took his telescope out into the street at the front of the house, and dictated notes to Caroline. That autumn they attended together a return series of Ferguson’s astronomy lectures, given at the Pump Room by popular demand. Herschel’s journal records that he was still giving eight one-hour music lessons a day, and Caroline was continuing several hours’ singing practice.
(#litres_trial_promo) But the music scholars were sometimes surprised by Herschel ‘dropping his violin’ in the middle of the last evening lesson, and jumping up to peer at some particular group of stars from the window. One startled student recalled: ‘His lodgings [at Rivers Street] resembled an astronomer’s much more than a musician’s, being heaped up with globes, maps, telescopes, reflectors etc, under which his piano was hid, and the violoncello, like a discarded favourite, skulked away in a corner.’ Herschel himself said that some of his pupils ‘made me give astronomical instead of music lessons’.
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Back in Hanover, Anna and Jacob were still expressing doubts about Caroline living in England. Again, Herschel did not mention astronomy, but revealed that he had established a small millinery business on the ground floor at 5 Rivers Street, to supplement the household income, which Caroline was running successfully as well as pursuing her singing.
(#litres_trial_promo) He then slipped over to reassure them in the summer of 1777, and for the first time wrote a series of confidential letters to Caroline in English. ‘Mama is extremely well and as I have represented things gives her consent to you staying in England as long as you and I please. I wish very much to see my own home again [Bath], and conclude at present, remaining your affectionate Brother, Wm. Herschel…I hope to be in Bath about 14-16 of Sept.’
