Somerville Mary

Queen Of Science


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of which charm does it possess. If you marry Scotchmen, take care they are good ones. The Scotch are like foreigners in one respect, the very high alone are tolerable and they not always.17

      This is, however, a letter written in surprising bitterness of spirit, full of irritation with some of her Scottish acquaintance and also, alas, with the family of her son’s bride. She quotes her brother Henry as saying that the gentlemen of the new generation are not fit society for Martha and Mary, as feeling that Woronzow’s imminent marriage to Agnes Graham will not bring a good ‘connexion’ and that Woronzow might have done much better. Mary Somerville agrees that her brother is the only gentleman and his wife and her sister the only ladies she has seen since she came, but she believes that Woronzow’s happiness is most important and everyone speaks well of Agnes. There is an uncharacteristic coarseness about this which can perhaps only come out of encounters with our nearest and dearest. The oppressiveness of provincial society is hardly a peculiarly Scottish problem.

      Her local places were certainly proud of her. The Kelso Chronicle reviewed her Personal Recollections, entirely unresentful of the occasional slight to Scotland, justly recognising that ‘Mary Somerville lived so as to get the greatest possible amount of happiness out of her long life’ (n.d. after 18 Dec. 1873) and the Kelso Mail (25 March 1874), in its laudatory review, tells a doubtless apocryphal but charming story about Mary Somerville after the planting of a cedar at the residence of the Misses Ramsay, friends of her mother:

      One of the Miss Ramsays said, ‘May we again all meet around it.’ ‘May we all meet under it’ was the wish of her sister; and ‘May we all meet above it’ was the characteristic wish of Mrs Somerville.

      DAUGHTER, WIFE AND MOTHER:

      With her siblings and with her children, Mary Somerville suffered, as did most people at the time, from the frequency of infantile and premature deaths. The death of her elder brother, Sam, in India at 21, greatly affected her and the first draft of the autobiography has a double row of dots across the page after the description of his death, as if to signal an irreversible difference in her life. Like so many women of the time, she also had to suffer the pain of the deaths of her children. The most affecting childhood death certainly was that of her eldest daughter, Margaret, who died in 1823 before her eleventh birthday. The Somervilles had obviously invested a great deal in this young girl: ‘She was,’ Mary Somerville says, ‘a child of intelligence and acquirements far beyond her tender age’ (p. 124); indeed, made unscientific perhaps by grief, she feared that she may have overtaxed Margaret’s young mind:

      It does not take a very percipient reader to guess that all was not