Six-minute summary: Mary Somerville

Hello readers! If you live outside Scotland, you might not have heard of Mary Somerville, a Scottish polymath who wrote five best-selling books in the 1800s, making science accessible to the masses. She was primarily a skilled mathematician, but she studied the natural world, and was an advocate for the education of women. Luckily for us, she also wrote an autobiography, providing direct insight into her thoughts and motivations.

Humble-ish beginnings

Mary was born on boxing day in 1780. Her parents were descended from aristocracy, but had little money by aristocratic standards. Her father, William Fairfax, received a “modest” wage from his job in the navy, and he was often away.

The Fairfax family lived in Burntisland, on the Firth of Forth, opposite Edinburgh. They were upper middle-class by modern standards; they had servants, but although they had enough money to send Mary’s older brother to Edinburgh university, they couldn’t afford to send Mary to school until she was ten. She recalls helping around the house, picking fruit, shelling peas and feeding the chickens.

Mary’s father insisted that she learn to read and write. She was sent to a boarding school in which girls wore contraptions that forced their shoulders back, to make them sit perfectly straight, as they were made to memorise pages of Johnson’s Dictionary. Thankfully, the school cost too much for her to stay. Instead, Mary learnt needlework at the village school. Her aunt “greatly disapproved” of her conduct, particularly her reading.

However, Mary had wealthy relatives to help her. One of Mary’s uncles, having recently “returned from India” (uh oh) gifted her a pianoforte. She practised for four or five hours a day, and had to learn to tune and mend it herself, as there was no piano tuner nearby.

When Mary was thirteen, she spent the winter with her mother in a flat in Edinburgh, where they shared a bedroom to save money. Here, she attended “writing school” and learnt basic maths. In the summer, she spent time with her uncle, Dr Thomas Somerville, who helped her learn Latin. When she was fifteen, her younger brother’s tutor brought her books on Euclid and algebra at her request – and she spent so much time reading that her mother ordered for her candles be taken away as soon as she went to bed. Her father commented that if they didn’t put a stop to her reading, she would end up in a “straight-jacket”. Not exactly a supportive learning environment…

First marriage – a disaster

In 1804, Mary married Lieutenant Samuel Greig, a distant cousin. He was a commissioner for the Russian navy (Britain’s allies at the time) and he took her to London, where she was “alone the whole of the day”. She did not like Greig at all. “I met with no sympathy whatsoever from him, as he had a very low opinion of the capacity of my sex, and had neither knowledge nor interest in science of any kind.” She had two sons in three years, but one of them died in early childhood. Greig died in 1807, and Mary returned to Scotland. Here, she read Newton’s Principia – and solved a “prize problem!” (the exclamation mark is hers), for which she received a silver medal. Her friend John Wallace became a professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University, and agreed to help her improve her skills.

Second marriage – a triumph

In 1812, Mary married her cousin, William Somerville (her mother’s sister’s son). He had spent a lot of time abroad, having been involved in “the taking of the Cape of Good Hope” (uh oh). Still, he had a “lively interest in all branches of natural history” and was “a good botanist and mineralogist”. He helped Mary by searching for books she requested, and by “copying and re-copying her manuscripts, to save her time”.

In 1816, the pair moved to London. William was an inspector for the Army Medical Board, and in 1817, he was elected to the Royal Society. Mary developed a vast social circle, and met many famous scientists, as well as attending lectures at the Royal Institution. In 1826, she conducted experiments exploring whether violet light could induce magnetism, and became the first woman to present scientific findings to the Royal Society (even if those findings were later dismissed by Michael Faraday).

Mechanism of the Heavens

Soon after this, Lord Henry Brougham asked if Mary could translate “Mécanique Céleste”, a work written in French by Pierre-Simon Laplace. Mary agreed to keep her authorship a secret, “[hiding] my papers as soon as the bell announced a visitor.” Herschel reviewed a draft and found very few errors, and William Whewell was so impressed that he sent her a sonnet (well, he sent it to her husband to pass on to her). The book was published in 1831 as “Mechanism of the Heavens”, and it was more than a translation – it made Laplace’s equations accessible to a much wider audience. Whewell immediately used it as a textbook for his students at Cambridge, and Robert Peel advised the King to grant her a “pension” (i.e., a steady income) of £200 per year to fund her scientific endeavours.

Her next book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834) sold 15,000 copies, and was the publisher’s most successful science book until Charles Darwin wrote Origin of Species. In 1835, she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society, at the same time as Caroline Herschel. In 1848, she published Physical Geography, which earnt her the Victoria Gold Medal from the Royal Geographical Society.

Dabbling in geology

Mary and William built a vast mineral collection and were avid geologists. They were friends with Dr. William Wollaston, who designed and sold to them a goniometer to measure the angles of crystal faces. Mary also recalls a day when her husband was analysing minerals “with the blowpipe” (i.e., burning them and examining flame colours) close to where she was playing the piano, causing her to faint from the emission of arsenic fumes. On a visit to Naples, she climbed Vesuvius, even though there had been an eruption very recently, and it was “still smoking very much” (she got lucky here – an eruption in 1872 killed 25 Victorian tourists).

Her network was crazy…

Growing up, Mary regularly visited the “Lyells of Kinnordy” – the parents of Charles Lyell, a father of modern geology, whom Mary Somerville later regarded as a friend. When she moved to London, her circle of friends included the astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, engineer Charles Babbage (“while he was making his Calculating-machines”), and Ada Lovelace, whom Mary advised to learn mathematics (some sources suggest that she tutored her, but from her own memoirs it seems that it was a more informal relationship, with Ada writing to her “when she met with any difficulty”). Mary also knew William Buckland (creator of the first geologic map of Britain), who invited her to visit Oxford University; and Adam Sedgewick (another father of modern geology), who invited her to visit Trinity College Cambridge (despite his opposition to admitting female students).

When Mary and William visited Europe, they met a long list of scientists, including Humboldt, Ampere, Becquerel and Poisson (who begged her to write a second volume to Mechanism). In Italy, she briefly met Lord Byron, although he refused to speak with anyone British – and then she met the Pope!

…but she outlived almost everyone

Mary Somerville lived to the age of 91, which meant that she outlived all of her peers, siblings, and many of her children, several of whom didn’t reach adulthood. Her older brother died of heatstroke at 21 while working in the military of the East India Company. Her eldest son became a successful barrister, but died in 1865 at the age of 60. When reading her memoirs, it is striking how often she remembers friends and peers that died before she did.

In 1833, Mary moved to Italy, as her husband was ill and thought the warmer weather would make him better. She remained in Italy for the rest of her life.

Personality

Mary Somerville was liked by her friends and respected by her scientific peers. She was certainly an outsider, stating that “the conversation of the ladies in the drawing-room… often bored me”, but she had many friends and an active social life. Her daughter recalls that she “never introduced scientific or learned subjects into general conversation”, and never displayed “the slightest pretension of superior knowledge.” Mary describes herself as having a “timidity of character”, and remarks that “in argument I was instantly silenced, although I often knew, and could have proved, that I was in the right.”

As for the working of her mathematical mind, we can glean a few insights from her memoirs. Her daughter recalls that when faced with a difficult problem, Mary would lose “all consciousness of what went on around her, and became so entirely absorbed that any amount of talking… went on without in the least disturbing her.” Mary recounts that she could “remember neither names nor dates”, but “in my youth I could play long pieces of music on the piano without the book, and I never forget mathematical formulae.”

Love of nature

Mary loved nature, and this is evidenced throughout her memoirs. She particularly loved birds, remembering a time in her childhood when “a vast crop of thistles and groundsel appeared, which attracted quantities of goldfinches… I have seen as many as sixty to eighty of these beautiful birds feeding on it.” I hope this isn’t an exaggeration – you would never see this many goldfinches nowadays! She even warns that “owing to the reckless destruction of birds, the equilibrium of nature is disturbed”.

She remembers collecting shells on the beach, and seeing fossils in limestone blocks carried from the coal mines further inland. Their garden in Burntisland led all the way down to the sea, and she recalls a stream “thickly covered with the freshwater mussel” (again, how times have changed), and seeing whales and “shoals of porpoises at play” in the Firth of Forth.

Politics

Mary Somerville was a liberal. She “resented the injustice of the world in denying all those privileges of education to my sex which were so lavishly bestowed on men.” She was anti-slavery, to the extent that she “would not take sugar in my tea, or indeed taste anything with sugar in it.” In 1866, when John Stuart Mill organised a mass petition to the UK parliament, demanding that women be given the right to vote, Mary Somerville was the first to sign it. Sadly, it was unsuccessful.

Still, Mary wasn’t revolutionary in the French sense, stating that “I have always considered a highly-educated aristocracy essential, not only for government, but for the refinement of a people.” Hmm. A merit-based or a hereditary aristocracy, I wonder?

In summary…

Mary Somerville was a gifted polymath, with particular skill in writing accessible science for the masses. She played a key role in the democratisation of knowledge and the advancement of science, and her memoirs provide a wonderful insight into the scientific world of the 1800s. I have avoided being too negative throughout this summary – but imagine what she could have done had she been afforded the same level of education as her male peers! What an amazing woman.

Happy reading, and have a lovely week!

Links:

Somerville, M. (1826) On the Magnetizing Power of the More Refrangible Solar Rays. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 2 (1815 – 1830), 263-265. (https://doi.org/10.1098/rspl.1815.0282)

Somerville, M. (1873) Personal recollections, from early life to old age, of Mary Somerville: with selections from her correspondence. London: J Murray.