“As when by night the glass
Of Galileo less assured observes
Imagined lands and regions in the moon.”—Paradise Lost.
Every one knows the fame of Sir William Herschel, the first distinguished astronomer of that name, the builder and designer of the forty-foot telescope, and the discoverer of the planet, called after George III., Georgium Sidus. Hardly less well known is the name of his sister, Caroline Herschel, who was her brother’s constant helper for fifty years. She was the discoverer of eight comets; she received, for her distinguished services to science, the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the gold medal conferred annually by the King of Prussia for science; she was also made an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society and of the Royal Irish Academy, and received many other public marks of appreciation of the value of her astronomical labours. Few women have done as much as she for the promotion of science, and few have been more genuinely humble in their estimate of their own attainments. Nothing made her more angry than any praise which appeared, even in the slightest degree, to detract from the reputation of her brother; over and over again she asserted that she was nothing more than a tool which he had taken the trouble to sharpen. One of her favourite expressions about herself was that she only “minded the heavens” for her brother. “I am nothing,” she wrote; “I have done nothing: all I am, all I know, I owe to my brother. I am only a tool which he shaped to his use—a well-trained puppy-dog would have done as much.”

Scientific men and scientific societies did not endorse Caroline Herschel’s extremely humble estimate of herself. In the address to the Astronomical Society by Mr. South, on presenting the medal to Miss Herschel in 1828, the highest praise was conferred upon her as her brother’s fellow-worker, and as an original observer. “She it was,” said Mr. South, “who reduced every observation, made every calculation; she it was who arranged everything in systematic order; and she it was who helped him (Sir W. Herschel) to obtain his imperishable name. But her claims to our gratitude do not end here: as an original observer she demands, and I am sure she has, our unfeigned thanks.” He then narrates the series of her astronomical discoveries, and adds, referring to the brother and sister: “Indeed, in looking at the joint labours of these extraordinary personages, we scarcely know whether most to admire the intellectual power of the brother, or the unconquerable industry of his sister.”

The sharpest tool, or the best-trained puppy-dog in the world, could hardly have earned such praise as this. Without endorsing what Caroline said of herself in her generous wish to heighten the fame of her brother, it must, however, be conceded that in a remarkable degree she was what he made her. With an excellent, and indeed an exceptionally powerful, natural understanding, she was ready to apply it in any direction her brother chose. She was far from being a mere tool, but her mind resembled a fine musical instrument upon which her brother was able to play the lightest air or the grandest symphony, according as he pleased. At his bidding she became, first, a prima donna, then an astronomer; if he had so wished it, she would probably with equal readiness and versatility have turned her attention to any other branch of science or art. Caroline Herschel was, indeed, a fine example of what devoted love can do to elevate the character and develop the natural capacity of the understanding.

She was born in Hanover on the 16th March 1750, the youngest but one of six children. Her exceptionally long life of nearly ninety-eight years closed in January 1848. Her memory, therefore, included the earthquake of Lisbon, the whole French Revolution, the meteor-like rise and fall of Napoleon, and all the history of modern Europe to the eve of the socialistic outbreak of 1848. Her family life, before she left Germany, was of the narrowest possible kind. She had only one sister, seventeen years older than herself; and as Sophia Herschel married early, Caroline became the only girl in her family circle, and to the full was she kept to those exclusively feminine pursuits and occupations which the proprieties of Germany at that time enforced. Her mother appears to have been enthusiastically opposed to the education of girls. Her father wished to give her a good education, but the mother insisted that nothing of the kind should be attempted. How she learned to read and write we are not told in the biography written by her grand-niece, Mrs. J. Herschel. These accomplishments were by no means common among German women of the humbler middle class a hundred years ago. She did, however, acquire them, in spite of her mother’s decree that two or three months’ training in the art of making household linen was all the education that Caroline required. Her father, who was a professional musician himself, wished to teach her music, but could only do so by stealth, or by taking advantage of half an hour now and then, when his wife was in an exceptionally good temper. In a letter, written when she was eighty-eight years old, Caroline recalls these furtive hours stolen from the serious occupations of her life, which then consisted in sewing, “ornamental needlework, knitting, plaiting hair, and stringing beads and bugles.” “It was my lot,” she writes, “to be the Cinderella of the family.... I could never find time for improving myself in many things I knew, and which, after all, proved of no use to me afterwards, except what little I knew of music ... which my father took a pleasure in teaching me—N.B., when my mother was not at home. Amen.”

Very early in her life her brother William became Caroline’s idol and hero. He was twelve years older than herself, and distinguished himself among the group of brothers for tenderness and kindness to the little maiden. Her eldest brother, Jacob, was a fastidious gentleman, and Caroline’s inability to satisfy his requirements for nicety at table and as a waitress, often earned her a whipping. But her brother William’s gentility was of a different order. She narrates one instance, which doubtless was a specimen of others, when “My dear brother William threw down his knife and fork and ran to welcome and crouched down to me, which made me forget all my grievances.” Little did William or Caroline guess that in the kind brother soothing the little sister’s trouble, the future astronomer was “sharpening the tool” that was hereafter to be of such inestimable service to him.

The connection of England and Hanover under one crown caused an intimate association between the two countries. William Herschel’s first visit to England was as a member of the band of the regiment of which his father was bandmaster. On this first visit to England, William expended his little savings in buying Locke’s “Essay on the Human Understanding.” Jacob made an equally characteristic purchase of specimens of English tailoring art. These professional journeys to England led, in the course of time, to William Herschel establishing himself as a music-master and professional musician at Bath. This, however, he very early regarded merely as a means to an end. He taught music to live, but he lived for his astronomical studies and for the inventions and improvements in telescopes which he afterwards introduced to the world. When Caroline was seventeen years old, her father died, leaving his family very ill provided for; Caroline was more closely than ever confined to the tasks of a household drudge and to endeavouring to supply home-made luxuries for Jacob. This went on for five years, the mother and sister slaving night and day in order that Jacob might cut a figure in the world not humbling to the family pride. In 1772 William Herschel unexpectedly arrived from England, and his short visit ended in his sister Caroline returning with him to Bath. She left, as she writes with some awe, even after an interval of many years, “without receiving the consent of my eldest brother to my going.”

There could not possibly be a greater contrast than that between Caroline’s life in Hanover and her life in England. From being a maid-of-all-work in a not very interesting family, where there was a dull monotony in her daily routine of drudgery, she found she was to become a public singer, an astronomer’s apprentice, and an assistant manufacturer of scientific instruments; she was not only her brother’s housekeeper, but his helper and coadjutor in every act of his life. Nothing is more remarkable than the account of the life of William and Caroline Herschel at Bath. He frequently gave from thirty-five to forty music-lessons a week; this, with his work as director of public concerts, kept the wolf from the door, and, needless to say, occupied his daylight hours with tolerable completeness. The nights were given to “minding the heavens,” or to making instruments necessary for minding them much more efficiently than had hitherto been possible. Every room in the house was converted into a workshop. William Herschel literally worked on, night and day, without rest, his sister on several occasions keeping him alive by putting bits of food into his mouth while he was still working. Once when he was finishing a seven-foot mirror for his telescope, he never took his hands from it for sixteen hours. The great work of constructing the forty-foot telescope took place at Bath; and at Bath also, while still practising the profession of a music-master, Herschel discovered the Georgium Sidus, and was acknowledged as the leading authority on astronomy in England.

Up to the time of Herschel’s improvements, six or eight inches used to be considered a large size for the mirror of an astronomical telescope. His first great telescope had a twelve-foot mirror. There is a most exciting account in Mrs. Herschel’s Life of Caroline Herschel, of the failure of the first casting of the mirror for the thirty-foot reflector. The molten metal leaked from the vessel containing it and fell on the stone floor, pieces of which flew about in all directions as high as the ceiling. The operators fortunately escaped without serious injury. “My poor brother fell, exhausted with heat and exertion, on a heap of brickbats.” The disappointment must have been intense, but nothing ever baffled these indefatigable workers, and the second casting was a complete success.

Five years after she had joined her brother at Bath, Caroline made her first appearance as a public singer. She was very successful, and her friends anticipated that her well-cultivated and beautiful voice would become a means of providing her with an ample income. She, however, had so fully identified herself with her brother’s astronomical labours, that she only regarded her musical acquirements as a means of setting him free to devote himself more completely to the real object of his life. His fame as a maker of telescopes had by this time spread all over Europe, and many scientific societies, royal persons, and other celebrities, ordered telescopes of him. On these orders he was able to realise a large profit, but Caroline always grudged the time devoted to their execution. Her aim for her brother was not that he should become rich or even well-to-do, but that he should devote himself unreservedly to advance the progress of astronomical science. She was ready to live on a crust, and to give herself up to the most pinching economies and even privations, for this end. She was the keeper of her brother’s purse, and received his commands to spend therefrom anything that was necessary for herself; her thrift and self-denial may be judged from the fact that the sum thus abstracted for her own personal wants seldom amounted to more than £7 or £8 a year.

The next great change in the life of the brother and sister took place in 1782, when William Herschel left Bath and was appointed Astronomer-Royal by George the Third. His salary of only £200 a year involved a great loss of income, but this, in his eyes, was a small matter in comparison with the advantage of having his time entirely free to give up to his favourite studies. They bade farewell to Bath, and settled first at Datchet, shortly after, however, removing to Slough. Caroline had dismal visions of bankruptcy, but William was in the highest spirits, and declared that they would live on eggs and bacon, “which would cost nothing to speak of, now that they were really in the country.”

Caroline was now installed as an assistant astronomer, and was given a telescope, which she calls a “seven-foot Newtonian Sweeper”; and she was instructed, whenever she had an evening not in attendance on her brother, to “sweep for comets”; but her principal business appears, at this time, to have been waiting on her brother, and writing down the results of his observations; they worked quite as hard as they had done at Bath. They laboured at the manufacture of instruments all day, and at the observation of the heavens all night. No severity of weather, if the sky was clear, ever kept them from their posts. The ink often froze with which Caroline was writing down the results of her brother’s observations. It has been well said that if it had not been for occasional cloudy nights, they must have died of overwork. The apparatus for erecting the great forty-foot telescope, and the iron and woodwork for its various motions, were all designed by William Herschel, and fixed under his immediate direction. His sister, in her Recollections, wrote: “I have seen him stretched many an hour in the burning sun across the top beam, whilst the iron-work for the various motions was being fixed.” The penurious salary granted to William Herschel was supplemented by special grants for the removal and the erection of all this machinery; and in 1787 Caroline’s services to her brother were publicly recognised by her receiving the appointment of assistant to her brother at a salary of £50 a year. She was at all times grateful to members of the royal family for acts of kindness shown by them to her brother and herself; but it is evident that she felt that, so far as money was concerned, she had not much cause for gratitude to the royal bounty. She points out that at the time when Parliament was granting George III. the sum of £80,000 a year for encouraging science, £200 was considered a sufficient salary for the first astronomer of the day; and yet money could flow liberally enough in some directions, for £30,000 was at that time being spent on the altar-piece of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Even Caroline’s little salary of £50 a year was not regularly paid. It was a trial to her again to become a pensioner on her brother’s purse, and it was not till nine quarters of her official salary remained unpaid, that she reluctantly applied to him for help. No wonder that in reading, after her brother’s death, an account of his life and its achievements, she remarks, “The favours of monarchs ought to have been mentioned, but once would have been enough.”

It was after her brother’s marriage, in 1788, that the majority of Caroline’s astronomical discoveries were made. She discovered her first comet in 1786, her eighth and last in 1797. She was recognised as a comrade by all the leading astronomers of Europe, and received many letters complimenting her on her discoveries. One from De la Lande addressed her as “Savante Miss,” while another from the Rev. Dr. Maskelyne saluted her as “My worthy sister in astronomy.” Royal and other distinguished visitors constantly visited the wonderful forty-foot telescope at Slough, and either William Herschel or his sister were required to be in attendance to explain its marvels. The Prince of Orange, on one occasion, called, and left an extraordinary message “to ask Mr. Herschel, or if he was not at home, Miss Herschel, if it was true that Mr. Herschel had discovered a new star, whose light was not as that of the common stars, but with swallow-tails, as stars in embroidery.” The only glimpse we get, through the peaceful labours of Caroline’s long life, of the strife and turmoil of the French Revolution, is the note she makes of the visit, to her brother’s observatory, of the Princesse de Lamballe. “About a fortnight after this,” the diarist observes, “her head was off.” The absence of all comment upon the wonderful political events of the time is noticeable, and so also is Caroline’s thinly-veiled contempt for any science less sublime than that to which she and her brother were devoted. Her youngest brother, Dietrich, was a student of the insect world. “He amuses himself with insects,” she wrote to her nephew; “it is well he does not see the word amuses, for whenever he catches a fly with a leg more than usual, he says it is as good as catching a comet.” Her brother’s marriage, though far from welcome at the time it took place, was a great blessing to her; for it gave her a most tender and affectionate sister, and ultimately a nephew, the inheritor of his father’s great gifts, and the being to whom, after William Herschel’s death in 1822, Caroline transferred all the devoted and passionate attachment of which her nature was capable.

The great mistake of her life was going back to Germany after Sir W. Herschel’s death in 1822. She was then seventy-two years of age, and the previous fifty years of her life, containing all her most precious memories and associations, had been spent in England. In this country, also, were all those who were dearest to her. Yet, no sooner was her brother dead, than she felt life in England to be an impossibility. She little thought that she had still twenty-six years to live; indeed she had long been under the impression that her end was near, but while her brother lived she kept this to herself, because she wished to be useful to him as long as she possibly could. She never really re-acclimatised herself to Germany. “Why did I leave happy England?” she often said. The one German institution she thoroughly enjoyed was the winter series of concerts and operas, which she constantly attended, and she mentions with pleasure, in her letters, that she was “always sure to be noticed by the Duke of Cambridge as his countrywoman, and that is what I want; I will be no Hanoverian.” She laments the death of William IV., chiefly because, by causing a separation of the crowns of England and Hanover, it seemed to break a link between herself and the country of her adoption.

She never revisited England, but she kept up a constant communication with it by letters to her sister-in-law, her nephew, and later to her niece, Sir John Herschel’s wife. At that time the post between London and Hanover was an affair of fifteen days, and letters were carried by a monthly messenger, of whose services she seldom failed to avail herself. She took the keenest interest in her nephew’s distinguished career. His letters to her are full of astronomy. In 1832 he made a voyage to the Cape to observe the stars in the Southern Hemisphere. When Miss Herschel first heard of the intended voyage she refused to believe it. But when she was really convinced of it, the old impulse was as strong upon her as upon a war-horse who hears the trumpet. “Ja! if I was thirty or forty years younger and could go too!” she exclaimed.

On 1st January 1840 the tube of the celebrated forty-foot telescope was closed with a sort of family celebration. A requiem, composed by Sir John Herschel for the occasion, was chanted, and he and Lady Herschel, with their seven children and some old servants, walked in procession round it, singing as they went. On hearing of this from Slough, Miss Herschel recalls that the famous telescope had also been inaugurated with music. “God save the King” had then been sung in it, the whole company from the dinner-table mounting into the tube, and taking any musical instruments they could get hold of, to form a band and orchestra.

The most laborious of all her undertakings she accomplished after her brother’s death. It was “The Reduction and Arrangement in the form of a catalogue, in Zones, of all the Star Clusters and Nebulæ, observed by Sir W. Herschel in his Sweeps.” It was for this that the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society was voted to her in 1828.

All through her life in Hanover she lived with the most careful economy, seldom or never consenting to draw upon Sir John Herschel for the annuity of £100 that had been left her by her brother. She said it was impossible for her to spend more than £50 a year without making herself ridiculous. The only luxuries she granted herself were her concert and opera tickets, and her English bed, which all sufferers from the inhuman German bedding must be thankful to hear she possessed. The self-forgetfulness and devotion to others which had characterised her in youth accompanied her to her grave. Every detail with regard to the disposition of her property and the arrangements for her funeral had been made by herself, with the view of giving as little trouble as possible to her nephew, and making the smallest encroachment upon his time. In her latest moments her only thought for herself was embodied in a request that a lock of her beloved brother’s hair might be laid with her in her coffin.