William and Caroline Herschel by Michael Hoskin

Author:Michael Hoskin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

In Bath William arranged for the disc for the new reflector to be cast from Michell’s metal. William then ground the disc and polished the resulting mirror, presumably in the house to which Alexander had moved after the death of his wife. William tried the new telescope for the first time in August 1799, before the polishing was complete, and was delighted. With it he could single-handedly “get any object in less than half a minute”.13 But his glory days as an observer were drawing to a close, and eventually, in 1814, he sold the 10-ft to the brother of Napoleon.

Sion Hill proved to be a little too far from the centre of town, and so from midsummer 1800 he took a year’s lease on a house in Little Stanhope Street, just around the corner from his old haunts in New King Street. The property—which neither William nor Mary had yet seen—had been empty for some weeks, and their possessions were moved there from Sion Hill without supervision. Much needed to be done to make the house fit for habitation, and as usual Caroline was the answer. William decided that she should uproot herself from the Windsor area and move permanently to Bath, to look after the house there when he was in Slough, and to come to Slough as and when he and Mary went to Bath. Occasionally William and Caroline would have to be in Slough together, when William was minded to have some sweeps with the 20-ft, but this work was drawing to a close.

At the end of June, therefore, a reluctant Caroline took formal leave of her friends at Windsor Castle and moved out of her lodgings, and soon she was on the coach to Bath. With the help of a servant she got William’s house into some sort of order, and then she was ready for deskwork to be sent to her, from Slough or from the printers in London.

In mid-November William summoned her to Slough, for he and Mary were planning to spend two or three weeks in Bath. Then, if the weather was suitable for observing, he would return, “that I may have a few sweeps with you before you go back to Bath”.14 But it seems that, once in Little Stanhope Street, William and Mary decided they had made a serious error in taking a year’s lease of the house, for they promptly shipped Caroline’s effects back to Slough, and never occupied the house again except for a brief visit by William in the summer of 1801 to wind up his affairs.

This sudden change of plan left Caroline without a home, but fortunately her nephew George Griesbach, eldest of Sophia’s five sons all of whom were by now musicians in Queen Charlotte’s band at Windsor Castle, had a couple of rooms to spare. But this could be only a temporary arrangement, as it meant that Caroline was two miles from the observatory, an awkward distance in the daytime and an impossible one if she was needed at night.

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