The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace andBabbage review a comic look at two Victorian prodigies

October 2020 · 4 minute read
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua. Photograph: Sydney PaduaThe Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua. Photograph: Sydney Padua
Nicholas Lezard's choiceComics and graphic novelsReviewA flight of fancy that explores the possibilities of Babbage’s early computer, and makes Victorian mathematics compellingly tangible

My fear, on picking this up, was that it would be a tiresome reduction of the work of two serious scientists to silliness. It’s been described as “steampunk”, which sets alarm bells ringing. I need not have worried. The only major tinkering with the historical record in the book is its proposal that Charles Babbage completed his Analytical Engine, the computer he designed in 1837 but never got round to building. (It would have been huge and difficult to construct; a working model of its predecessor, his Difference Engine, was only finally completed in 2000 – you can see it in the Science Museum – and even that apparently has a tendency to jam.)

However, assert that the machine got built (Padua knows very well the difference between a Difference Engine and an Analytical Engine, but prefers to use the former term, on the understandable grounds that it is cooler), and the medium of comics is just the right way to proceed. I use the word “comics” rather than “graphic novel” not just because this isn’t a novel, but because it is often funny.

Babbage’s chief collaborator – and, it would appear, the only collaborator he never fell out with, for he was that kind of a man – was Ada Lovelace. The sole legitimate child of Lord Byron, she was raised well away from him and encouraged by her mother to study mathematics, on the grounds that it was as far as you could get from poetry. Lovelace saw the possibilities of Babbage’s first machine, making the extraordinary intuitive leap that it could be used to calculate not only mathematical formulae, but, in theory if not in practice, pretty much anything, as our own computers do today.

Padua launches a host of flights of fancy – George Eliot having the manuscript of Scenes of Clerical Life pulled to pieces as Babbage’s engine reduces it to searchable bits; Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington (on a horse) popping round to see how the machine works. “Knowledge is power,” says Babbage; Victoria – whose speech is written in gothic script – replies, “POWER is power”. What is remarkable is how often, as we learn in extremely engaging and well written footnotes and endnotes, such flights of fancy have a basis in reality.

For example, I was particularly delighted when the number 0 – here represented as the corner of the Argand plane (an x axis of real numbers and a y axis of imaginary numbers) – turned into Humpty Dumpty: it makes the occasional weirdness of mathematics compellingly tangible. And Padua is justified in drawing on the Alice books: Lewis Carroll visited Babbage in the hope of procuring a calculating machine, and was shown such bits as were available to look at. Indeed, much of the book seems to breathe the air of Wonderland – just as Wonderland itself breathes the air of algebraic mathematics (“Divide a loaf by a knife – what’s the answer to that?” asks the White Queen, for example. We are reminded of this, and much else, by Padua).

In short, this is an utter joy, but also, to hazard a semi-educated opinion, mathematically sound. The 19th century was when mathematics started getting weird, and the idea that a machine could have an emergent intelligence began to take root. Babbage and Lovelace were, in a sense, ahead of their time; Padua brings them into ours. She is also honest enough to raise the question of whether Lovelace’s contributions and reputation have not been inflated by a desire to squeeze a woman into mathematical history; and the way she answers this question is extremely plausible. For Padua has done her research: she has teased out the connections between Babbage, Lovelace and what would seem to be the whole of Victorian culture and society – and done so in a way that appears almost effortless on the page, her light, easy graphic style an excellent vehicle not only for deep and complex thought, but for excellent, and sometimes excellently corny, jokes. This is a book to reread, not just read.

To order The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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