User Experience The Final Chapter
Whew! I don’t know about you but I’m off to bed with a snifter of Armagnac! But not before I gift you with the following NOTE:
The fate of Thomas Carlyle’s first draft of The History of the French Revolution, Part 1, is one of the most hilarious dreadful tragedies every to happen to somebody else. Neither Charles Dickens or Charles Babbage was responsible– it was that most moral of men, John Stuart Mill:
Well, one night about three weeks ago, we sat at tea, and Mill’s short rap was heard at the door. Jane rose to welcome him; but he stood there unresponsive, pale, the very picture of despair; said, half articulately gasping, that she must go down and speak to “Mrs Taylor” (his Platonic inamorata); with whom Jane fancied he must have at length run off, and so was come, before setting out for the Devil, to take solemn leave of us. Happily, no;—and yet unhappily! After some considerable additional gasping, I learned from Mill this fact: that my poor Manuscript, all except some four tattered leaves, was annihilated! He had left it out (too carelessly); it had been taken for wastepaper: and so five months of as tough labour as I could remember of, were as good as vanished, gone like a whiff of smoke.— There never in my life had come upon me any other accident of much moment; but this I could not but feel to be a sore one. The thing was lost, and perhaps worse; for I had not only forgotten all the structure of it, but the spirit it was written with was past; only the general impression seemed to remain, and the recollection that I was on the whole well satisfied with that, and could now hardly hope to equal it. Mill whom I had to comfort and speak peace to remained injudiciously enough till almost midnight.
I should ALSO add an interesting fact, which I shall certainly work into the next draft, that George may be a very silly title for a book but it’s a fine name for a planet– the (arguably unfortunately named) Uranus was named ‘George’ (after the King, to be sure) by Herschel (father of Babbage’s close friend by the by) on its discovery in 1781, and so it was called until 1850.
Goodnight!
