What's in a name?
The names Graham Hamilton and Ada Reis and a reference to 94 Picadilly were scribbled on the bottom edge of Ludlow's map.
94 Piccadilly was home to the Naval and Military Club, also known as the In and Out due to the bold lettering found on the gate posts. See the map page for 94 Picadilly for more information.
Ada Reis and Graham Hamilton
Ada Reis and Graham Hamilton are both books written by Lady Caroline Lamb, an infamous character who shocked gentle society with her behaviour, particularly her affair with Lord Byron (see later). Lady Caroline wrote three books, Glenarvon was her first, then Graham Hamilton in 1822 and Ada Reis in 1823.
Ada Reis was thought to be a fictionalised version of Byron - he had the same hair. But Ada wasn't his name, rather his title as a pirate captain. In the book, Reis kidnaps his daughter, who is then raised by a witch and betrothed to the Devil. Some seem to think that the daughter led astray by her weird upbringing represents Lady Caroline herself. In the end she repents her sins and goes out into the world to earn forgiveness. Reis remains in the devil's clutches.
Graham Hamilton is about a young man's corruption by society and fall from innocence, resulting in the death of his beloved. As in Ada Reis, forgiveness and happiness is found in goodness and simplicity, not by the protagonist so much as by those around him.
Ada was also Lord Byron's daughter's name, later to become Ada Lovelace (which any respecting computer science student will know actually helped Charles Babbage with his analytical engine - in theory the first ever computer). Her mother was Anne Isabelle Milbanke. Ada's parents married on 2 January 1815 but separated on 16 January 1816, a month after she was born. On 25 April 1816 Lord Byron went abroad and Ada never saw her father again. Lord Byron never returned to England and died in Greece when Ada was eight years old. Lady Byron was given sole custody of her daughter Ada, and she tried everything possible to bring up her child to ensure that she would not become a poet like her father.
Ada, in 1843, married to the Earl of Lovelace and the mother of three children under the age of eight, translated Menabrea's article. When she showed Babbage her translation he suggested that she add her own notes, which turned out to be three times the length of the original article. Letters between Babbage and Ada flew back and forth filled with fact and fantasy. In her article, published in 1843, Lady Lovelace's prescient comments included her predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. She was correct.
Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan is now regarded as the first "computer program." A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defence was named "Ada" in her honour in 1979.
Lady Caroline Lamb
Lady Caroline Lamb was the wife of William Lamb, another Victorian Prime Minister. William's father, Peniston, swapped a house in Piccadilly for one in Whitehall, with the original Grand Old Duke of York, no less. The exchange took place in 1792. The Piccadilly property, Melbourne House, was constructed under the supervision of William's mother, Lady Melbourne.
In 1812, Lady Caroline met Lord Byron at a party and fell madly in love with him. They had a passionate affair, but when Byron ended it, Lady Caroline became obsessed with him, showing up everywhere he went.
Lady Melbourne pushed Lord Byron away from her high-strung daughter-in-law but then brokered his unsuccessful marriage to her niece to try and break his incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta. Lady Caroline thanked her by demonising Lady M in her novel, Glenarvon - in essence a satirical attack on pretty much everyone she had ever met - but she also appears in a more flattering light in Byron's work.
Lady Caroline died January 26, 1828 at Melbourne House aged 42. She is buried at Hatfield.
Other facts:
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Caroline Lamb's aunt whom she reportedly spent much of her childhood with and was very close to, lived in Piccadilly, at Devonshire House.
Lady Caroline and her husband, Lord Melbourne were friendly with Lord and Lady Palmerston, who resided at Cambridge House (No.94)
By strange coincidence, Lady Palmerston, also known as Lady Cowper, was Lord Melbourne's sister, Emily Lamb. So Caroline's sister in law resided at 94 Piccadilly.
Byron also lived in Piccadilly, or in the area anyway, at 13 Piccadilly Terrace.
Lord Byron is a vampire - a theory going around...
Lady Caroline Lamb went out with Byron. He dumped her because she found out his dark secret. She couldn't tell people because she'd be thrown out of society, so she wrote a book called Glenarvon about a vampire who was actually Byron. After all, she did describe him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know".
But...
The whole Byron is a vampire thing was started by a Doctor called John Polidori. Him, Byron, Percy Shelley, the soon to be Mrs Shelley (Mary) and her sister were staying in a villa in Switzerland and Byron set the challenge for them all to write a horror novel. Mary Shelley created the beginnings of Frankenstein and Byron started, them abandoned a vampire tale. Polidori and Byron fell out during their stay and when they had parted ways Polidori 'borrowed' Byron's idea for a vampire story.
He gave the vampire lead the name 'Lord Ruthven' which was taken from the lead character of Lady Caroline Lamb's novel Glenarvon. Lord Ruthvens character in Lamb's book was a thinly disguised fictional version of Lord Byron at his worst and was Lady Caroline Lamb's way of getting back at Byron for him ending their affair. Poldoris novel is one of the first of the more modern 'Dracula' types of the Vampire novel.
If you have any more info on this, or other ghost stories connected to the Picadilly area, see what we have discovered on the Picadilly map pages already, and post any additional info you may have on my message board.
