Mary Sommerville

Mary Somerville was one of the most gifted mathematicians and scientists of the nineteenth century. As well as being a talented writer, artist and pianist. She was part of the elite thinkers of the early 19th century and what made this all the more remarkable was she mostly self taught at a time when education for women was not encouraged.

Mary Somerville’s father was Sir William George Fairfax; he was born in Bagshot in Surrey and joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman at the age of eleven in 1750. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in 1757. Earlier in his career as this young lieutenant was commissioned to a small naval cutter and following a serious gale in the North Sea his small ship was damaged. He brought her to Burntisland for repair. It was here he met and married his first wife who was the daughter of the local minister. His wife sadly died after only 3 years of marriage in 1770.

Two years after his first wife’s death he met Margaret Charters who was to become his second wife and they married in 1772. Margaret Charters was well connected. Her father Samuel Charters was the Solicitor of the Customs for Scotland. The family’s second home was here in Quality Street Burntisland.

Lieutenant Fairfax was frequently away for long spells at sea and in 1780 he was appointed as a Commander to sail for the North America station during the American wars of Independence. Although heavily pregnant his wife, now Margaret Fairfax, accompanied him to London to bid him farewell. Having waved him off in London on his latest voyage, her mother was making her way home to Burntisland, Fife via her sister’s house, in Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders.

 On a cold Winter night in December of 1780 returning from this long journey from London the heavily pregnant Margaret Fairfax was “caught short” and gave birth to Mary at her sister’s house. By a peculiar quirk of fate, Mary Fairfax was born at the home of the man, her cousin William Somerville, whom she was to marry some thirty years later. In her memoirs Mary states ‘I was born in the house of my future husband and nursed by his mother … a rather singular coincidence!

At the age of three Mary and the rest of the Fairfax family took up residence in what was to become Mary’s permanent childhood home in Quality Street Burntisland. (Now Somerville Square). The house survives to the present day. It is part of a terrace of late 16th and 17th century crow-stepped merchant’s houses.

Mary’s father became flag captain of HMS Venerable under Admiral Adam Duncan and was heavily engaged at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797. This was a major naval action fought between the British and Dutch fleets. The following year. For his service in the battle, Fairfax was knighted. Fairfax was absent from his home for long periods on naval duty and management of the household and family fell largely to his wife, Margaret. She lived with great simplicity and even greater economy on her husband’s slim navy pay. ‘After three years absence he returned home to Burntisland.

He was shocked to find his daughter at the age of nine whom he described as a “savage” with an atrocious accent who could neither read nor write. She was sent at the age of 9 to a school in Edinburgh, run by a Miss Primrose. Mary hated this school and learned very little. Mary stayed at the school for a year and then her torment finally over, ‘like a wild animal escaped out of a cage’ she returned to her natural place of learning, the wild countryside and seashore at home. At the age of 13 she was sent briefly to a writing school in Edinburgh where she learned to write and study some simple arithmetic. The rest of Mary’s education would be entirely self taught. After the chores were done, Mary watched the tides, the marine life, the land, its changes, and the plants which gave the land its life. In her memoirs and in her eighties, she writes and describes her childhood home. Her description of the town as” a small seaport sheltered by the Binn with the communal Links and the wide sweeping sandy bay”, is recognizable to residents and visitors today. Her close examination of surroundings laid the foundation for her enquiring mind to explore and engage in fossil finds, shell and mineral collections, bird study and marine life.

One of the most distinctive features of Mary Somerville’s later work is her understanding of what we now accept as the eco system. She also observed the heavens. “My bedroom had a window to the south, and a small closet near had one to the north. At least I spent many hours studying the stars by the aid of a celestial globe. ... at an earlier period of my life there was a comet, which I dreaded exceedingly”.

Mary in fact mentions having two small celestial globes and “her mother allowed the teaching of them from Mr Reid the village schoolteacher who came to teach her for a few weeks in the winter evenings”. The young Mary discovered her flair for mathematics by chance. She used to listen while her younger brother took lessons on geometry from Mr Reid. On one occasion the young Fairfax failed to answer a question and Mary prompted him. Mr Reid greatly surprised allowed her to continue as his unofficial pupil.

Just up the road from Mary’s house was the church she and the Fairfax family attended. Built in 1595 this historic is one of the oldest post Reformation churches still in regular use. Mary used to attend. The culture of the day was governed by rigid Calvinism, a church service through the week and two on a Sunday and I quote here from Mary’s memoirs “these were dominated by gloomy sermons”. The Fairfax family sat in the pews to front of the pulpit. In her memoirs she recalls the minister who also just happened to be her uncle the Rev James Wemyss calling out to some culprit “Sit up there! How daur ye sleep i the kirk”. One Sunday she was surprised to see the Sextant bring a low stool and place it before the pulpit after the sermon. There was a great stir and excitement in the church, everyone rising from curiosity when a man stood upon it. After being severely reprimanded he was restored again to the privileges of the Kirk. This was probably the last instance of the cutty stool. Mary recalls that her mother had no small difficulty in evading my questions. The cutty stool was the stool of repentance in the church for fornication. The guilty party would be accused from the pulpit. Usually, the evidence of fornication was pregnancy.

Winters were spent in Edinburgh, the rest of the year at Burntisland or visiting family and friends in other parts of Scotland. She is described as “extremely pretty”, a petite figure with light brown hair, grey eyes and a lovely pink complexion. Her pleasing shyness of manner did not prevent her from entering with zest into the life of balls, theatres and parties that gave Edinburgh a special sparkle during the second half of the eighteenth century. She enjoyed life to the full. She read poetry, played the piano and painted.  She also taught herself a bit of Greek, more Latin and studied French. On top of this she also acquired the more usual social and domestic skills of entertaining, sewing, cooking and household management. Yet at this she recalls,

 “I was often deeply depressed at spending so much time to so little purpose”.

On one occasion her mother invited her to a tea party given especially for widows or maidens who resided in the town. It was here she met a Miss Ogilvie who introduced her to this Ladies Magazine … but Mary was not interested in ladies fashionwear, it was on the puzzles page Mary was surprised to see strange looking lines mixed with letters, chiefly X’s and Y’s and asked: ‘What was that?’ ‘Oh,’ said Miss Ogilvie, ‘It is a kind of arithmetic: they call it algebra, but I can tell you nothing about it’ this intrigued Mary and was to change the course of her life. 

The Edinburgh that Mary spent her Winters in had transformed throughout the 18th century from its squalid medieval legacy into the thriving capital city of the Scottish Enlightenment. The air in Edinburgh buzzed with ideas, philosophies and creative innovations. Mary was to meet, befriend and work with some of the greatest minds of her time. They liked her and encouraged her. They accepted her into a community at a time when women were not educated. Scientists like John Playfair; writers like Walter Scott and artists like Alexander Naysmyth these men were part of the society in which Mary Somerville lived. Mary’s education included art lessons with the Alexander Nasmyth’s drawing class. It was also at Alexander Nasmyth’s drawing class that she first encountered pure mathematics. She overheard the master explaining the art of perspective: “You should study Euclid’s Elements of geometry”. With the help of her brother’s tutor Mary acquired a copy of Euclid and began to teach herself mathematics.  She stayed up late studying … the servants in the house reported that it was no wonder their stock of candles was exhausted for Miss May sat up reading to a very late hour… an order was given to take away her candle as soon as she went to bed! … she had however already gone through the first six books of Euclid. Her life in Scotland was about to change, however.

Mary’s mother was a distant cousin of Samuel Greig who was born in nearby Inverkeithing. He was a navy man and was selected to go to Russia to assist and help organise the navy of Catherine the Great. He is often recognized as being the ‘father of the Russian Navy’. He is buried in Tallinn Cathedral in Estonia. In 1804, at the age of twenty-four, Mary met and married Admiral Grieg’s son who was also in the Russian Navy. He was also called Samuel. That same year Samuel was appointed to the Russian Consular post in London and Mary moved to London. Mary’s brief description of her first marriage speaks volumes of her unhappiness during this period in the city. Samuel was in many ways a difficult man because he had quite a low opinion of women. He knew nothing of mathematics and science, and he disapproved quite strongly of Mary’s studies. So again, Mary was forced to study in private and to keep it very secret. She was kept very busy of course as they had two sons. She still managed to keep up her studies until very sadly her husband died after only three years of marriage. If things had continued this way, her name would mean nothing in the 21st century. However, widowhood at twenty-seven gave her the independence to develop her intellectual interests and with it a sense of freedom, both financially and socially. She moved back to Scotland and to her father’s house in Quality Street in Burntisland. She mentions being ‘much out of health’. She stayed away from society, rose early and resumed her mathematical studies. She mastered J. Ferguson's Astronomy and became a student of Isaac Newton's Principia (Principia Mathematica), even though many of her family and friends disapproved. She herself was considered eccentric and foolish and her conduct was highly disapproved of by many, particularly by some members of her own family. … but in her own words “she did not care for their criticism”.

Her circle of friends in the scientific community was limited but in the 1811 Dr William Wallace, professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University, set a mathematical puzzle. Mary found out and immediately set about to solve it, and in so doing won a prize medal. She impressed Wallace to the extent that he offered her further instruction and a reading list. It was upon his advice that Mary obtained a small library of works to provide her with a sound background in mathematics. By the time she was in her early thirties there was little Professor Wallace could teach Mary. She looked back on the years since she had first seen the word ‘algebra’ and the long number of years she had persevered without hope, but she now had the means to pursue her studies independently.

She remarried in 1812 to another cousin, Dr. William Somerville. It was William’s mother Martha who had weaned Mary at the time of her birth. William was a surgeon in the British Navy. Mary was 32 and he was 41. The couple had three daughters and a son. Dr. Somerville was very supportive of his wife's intellectual endeavors. He was proud of Mary’s work and did everything he could to aid her pursuits. He encouraged her and helped her to find tutors, to improve her French, to improve her mathematics and to improve her scientific knowledge. Three years later in 1816 the Somervilles moved to London when he was appointed one of the principal medical inspectors of the Army Medical Board of England. He was admitted into the Royal College of Physicians and in 1817 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

For many years Mary and William were popular figures in the city’s intellectual circles particularly in the Royal Society. At that time the Royal Society was located on the north side of Somerset House on the Strand. In 1817 Mary and William moved to Paris and met the famous French astronomer Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace. He once remarked that Mrs.Greig and Mrs Somerville were the only two woman who understood his works. His most famous work was Mecanique Celeste. Mary immersed herself in the scientific community and gaining fame before publishing her first scientific paper in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1826. this article is of great importance. It was the first experimental paper by a woman to be published in the journal under her own name.

In 1826 Mary presented a paper to the Royal Society on the magnetising power of the sun’s rays. Given women were not permitted to read to the Royal Society William had to go and present his wife’s paper describing the experiments she performed on the magnetizing effects of sunlight. The paper established Mary Somerville as a serious scientist and a minor scientific lioness’ After Laplace died in 1827 Mary received a letter from Lord Broughton from The Royal Society asking her to translate and popularise his famous work Mecanique Celeste which translates as ‘Mechanism of the Heavens’. All the knowledge Mary had gleaned was about to be put to the test. It took Mary four years to complete the task. Mary went far beyond the translation and condensing the work. She reworked equations, created meaningful illustrations and explained clearly subjects, like the mathematics that in fact, were not clear at all. The book secured her status as a leading mathematician

By the time Mary Somerville reached her late forties, the French had come to the end of a brilliant period of mathematical work. The British were far behind. Her book Mechanism of the Heavens (1831) was a textbook for undergraduates.

Her book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, ran to 10 editions. Her most popular work was Physical Geography in 1848 went through seven editions. Finally Molecular and Microscopic Science she finished when she was 89. All of this helped reshape mathematics and science and by that time Britain had become the world's scientific leader. Her books were all considered of great importance by the scientific community and by many of her colleagues. People such as Caroline and Sir William Herschell. They were sibling astronomers. Caroline and Mary were the first women to be made honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society. Charles Darwin, Mary knew Darwin from early manhood. He lent her plates from his book on orchids to use in her ‘Molecular & Microscopic Science’ ‘Others already mentioned are Charles Babbage the mathematician who was credited with the idea leading to the first computer.  It was widely believed that the computer age started in the mid-20th century. It is little known that over 100 years earlier a young woman of 17 had seen Charles Babbage’s calculating machine and began to develop ideas so far ahead of her time that only in our time have they finally begun to be realised. This young woman was Ada Byron Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron the poet. She is often regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of Charles Babbage’s proposed computer machine and was one of the first computer programmers.  In her memoirs Mary Somerville said “Ada was much attached to me. It was by my advice that she studied mathematics. She always wrote to me for an explanation when she met with difficulty”. Ada was mentored by Mary Somerville. Sadly, Ada died when she was only 37.

As well as the mathematicians and scientists there were many artists, poets and other people such as William Wilberforce the anti slavery campaigner and intimate of the like-minded Mary and her husband. Mary never really retired from active work. Mary received widespread praise for her achievements. Her abilities were publicly recognised by the numerous honours that were bestowed upon her.  As has been mentioned she was one of the first two female Honorary Members alongside Caroline Herschel to be elected to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835.  She was also elected to the American Geographical and Statistical Society in 1857 and the Italian Geographical Society in 1870.  That same year she received the Victoria Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Her abilities were publicly recognised, and this included the commissioning of many portraits.

Mary Somerville received admiring accolades from the leading men of science of her era. She received a government pension for life, which came in very handy when her husband lost all his money in an unwise investment. The couple and their two unmarried daughters, Martha and Mary Charlotte, spent most of their latter years in Italy, travelling incessantly. Mary’s husband William died in Florence after only 3 days of illness in 1860. In her memoirs there is an interesting exchange of very moving letters from that time. Mary began her memoirs in a notebook dated 1859 when she was 79 years old. She wrote:

“My life has been domestic and quiet. I have no events to record that could interest the public. My only motive in writing it, is to show my country women that self education is possible under the most unfavourable and even discouraging circumstances”. In her eighty-ninth year she wrote “Age has not abated my zeal for the emancipation of my sex from the unreasonable prejudice too prevalent in Great Britain against a literary and scientific education for women”, and she drove home the point by praising the French and even the Russians for granting degrees to women.  This was at a time when some so-called scientists could proclaim that education made women both physically and morally unfit for motherhood, Mary Somerville the wife, mother and devout Christian was honoured by the leading scientific societies of Europe.

In the spring of 1872, she was writing the final pages. She was living in Naples during a fierce eruption of Vesuvius. She describes the volcanic activity with the keen eye of a naturalist, the frosted silver of the smoke and steam, the darkness, the noise of the mountain roaring. She watched Vesuvius from the windows of a hotel at Santa Lucia, immediately opposite the mountain. She then moved with her two daughters to a cheerful apartment close to the sea in Sorrento. In the early hours of Friday 29th November 1872 Mary Somerville died peacefully in her sleep. Advanced years impaired neither her serenity nor her intellect and Mary’s final words in the published memoir were

“The Blue Peter has been long flying at my foremast, and now that I am in my 92nd year I must soon expect the signal for sailing …”

The Morning Post carried the obituary on 2 December 1872. They stated, “Whatever difficulty we might experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in choosing a king of science, there could be no question whatever as to the queen of science.” Perhaps the greatest memorial to her can be found at Oxford University. Somerville College founded in 1879 to provide an opportunity for women to gain a higher education, At that time women were excluded from membership of the University. The name Somerville was chosen in honour of a formidable role model.