‘The Comet Sweeper’ by Claire Brock

This was a really interesting biography, but not in all honesty a very well-written one. Dating from 2007, it is quite brief and repeats a lot of points, while never presenting the full picture of its subject’s remarkable ninety-eight year long life that is clearly well-deserved.

Thanks to a bout of childhood typhus, Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) was tiny – just four feet and three inches tall – and only had sight in one eye, but she would go on to make extraordinary good use of that eye. She was born in Hanover, her father being a self-taught oboist who became a military bandmaster, but was himself sickly for much of his life. She was one of eight children.

Because her older sister married when she was quite young, Caroline, was brought up to be an efficient housekeeper and was not given the formal education that her brothers received. One of them, William Herschel, like his father became a talented musician who dabbled in composition, and it was these skills that took him to England as a young man where he settled in Bath and started to make a reasonable living. In 1772, following their father’s death and knowing of his sister’s deep unhappiness with her life of household drudgery, he invited her to join him and another brother with a view to becoming a professional singer. She did so and both siblings developed solid careers in music while also running a small millinery shop that did not ultimately succeed.

They were, however, also both accomplished amateur astronomers, and it would be in this field that they would go on to find fame, and to rather less an extent, fortune.

William was a great innovator in the design of telescopes, and his creations enabled both he and Caroline to start ‘sweeping’ the skies on clear nights, looking for new celestial bodies to catalogue. They had complementary personalities in many ways. William was passionate and ambitious, Caroline more reserved and meticulous, so they made an excellent partnership. She assisted him and, at least to start with was as much his housekeeper and secretary as a scientist in her own right.

The discovery of Uranus was William’s big breakthrough and it earned him a paid post as Court Astronomer to George III. The siblings then moved to Windsor and subsequently to Slough, Catherine living alone after William’s marriage in 1788. Over a lengthy period, thanks to diligent nightly telescopic sweeping, Caroline mapped and catalogued the sky at night, discovering eight new comets in the process. Her work was published in her own name, resulting in her being provided with a pension (effectively a salary) from the government and making her Britain’s first ever paid female government official.

When she was seventy two, William died, and she retired to Hanover, after which formal accolades and prizes steadily began to accumulate. She never quite managed to achieve the financial independence she craved and was always unhappy about the way that his achievements were reckoned greater than her own.

Caroline kept diaries and wrote a lot of letters, as well as two volumes of autobiography, so there is plenty of material available on which to build a fine biographical study. Sadly though, I fear that this is not that book. It is not written particularly engagingly and, at least for my liking, says much less about astronomy, the leaps and bounds it made in this period, and, particularly, how discoveries such as those of William and Catherine Herschel shaped later thinking about religion and earth’s place in the cosmos. It is respectful, matter-of fact and strong on Caroline’s domestic life. But it is limited in its discussion of the wider scientific and social context which were developing in so many exciting new ways during her lifetime.

There are I believe two other, more recent books which present a fuller picture, largely because they give a joint account of the lives of both William and Caroline and treat them – as they properly should be – as partners who assisted and complemented one another. One is ‘Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel’ by Michael Hoskin (2011), the other is the celebrated history published by Richard Holmes in 2009 entitled ‘The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science’ which puts their achievements into the context of their times.