The Comet Sweeper: Caroline Herschel's Astronomical Ambition

  • Claire Brock
Icon Books: May 2007. 208 pp. £9.99 1840467207 | ISBN: 1-840-46720-7
Caroline Herschel discovered comets and nebulae. Credit: BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

Dava Sobel and Patricia Fara have proved that there is an audience for popular yet scholarly stories of the adventures of scientists at the beginning of the modern age. Claire Brock's brief study of the astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) intends to please these same readers. The easy prose of The Comet Sweeper is laced with quotations from Herschel's two autobiographies and her astronomical diaries. All the important facts of this interesting woman's life — from her youth in the German principality of Hanover in the late eighteenth century to her work with her astronomer brother, William — are here. Brock describes Herschel's considerable accomplishments, which included the discovery of comets and nebulae and the publication of two extensive astronomical guides: a revised edition of John Flamsteed's Historiae Coelestis, a catalogue of the 'fixed stars' and the standard authority on the heavens, and a catalogue of star clusters and nebulae, a similar listing that she and her brother made from their meticulous nightly sweeps of the sky.

Unfortunately, Brock has an agenda that leads her into some of the pitfalls often encountered by biographers of famous women in history. Brock describes her task as “rehabilitating Caroline Herschel”. She criticizes historians whom she feels acknowledged Herschel's discoveries but did not give proper attention to the astronomer's considerable ambition and desire for “independence”. Brock wants to prove that Herschel was not the dutiful daughter and sister usually portrayed, but an autodidact struggling against the constraints of her day. This leads Brock to overdramatize these constraints, to comb Herschel's personal writings for hints of rebellion and to offer mismatched psychological interpretations.

Herschel was certainly as disadvantaged as any younger sister in a large family — she was one of ten children — of no particular education or rank and with limited financial resources. Disfigured by smallpox as a young child, with no hope of a dowry from her musician father and no gift for women's trades, despite some lessons from a milliner, it was not a cruel mother, as Brock suggests, that left Herschel with little prospect of marriage or respectable employment outside the household. Her brother William must have felt he was providing generously for his unfortunate sibling by bringing her to England to run his household, allowing her to sing with his choir and to copy their musical scores.

Brock acknowledges that Herschel often wrote of her desire to be “useful” and that she defined this utility within the confines of service to her family. When William trained her to become his assistant in his new-found avocation for astronomical observation, he gave her no independence, but he did give her the means to scientific accomplishment and fame. Without William, there would have been no discoveries and no recognition.

The root of the problem with the way Brock has chosen to frame her biography may be that although Herschel indeed deserves her fame, her life was not so unusual for the times. Brock writes that Herschel grew up “exploited and enslaved” by the drudgery of housework. Brock characterizes a father's caution not to expect an offer of marriage as “obviously” having a “devastating impact” on the young girl. European women's history shows us that Herschel was neither enslaved nor devastated but, like other women of accomplishment, made the best of her circumstances. Earlier in the eighteenth century the women of the famous Winkelmann family of Prussian astronomers also had the patience and skill to watch the stars for hours at a time, and to record their observations with care. In this exciting period of early modern science, amateurs, whether female or male, if in the right place at the right time, could make significant contributions to knowledge.

I wish that Brock had let go of the rehabilitation project and focused instead on the richness of Herschel's autobiographies, which she does recognize. They have already been edited by Michael Hoskin, an eminent historian of astronomy, but Brock, with her literary training, has an excellent eye for the vivid quotation. An analysis of the two versions of her past that this remarkable woman created in her old age would make a fascinating double journey from eighteenth-century Hanover to Bath to Windsor, and back to Hanover 50 years later — revealing what Herschel herself chose to illuminate, cloud, or hide altogether.