Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy, Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Astronomer Royal from 1836–1881

Abstract

DE MORGAN, in a letter to Dr. Hamilton, has humorously described one of the most salient features of Airy's character. “Airy,” he wrote, “is the prince of methodists. My theory is that when he tries his pen on blotting-paper, he makes a duplicate by the pressing machine, files, and indexes it.” This is scarcely an exaggeration, and suggests that every line that Airy wrote; however trivial, found an assigned place in the Greenwich archives. Scarcely any one could have left fuller materials from which a biography could have been constructed; while the genius of order and arrangement that pervaded Airy's life, must have made the task of compilation com paratively simple. The editor tells us that this love of order outlived capacity itself, and that at the close of his life he occasionally exhibited more anxiety to have a letter placed in its proper pigeon-hole, than even to master its contents. In addition to this mass of information which Airy had stored up, he had also written a series of skeleton annals of the Observatory, which, he remarks, unavoidably partook in some measure of the form of biography. It is from these skeleton notes, existing in manuscript, that his eldest surviving son has prepared the present biography. The editor, in the use he has made of this information, has had evidently but one wish—that of placing before the world the public life of a celebrated man, to whom this country is much indebted for hard and conscientious work, and along lines which sometimes lay utterly outside his official duties. Mr. Wilfrid Airy is content to be merely a commentator, to keep in the background, and to let Sir George tell his own tale. The result of this devotion to the memory of his father, is to exhibit everywhere in the clearest possible manner what Airy did, and to what extent he can command our gratitude; but it prevents the introduction of any great amount of new or interesting information, which the less public portion of his papers might have disclosed, and to a knowledge of which the public might be permitted.

Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy, Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Astronomer Royal from 1836–1881.

Edited by Wilfrid Airy (Cambridge: University Press, 1896.)