Memoir and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel
9781465622051
311 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Caroline Lucretia Herschel was born at Hanover on the 16th of March, 1750. She was the eighth child and fourth daughter of Isaac Herschel, by Anna Ilse Moritzen, to whom he was married in August, 1732. The family consisted of ten children, four of whom died in early childhood. A memorandum in the handwriting of Isaac Herschel, transcribed by his daughter in the original German at the beginning of her Recollections, traces the family back to the early part of the seventeenth century, about which time, it appears that three brothers Herschel left Moravia on account of their religion (which was Protestant), and became possessors of land in Saxony. One of these brothers, Hans, was a brewer at Pirna, a little town two miles from Dresden, and the father of two sons, one of whom, Abraham by name, was born in 1651, was the father of the above-mentioned Isaac, and the grandfather of Caroline Lucretia Herschel. Abraham Herschel was employed in the royal gardens at Dresden, he received commissions from various quarters on account of his taste and skill as a landscape gardener. Of his four children, Eusebius, the eldest, appears to have kept up little or no intercourse with his family after the father’s death in 1718. The second child, Apollonia, married a landed proprietor, Herr von Thümer. Benjamin, the second son, died in his third year; and Isaac, the youngest, was born 14th of January, 1707, and was thus an orphan at the early age of eleven years. His parents wished him to be a gardener like his father, but a passionate love of music led him to take every opportunity of practising on the violin, besides studying music under a hautboy-player in the royal band. When he was about one and twenty he resolved to seek his fortune, and went to Berlin, where the style of hautboy playing was so little to his taste that he soon left it, and went to Potsdam, where he studied for a year under the celebrated Cappell Meister Pabrïch, the means for so doing being supplied by his mother and sister; his brother, as he quaintly remarks, contenting himself with writing him letters in praise of the virtue of economy! In July, 1731, he went to Brunswick, and in August to Hanover, where he at once obtained an engagement as hautboy-player in the band of the Guards, and in the August following he married as above stated.
