Dreaming in Code by Emily Arnold McCully

Although her controlling mother stinted on emotional nurturing, she did give Lovelace a far more rigorous education than most girls of her time were allowed. Dreaming in Code progresses chronologically from Lovelace’s birth in late 1815 (to a domineering mother and poet Lord Byron, the “titled, handsome, reckless, and irresistible” father whom she never knew) to her painful death from cancer in 1852. The life of this forward-thinking scientist is brought to light for young readers in Emily Arnold McCully’s fascinating biography Dreaming in Code.

Two centuries before computers became ubiquitous, a brilliant young British woman named Ada Lovelace imagined an “engine” that could process information much like today’s computers do. End matter includes a summary of Lovelace’s notes to the publication of Babbage’s signature work, notes, bibliography, glossary, and index, as well as an 1878 document explaining why a scientific society would withhold their financial support of Babbage’s invention – and thereby relegate Ada Lovelace to footnotes for the next century.

Likewise, McCully is precise in her evaluation of Lovelace’s technological contributions: “Her idea that the engine could do more than compute, that numbers were symbols and could represent other concepts, is what makes Babbage’s engine a proto-computer.” The eminently readable text moves swiftly, and portrait reproductions included throughout underscore the polished society in which nineteenth-century sciences flourished. There’s no overt attempt at melodrama, but the convincing characterization of Lady Byron (who fashioned “a career out of having suffered at Lord Byron’s hands, while at the same time basking in the aura of his fame”), Ada’s admission that she’d fallen out of love with William Lovelace and didn’t really like children and her laudanum-induced erratic behavior make her a heroine worthy of fiction.

Here McCully offers middle-schoolers a biography at once more nuanced about Lovelace’s enduring contribution to computer development and vastly more involving about the domestic dramas that marked her life with her controlling mother, her supportive but ultimately unloved husband, and her largely ignored children. STEM education has spurred curricular interest in Ada Byron Lovelace, and much of it has recently emerged in picture-book format.

★ The Bulletin for the Center for Children’s Books

Dreaming in Code by Emily Arnold McCully