Did you know Charles Babbage hosted soirées most Saturday nights during the London “season” from the early 1830s until the early 1850s? That’s where Ada Lovelace first saw the difference engine when she was just 17. The guest list included people you’ve definitely heard of: Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday and Felix Mendelsohn for instance, and people who were as famous at the time, like Caroline Norton, the author and political lobbyist who secured divorced women the right to custody of their own children, and later copyright of their own writing. Or Mary Somerset, the famed mathematician. Harriet Martineau, arguably Britain’s first sociologist, and Monsieur Sismondi, the Swiss economist who coined the term proletariat. Actors, sculptors, politicians, aristocrats and inventors all came to these events.

And the centrepiece was new technology. Fox Talbot, the inventor of the British version of photography, showed his calotypes at Babbage’s parties. Before that, Charles Wheatstone showed the first 3D image viewer, and David Brewster, another regular guest, developed an improved version he also showed. Faraday was able to chat at the soirées with Jane Marcet, author of “Conversations on Chemistry”, a wildly popular textbook that Faraday said was the direct cause of his becoming a scientist.

The soirées have been a pet project of mine for a couple of years now. We’ve made a dataset of guests we know attended the soirées, using diaries and memoirs and published letters as sources. I’m working on a book about it, but it’s the sort of book that’ll take me a decade to write I think. And I designed a larp which I’ve run about 5 times now and am running again with the digital culture students next week.

We ran a version of the larp yesterday, and it went really well! This semester I have a student intern who will be helping improve the larp materials and package them up so we can share them with others who might like to try this with their students, so I hope to write more about this over the next few months.