Page:Millicent Fawcett - Some Eminent Women.djvu/32

 Caroline Herschel was, indeed, a fine example of what devoted love can do to elevate the character and develop the natural capacity of the understanding.

She was born in Hanover on the 16th March 1750, the youngest but one of six children. Her exceptionally long life of nearly ninety-eight years closed in January 1848. Her memory, therefore, included the earthquake of Lisbon, the whole French Revolution, the meteor-like rise and fall of Napoleon, and all the history of modern Europe to the eve of the socialistic outbreak of 1848. Her family life, before she left Germany, was of the narrowest possible kind. She had only one sister, seventeen years older than herself; and as Sophia Herschel married early, Caroline became the only girl in her family circle, and to the full was she kept to those exclusively feminine pursuits and occupations which the proprieties of Germany at that time enforced. Her mother appears to have been enthusiastically opposed to the education of girls. Her father wished to give her a good education, but the mother insisted that nothing of the kind should be attempted. How she learned to read and write we are not told in the biography written by her grand-niece, Mrs. J. Herschel. These accomplishments were by no means common among German women of the humbler middle class a hundred years ago. She did, however, acquire them, in spite of her mother's decree that two or three months' training in the art of making household linen was all the education that Caroline required. Her father, who was a professional musician himself, wished to teach her music, but could only do so by stealth, or by taking advantage of half an hour now and then, when his wife was in an exceptionally good temper. In a letter, written when she was eighty-eight years old, Caroline recalls these furtive hours stolen from the serious occupations of her life, which then consisted in sewing, "ornamental needlework, knitting, plaiting hair, and stringing beads and bugles." "It was my lot," she writes, "to be the Cinderella of the family.… I could never find time for improving myself in many things I knew, and which,