CHAPTER VI - CAROLINE HERSCHEL

Summary

Caroline Lucretia Herschel was born at Hanover, March 16th, 1750, and was thus more than eleven years younger than the brother with whose name hers is inseparably associated. She remembered the panic caused by the earthquake of 1755, and her experience barely fell short of the political earthquake of 1848; but the fundamental impressions of her long life were connected with “minding the heavens.”

She was of little account in her family, except as a menial. Her father, indeed, a man of high character and cultivated mind, thought much of her future, and wished to improve her prospects by giving her some accomplishments. So he taught her to play the violin well enough to take part in concerted music. But her instruction was practicable only when her mother was out of the way, or in a particularly good humour. Essentially a “Hausfrau,” Anna Ilse had no sympathy with aspirations. She was hard-working and well-meaning, but narrow and inflexible, and she kept her second daughter strictly to household drudgery. Her literary education, accordingly, got no farther than reading and writing; even the third “R” was denied to her. But she was carefully trained in plain sewing and knitting, and supplied her four brothers with stockings from so early an age that the first specimen of her workmanship touched the ground while she stood upright finishing the toe!