Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • December 19, 2016

Dec. 8,1853.  Last night we had the first meeting of the class of elocution.  It was very pleasant, but my deficiency of ear was never more apparent to myself . . .I practised {sic.} after I came home, with the family as audience.  H. says my ear is competent only to vulgar hearing, and I cannot appreciate nice distinctions . . . . Coloring I might have been good in, for I do think my eyes are better than those of any one I know.


Maria Mitchell did seem to have a problem with her ears.  When in Europe, she attended the opera as everyone who travelled throughout Europe would do – it was not just part of the visit but also of the education that resulted from a European trip.  The issue was that she was tone deaf and try as she might, she could never appreciate or enjoy the opera.  It did not stop her from trying though!  And I can see where the process of elocution might be difficult as well and the comments that “H.” (her youngest brother, Henry) makes to her are somewhat understandable – she doesn’t hear the difference.


Her feelings about color – and having better eyes – VERY true!  Not just because she was an astronomer or natural scientist – she was a natural observer and incredibly observant.  You’d be surprise at what people do NOT notice – but not Maria!  Which of course made her an even better scientist!


JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • August 24, 2026
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Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • August 17, 2026
August 19 {1857}. There are four great men whose haunts I mean to seek, and on whose footsteps I mean to stand: Newton, Shakespeare, Milton, and Johnson. To-day I told the driver to take me to St. Martin’s, where the guide-book says that Newton lived. He put me down at the Newton Hotel, but I looked in vain to its top to see anything like an observatory. I went into a wine-shop near, and asked a girl, who was pouring out a dram, in which house Newton lived. She pointed, not to the hotel, but to the house next to a church, and said, “that’s it – don’t you see a place on the top? That’s where he used to study nights.” It is a little, oblong-shaped observatory, built apparently of wood, and blackened by age . . . .” Blackened no doubt by the wood ash and soot found in the air throughout over-crowded nineteenth century London. We always think about London being very foggy in the nineteenth century but frankly a lot of it was wood and coal ash as the nineteenth century grew older, particularly as factories developed and belched all of that into the air – think Sherlock Holmes in the 1880s. But Maria Mitchell, while starting in Europe as a young woman’s chaperone, also knew that this tour of Europe was a great learning experience – the equivalent of a college education she could not have. Doors were thrown open to her around Europe – in particular at all of the observatories that dotted the continent. She was not just well-known – she was famous. JNLF
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