William Herschel’s Yorkshire Years

Abstract

William Herschel, telescope-builder, observer, and pioneer of deep-sky astronomy, was a professional musician for the first half of his life. He served as a boy bandsman in the Hanoverian Guards, and then fled to England in 1757 to escape the French. We are well informed about his time as a musician in Bath (1766–1782), which culminated in his discovery of Uranus, as his sister Caroline, chronicler of the family, was with him for most of these years. But little has been known of his previous time in the north of England (1760–1766), or of why an obscure jobbing musician should have been offered a prestigious post in Bath. This article is devoted to this episode in his career.