The First Trip Abroad

Abstract

On 17 July 1817 Dr. and Mrs. Somerville, their four-and-half-year old daughter and her maid, and Somerville’s only brother, Samuel Charters Somerville (1776–1823), Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, sailed by packet from Dover to Calais. It was Mary Somerville’s first trip abroad and it would leave her, bad sailor though she always was, with an incurable taste for travel. In the initial weeks of their travels she kept a journal,¹ faithfully recording their activities in some detail as well as noting her impressions of sights and people, snatches of conversations, judgements and opinions, and much factual information. It clearly conveys her astonishment and delight — occasionally shock and disapproval — at foreign scenes and foreign customs. Hers is a fresh, acute and observing eye, and the diary gives one of the most detailed accounts yet available of the reception of British visitors by the Parisian scientific community in 1817. Entries cease after a few weeks, but a number of letters written by the travellers and some rough notes made by Mrs. Somerville remain in the Somerville Collection to continue an account of their journey and to illustrate her capacity to grow, adapt and change. The Mary Somerville who left Dover in mid-summer 1817 was intelligent but provincial, satisfied with things Scottish or English. The woman who returned to London in 1818 was far more cultivated and cosmopolitan.