Commemorative plaque in SkibbereenNOTE: I have rewritten this post and substantially updated it. See, from Sept 2023, Storm Agnes: Agnes Clerke of Skibbereen and Nineteenth Century Astronomy.
What follows is the original post, from 2015.
Wandering around Skibbereen, I came across a plaque on a once-imposing pink building – it showed two women, the Clerke sisters, who had grown up in the house. Intrigued, I searched for more information and what I found astonished me.
Bridge Street, Skibbereen, 19th Century. National Library CollectionThe sisters were tutored by their mother to a high proficiency in music, Latin and Greek. (Catherine played Irish music on the harp and retained her ability to entertain well into her 80s.) Insatiably curious, they devoured knowledge and by 15 Agnes had already begun to write a history of astronomy – a book that would later count as her magnum opus. While Ellen and Aubrey distinguished themselves mainly (although not exclusively) in literature and law, Agnes went on to become one of the foremost science writers of her day. Devoted to each other, none of the siblings ever married and the family lived together in harmony and supported each other’s endeavours to the end.
The depth and scope of Agnes’s scholarship is awe-inspiring. To read through her History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century (available online through Project Gutenberg) is to see a brilliant mind at work. Her purpose in writing it was to embody an attempt to enable the ordinary reader to follow, with intelligent interest, the course of modern astronomical inquiries, and to realize (so far as it can at present be realized) the full effect of the comprehensive change in the whole aspect, purposes, and methods of celestial science introduced by the momentous discovery of spectrum analysis. This IS the rocket science of her generation, encompassing chemistry, physics, mathematics, history of scientific thought, cosmology, the most up to date observation and measurement techniques – in short, the disciplines that made up the emerging science of astrophysics.
The Clerke CraterRecently, however, Agnes has been paid a high honour. A crater on the moon, near the Apollo 17 landing site, has been named the Clerke Crater by the International Astronomical Union.
Huggins memoirMargaret Huggins penned a small memoir about Agnes and Ellen Clerke after their deaths. However the real authority on Agnes’s life and scholarship was Mary Brück, a fellow astronomer, yet another Irish woman (from Meath) and author of Agnes Mary Clerke and the Rise of Astrophysics.
Brück biographyOf Agnes, she said: This remarkable woman, educated solely within her own family and through her own private studies, not only kept abreast of astronomical progress world-wide but also had a genuine understanding of the matters on which she reported and the gift of communicating them through her fluent and prolific writings. Her books – in particular her Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century, first published in 1885 and reprinted over almost twenty years – are treasured by historians and by amateur lovers of astronomy alike as sources of reliable and enjoyable information on that period.
I loved her description of Agnes at the height of her powers: Agnes Clerke in her sixties had become a sort of mother figure among astronomers, tactful, kind, helpful.
Ellen and Aubrey deserve their own posts (now written, see From Skibbereen to the Moon Part 2: Ellen and Aubrey Clerke). However, it does seem apt to close this piece on Agnes with a quote from one of Ellen’s poems, Night’s Soliloquy:
…are not hidden things
Reveal’d to science when with piercing sight
She looks beneath the shadow of my wings
To fathom space and sound the infinite?
