Caroline Herschel is usually thought of as a relatively unimportant appendage to her more famous brother William, whose revolutionary astronomical work included discovering the planet Uranus, hypothesising that nebulae are composed of stars and developing a theory of stellar evolution. Claire Brock is determined to show that Caroline Herschel was an important scientist in her own right. Brock works almost entirely from primary sources, mostly Herschel's own autobiographies and letters, to establish what Herschel's life was really like.
Brock is a literary academic, a lecturer in the English department at the University of Leicester, and has written a prize-winning article on the Victorian scientist Mary Somerville. There's a pervasive, well-justified feminist tone through The Comet Sweeper, especially when Brock describes Herschel's Cinderella-like early decades with her mother.
Caroline Herschel was born in 1750 in Hanover, into a musical family. Despite the intellect and determination which Herschel later used to detect nebulae and comets in the heavens, her mother was apparently determined to keep her as an unpaid, overworked domestic worker, virtually a slave. In 1772, her brother William rescued her from drudgery by taking her to Bath in England, where he had become a professional musician. He trained her as a soloist, and she performed publicly in oratorios and concerts with him as conductor. However, as William become increasingly obsessed with astronomy, his interest in his own musical career - and his sister's - faded.
Industrious Caroline threw herself into helping her brother in his astronomical work. As well as recording William's observations, she was soon grinding and polishing telescope mirrors and observing the skies by night as an 'assistant astronomer', using horizontal movements to 'sweep for comets'. In her own right, she found three new nebulae in 1783 and eight comets from 1786 to 1797, while she also spent years in the slow, painstaking work of cataloguing nebulae. In 1798, after much calculation, she presented to the Royal Society a Catalogue of Stars which provided detailed additions and corrections to John Flamsteed's Historia Coelestis Britannica.
Caroline Herschel's hard work earned her not only a stipend from King George III and an international reputation, but also the highest accolades ever awarded, at that time, to a woman from the scientific community: a Gold Medal and Honorary Membership of the Astronomical Society of London.
