The Difference Engine

  All swear such pleasure they ne’er had,

  As the Grand Panmelodium Polka.

  First cock up your right leg so,

  Balance on your left great toe,

  Stamp your heels and off you go,

  The Grand Panmelodium Polka.

  Quadrilles and waltzes all give way,

  Machine-made music bears the sway.

  The chimney-sweeps on the first of May,

  In London dance the Polka.

  If a pretty girl you meet,

  With sparkling eyes and rosy cheek,

  She’ll say, young man we’ll have a treat,

  If you can dance the Polka.

  Professors swarm in every street,

  To hear the Panmelodium sweet,

  And every friend you chance to meet,

  Asks if you dance the Polka.

  And so the row-de-dow we dance,

  And in short skirts and brass-heels prance,

  Ladies won’t you spare a glance,

  For the boys what spin the Polka.

  The Tatler

  We learn with mingled regret and amazement of the recent departure, aboard the Great Eastern, of the well-liked and many-talented Mr. Laurence Oliphant—author, journalist, diplomat, geographer, and friend of the Royal Family—for America, with the stated intention of residing in the so-called Susquehanna Phalanstery established by Messrs. Coleridge and Wordsworth, thereby to pursue the Utopian doctrines espoused by these worthy expatriates!

  —“ ’ROUND TOWN,” a column, September 12, 1860.

  A London Playbill, 1866

  THE GARRICK THEATRE, Whitechapel, Newly Rebuilt and Refurbished, Under the Management of J. J. TOBIAS, Esq., presents

  The First Nights of a New Kinotropic Drama Monday, Nov. 13 and During the Week

  The performance will commence with (FIRST TIME!) an entirely new national, local, characteristic, metropolitan, melodramatic, kinotropic drama of the day, in five acts, correctly exhibiting modem life and manners in innumerable novel and interesting phases, called the

  CROSSROADS OF LIFE!!

  or

  THE CLACKERS OF LONDON

  The Groundwork of the drama founded on the celebrated play, “Les Fils de Vaucanson,” now attracting the attention of all France, and applied to the circumstances and realities of the present moment.

  With kinotropic scenery by MR. JJ TOBIAS and Assistants

  The New Flash Medley Orchestra, led by MR. MONTGOMERY

  The Action of the Piece arranged by MR. CJ SMITH

  The Dresses by MRS. HAMPTON and MISS BAILEY

  The Whole Produced Under the Direction of MR. JJ TOBIAS

  Dramatis Personae

  Mark Riddley, alias Fox Skinner, (a swell cove, and King of the London Clackers) ……. MR. H.L. MARSTON.

  Mr. Dorrington (a wealthy Liverpool Merchant, on a visit to London) ………………. MR. J. ROMER.

  Frank Danvers (a British Naval Officer, just arrived from the Indies) ………………. MR. WM. BIRD.

  Robert Danvers (his younger brother, a ruined roué, pigeoned by the clackers) …………. MR. L. MELVIN.

  Mr. Hawksworth Shabner (Principal Proprietor of a West-End Clacking-Hall, Bill-Discounter, and Anythingarian where there is Anything to be Got) … MR. P. WILLIAMS.

  Bob Yorkner (a Duffer, tired of the Lay) … MR. W. JONES.

  Ned Brindle (the Magsman, a half and-half cove) ……………………. MR C. AUBREY.

  Tom Fogg, alias Old Deady, alias The Animal, (a laudanum fiend suffering under delirium-tremens) MR. A. CORENO.

  Joe Onion, alias The Crocodile, (a bully-rock, and creature of Shabner’s) …………… MR. G. VELASCO.

  Dickey Smith (the Wakeful Bird, a young Engine-clerk in no ways particklar, pecking out a living as best he can) ………………. MR. G. MASKELL.

  Ikey Bates (Landlord of Rat’s Castle, proprietor of two-penny dabs and a scandalous bagatelle board, having cut the bumblepuppy as too low!) ……… MR. GOTOBED.

  Waiter at the Cat-and-Bagpipes Tavern … MR. SMITHSON.

  The Bow Street Special Inspector ……. MR. FRANKS.

  Louisa Truehart (the Victim of an ill-requited attachment) ……………. MISS CAROLINE BARNETT.

  Charlotte Willers (a young lady with her cat from the country) ………………. MISS MARTHA WELLS.

  DRESS CIRCLE, 3S. BOXES, 2S. PIT, 5D. gallery 2D. BOX OFFICE OPEN DAILY FROM TEN O’CLOCK UNTIL FIVE.

  A Poem of Farewell

  [Mori Yujo, a samurai and classical scholar of Satsuma Province, wrote the following ceremonial poem upon his son’s departure for England, in 1854. It is translated from Sinicized Japanese.]

  My child rides the unfathomable deep,

  In pursuit of noble ambition;

  Far must he sail—ten thousand leagues—

  Outpacing the breezes of spring.

  Some say that East and West

  Have naught in common;

  But I say the same heaven

  Overarches both.

  His own life he risks, on command of his han.

  Braving great danger to learn from far places;

  For family’s sake, he spares no effort,

  Seeking for wisdom in face of great hardship.

  He travels far beyond

  The fabled rivers of China;

  His scholarly labors shall someday

  Bear fruit in splendid achievement.

  A Letter Home

  As always, I searched that day for land, in all four directions, but could still find none. How melancholy it was! Then by chance, with the Captain’s permission, I climbed up one of the masts. From the great height, with sails and smokestack far below me, I was amazed to make out the coast of Europe—a mere hair’s-breadth of green, above the watery horizon. I shouted down to Matsumura: “Come up! Come up!” And up he came, very swiftly and bravely.

  Together atop the mast, we gazed upon Europe. “Look!” I told him. “Here is our first proof that the world is really round! While we were standing down there on deck we could not see a thing; but up here, land is distinctly visible. This is proof that the surface of the sea is curved! And if the sea is curved, why, then, so is the whole earth!”

  Matsumura exclaimed, “It’s fantastic—it’s just the way you say! The Earth indeed is round! Our first real proof!”

  —MORI ARINORI, 1854.

  Modus

  It seemed that Her Ladyship had been ill-served by the Paris publicists, for the lecture-hall, modest as it was, was less than half-filled.

  Dark folding-seats, in neat columnar rows, were precisely dotted by the shiny pates of balding mathematicians. Here and there among the savants sat shifty-eyed French clackers in middle-age, the summer linen of their too-elegant finery looking rather past the mode. The last three rows were filled by a Parisian women’s club, fanning themselves in the summer heat and chattering quite audibly, for they had long since lost the thread of Her Ladyship’s discourse.

  Lady Ada Byron turned a page, touched a gloved finger to her bifocal pince-nez. For some minutes, a large green bottle-fly had been circling her podium. Now it broke the intricacy of its looping flight to alight on the bulging archipelago of Her Ladyship’s padded, lace-trimmed shoulder. Lady Ada took no apparent notice of the attentions of this energetic vermin, but continued on gamely, in her accented French.

  The Mother said:

  “Our lives would be greatly clarified if human discourse could be interpreted as the exfoliation of a deeper formal system. One would no longer need ponder the grave ambiguities of human speech, but could judge the validity of any sentence by reference to a fixed and finitely describable set of rules and axioms. It was the dream of Leibniz to find such a system, the Characteristica Universalis.…

  “And yet the execution of the so-called Modus Program demonstrated that any formal system must be both incomplete and unable to establish its own consistency. There is no finite mathematical way to express the property of ‘truth,’ The tr
ansfinite nature of the Byron Conjectures were the ruination of the Grand Napoleon; the Modus Program initiated a series of nested loops, which, though difficult to establish, were yet more difficult to extinguish. The program ran, yet rendered its Engine useless! It was indeed a painful lesson in the halting abilities of even our finest ordinateurs.

  “Yet I do believe, and must assert most strongly, that the Modus technique of self-referentiality will someday form the bedrock of a genuinely transcendent meta-system of calculatory mathematics. The Modus has proven my Conjectures, but their practical exfoliation awaits an Engine of vast capacity, one capable of iterations of untold sophistication and complexity.

  “Is it not strange that we mere mortals can talk about a concept—truth—that is infinitely complicated? And yet—is not a closed system the essence of the mechanical, the unthinking? And is not an open system the very definition of the organic, of life and thought?

  “If we envision the entire System of Mathematics as a great Engine for proving theorems, then we must say, through the agency of the Modus, that such an Engine lives, and could indeed prove its own life, should it develop the capacity to look upon itself. The Lens for such a self-examination is of a nature not yet known to us; yet we know that it exists, for we ourselves possess it.

  “As thinking beings, we may envision the universe, though we have no finite way to sum it up. The term, ‘universe,’ is not in fact a rational concept, though it is something of such utter immediacy that no thinking creature can escape a pressing knowledge of it, and indeed, an urge to know its workings, and the nature of one’s own origin within it.

  “In his final years, the great Lord Babbage, impatient of the limits of steam-power, sought to harness the lightning in the cause of calculation. His elaborate system of ‘resistors’ and ‘capacitors,’ while demonstrative of the most brilliant genius, remains fragmentary, and is yet to be constructed. Indeed, it is often mocked by the undisceming as an old man’s hobby-horse. But history shall prove its judge, and then, I profoundly hope, my own Conjectures will transcend the limits of abstract concept and enter the living world.”

  Applause was thin and scattered. Ebenezer Fraser, watching from the shelter of the wings, in the shadow of ropes and sandbags, felt his heart sink. But at least it was over. She was leaving the podium to join him.

  Fraser opened the nickeled catches of Her Ladyship’s traveling-bag. Lady Ada dropped her manuscript within it, followed it with her kid gloves and her tiny ribboned hat.

  “I think they understood me!” she said brightly. “It sounds quite elegant in French, Mr. Fraser, does it not? A very rational language, French.”

  “What next, milady? The hotel?”

  “My dressing-room,” she said. “This heat is rather fatiguing.… Will you hail the gurney for me? I’ll join you presently.”

  “Certainly, milady.” Fraser, the bag in one hand, his sword-cane in another, led Lady Ada to the cramped little dressing-room, opened the door, bowed her within, set her bag at her neatly slippered feet, and closed the door firmly. Within the room, he knew, Her Ladyship would seek the consolation of the silvered brandy-flask she had hidden in the left-hand lower drawer of her dressing-table—wrapped, with pathetic duplicity, in a shroud of tissue-paper.

  Fraser had taken the liberty of providing seltzer-water in a bucket of ice. He hoped she would water the liquor a bit.

  He left the lecture-hall by a rear door, then circled the building warily, from old habit. His bad eye ached below the patch, and he made some use of the stag-handled sword-cane. As he had fully expected, he saw nothing resembling trouble.

  There was also no sign of the chauffeur for Her Ladyship’s hired gurney. Doubtless the frog rascal was nursing a bottle somewhere, or chatting-up a soubrette. Or he might, perhaps, have mistaken his instructions, for Fraser’s French was none of the best. He rubbed his good eye, examining the traffic. He would give the fellow twenty minutes, then hail a cab.

  He saw Her Ladyship standing, rather uncertainly, at the lecture-hairs rear door. She had put on a day-bonnet, it seemed—and forgotten her traveling-bag, which was very like her. He hurried, limping, to her side. “This way, milady—the gurney will meet us at the corner.…”

  He paused. It was not Lady Ada.

  “I believe you mistake me, sir,” the woman said in English, and lowered her eyes, and smiled. “I am not your Queen of Engines. I am merely an admirer.”

  “I beg your pardon, madame,” Fraser said.

  The woman glanced down shyly at the intricate Jacquard patterning of her white-on-white skirt of fine muslin. She wore a jutting French bustle, and a stiff high-shouldered walking-jacket, trimmed with lace. “Her Ladyship and I are dressed quite alike,” she said, with a wry half-smile. “Her Ladyship must shop at Monsieur Worth’s! That’s quite a tribute to my own taste, sir, n’est-ce pas?”

  Fraser said nothing. A light tingle of suspicion touched him. The woman—a trim little blonde, in her forties perhaps—wore the dress of respectability. Yet there were three gold-banded brilliants on her gloved fingers, and showy little stems of filigreed jade dangled at her delicate earlobes. There was a killing beauty-patch—or a black sticking-plaster—at the corner of her mouth, and her wide blue eyes, for all their look of seasoned innocence, held the gleam of the demi-mondaine—a look that somehow said, I know you, copper.

  “Sir, may I wait for Her Ladyship with you? I hope I will not intrude if I request her autograph.”

  “At the corner,” Fraser nodded. “The gurney.” He offered her his left arm, tucked the sword-cane in the pit of his right, his hand resting easy on the handle. It would not hurt to get a bit of distance down the pavement, before Lady Ada approached; he wanted to watch this woman.

  They stopped at the corner, beneath an angular French gas-lamp. “It’s so good to hear a London voice,” said the woman, coaxingly. “I have lived so long in France that my English has grown quite rusty.”

  “Not at all,” Fraser said. Her voice was lovely.

  “I am Madame Tournachon,” she said, “Sybil Tournachon.”

  “My name is Fraser.” He bowed.

  Sybil Tournachon fidgeted with her kid-skin gloves, as though her palms were perspiring. The day was very hot. “Are you one of her paladins, Mr. Fraser?”

  “I’m afraid I fail to take your meaning, madame,” Fraser said politely. “Do you live in Paris, Mrs. Tournachon?”

  “In Cherbourg,” she said, “but I came all that way, by the morning express, simply to see her speak.” She paused. “I scarcely understood a word she said.”

  “No harm in that, madame,” Fraser said, “neither do I.” He had begun to like her.

  The gurney arrived. The chauffeur, with a bold wink at Fraser, hopped from behind the wheel and whipped a dirty chamois from his pocket. He applied it to the tarnished trim of a scalloped fender, whistling.

  Her Ladyship emerged from the lecture-hall. She had remembered her hand-bag. As she approached, Mrs. Tournachon went a bit pale with excitement, and took a lecture-program from her jacket.

  She was quite harmless.

  “Your Ladyship, may I present Mrs. Sybil Tournachon,” Fraser said.

  “How do you do?” Lady Ada said.

  Mrs. Tournachon curtsied. “Will you sign my program? Please.”

  Lady Ada blinked. Fraser, adroitly, handed her the pen from his notebook. “Of course,” Lady Ada said, taking the paper. “I’m sorry—what was the name?”

  “ ‘To Sybil Tournachon.’ Shall I spell it?”

  “No need,” said Her Ladyship, smiling. “There’s a famous French aeronaut named Tournachon, isn’t there?” Fraser offered his back to the flourish of Her Ladyship’s pen. “A relation of yours, perhaps?”

  “No, Your Highness.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Lady Ada said.

  “They call you Queen of Engines.…” Mrs. Tournachon, smiling triumphantly, plucked the inscribed program from Her Ladyship’s unresisting fingers. “The Queen of
Engines! And you’re just a funny little grey-haired bluestocking!” She laughed. “This lecture-gull you’re running, dearie—does it pay at all well? I do hope it pays!”

  Lady Ada regarded her with unfeigned astonishment.

  Fraser’s grip tightened on the cane. He stepped to the curb, swiftly opened the gurney door.

  “One moment!” The woman tugged with sudden energy at one gloved finger, came up with a gaudy ring. “Your Ladyship—please—I want you to have this!”

  Fraser stepped between them, lowering the cane. “Leave her alone.”

  “No,” Mrs. Tournachon cried, “I’ve heard the tales, I know she needs it.…” She pressed against him, stretching out her arm. “Your Ladyship, please take this! I shouldn’t have wounded your feelings, it was low of me. Please take my gift! Please, I do admire you, I sat through that whole lecture. Please take it, I brought it just for you!” She fell back then, her hand empty, and smiled. “Thank you, Your Ladyship! Good luck to you. I shan’t trouble you again. Au revoir! Bonne chance!”

  Fraser followed Her Ladyship into the gurney, shut the door, rapped the partition. The chauffeur took his post.

  The gurney pulled away.

  “What a queer little personage,” Her Ladyship said. She opened her hand. A fat little diamond gleamed in its filigreed setting. “Who was she, Mr. Fraser?”

  “I should guess an exile, ma’am,” Fraser said. “Very forward of her.”

  “Was it wrong of me to take this?” Her breath smelled of brandy and seltzer. “Not really proper, I suppose. But she would have made a scene, otherwise.” She held the gem up, in a sheet of dusty sunlight through the window. “Look at the size of it! It must be very dear.”

  “Paste, Your Ladyship.”

  Swift as thought, Lady Ada pinched the ring in her fingers like a bit of chalk, and ran the stone along the gurney’s window. There was a thin grating shriek, almost inaudible, and a shining groove appeared across the glass.