Newton, page 31
Was Newton indeed bribed to accept an adulterous relationship between his beautiful niece Catherine Barton and the influential statesman with an amorous reputation, Lord Halifax? The evidence is so complicated that historical sleuths have drawn differing conclusions, which reveal much about their own moral stance. Many of Newton’s admirers have found it hard to believe that Newton could have condoned an illicit affair, which must have been happening while Barton was living in Newton’s house and looking after him. Nevertheless, it remains hard to provide any other explanation for Halifax’s extraordinarily generous legacy to Barton – or la Bartica, as she was dubbed by contemporary gossipy journalists.
Victorian scientists were scandalized: Brewster denied the very possibility, while Augustus de Morgan wrote a whole book to exonerate his hero by postulating a secret marriage. As social codes relaxed in the later twentieth century, historians accommodated Newton’s apparent culpability by divorcing his moral conduct from his intellectual achievements. Evidently working hard at positive thinking, Richard Westfall transformed Newton’s lapse into proof that he was no ‘plaster saint’, but a human being forced to pay the price for his genius. Still more creatively, Frank Manuel suggested a Freudian explanation, cautiously framing it as a question: ‘In the act of fornication between his friend Halifax and his niece was Newton vicariously having carnal intercourse with his mother?’38
Newton died almost three centuries ago, yet new visions of his life are constantly being created. Like a hologram, his image flickers back and forth between two apparently irreconcilable models. On the one hand, he is a paragon of detached rationality who represents modern ideals of scientific thought. By 1927 Newton had come ‘very near to Nietszche’s description of “the objective man”, a passionless being concerned only to “reflect” such things as he is tuned to perceive’.39 But this Nietzschean Newton has gained an increasingly prominent double, the mad genius, the solitary recluse verging on insanity who seeks the truths of nature in alchemical crucibles, arcane symbolism and cabalistic calculations.
John Maynard Keynes, assiduous collector of Newton’s neglected alchemical manuscripts, initiated this transformation just after the Second World War, although he died before he could appreciate the impact of his words. ‘Newton’, he declared, ‘was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.’40
According to the biographer Michael White, it was not until the very end of the twentieth century that the ‘real’ Newton emerged. Yet White’s reclusive, ill-tempered alchemist who distils reason in his alembic flasks is neither more nor less true than the nineteenth-century accounts of a dedicated, patient, methodical thinker who lived a pure and holy life. Today’s Newton is an unpleasant, self-preoccupied introvert who is obsessed with alchemical experimentation, but at the same time he remains an icon of rationality.41 This duality as both an insane genius and a dispassionate scientist is unique to Newton. Writers may fondly recount Einstein’s eccentric refusal to wear socks, or sympathetically analyse Darwin’s secretive, semi-invalid lifestyle, but among scientific icons, only Newton is simultaneously mad, bad and brilliant.
In the late 1990s, racy novels featuring Newton deliberately blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. These pseudo-historical books are deceptively packed with authentic details, yet it is often hard to discern where reality slides into fantasy. Newton’s alchemical and sexual activities provide the major focus of these narratives. Under the guise of literary fantasy, modern authors have gained the freedom to explore precisely those aspects of Newton’s character that Victorian moralists had tried to suppress. In Newton’s Niece, Newton’s homosexuality and voyeurism drive a complicated plot of alchemical transformation and criminal corruption. The fictionalized Bartica gazes round her bedroom and realizes ‘the true significance of my uncle’s choice of decor. He wasn’t just the civil servant he claimed to be. He had a new project . . . a whorehouse – a laboratory whorehouse – and I was the whore.’42
Newton the brothel-keeper was also voted Man of the Millennium, an accolade that might have surprised even the most loyal of his contemporaries. Selection juries engaged in long behind-the-scenes deliberations to reconcile conflicting choices. Newton’s achievements, scoffed the member of one panel, were ‘puny’ by comparison with the innovations introduced in the previous millennium by Plato, Aristotle and Jesus; his own favoured candidate was Murasaki Shikibu, the eleventh-century inventor of the novel. More conventional nominations included Martin Luther, William Shakespeare and Karl Marx, but there was overwhelming agreement that a scientist would best reflect the most profound type of change that had taken place during the previous 1,000 years. Should this be Darwin, Einstein or Galileo? Eventually a history professor’s terse judgement won the day: ‘Newton. End of story!’43
But Newton’s story has no end . . .
Notes
In the Notes, works listed in the Bibliography are referred to by author’s name only, or by author’s name and short title when more than one work by the same author appears in the Bibliography, or when works by different authors with the same name are cited.
1: SANCTITY
1. Times index, passim; Times, 20 July 1857, 6c, 6 January 1866, 12a, 23 March 1886; Illustrated London News, 2 January 1864; Personal Computer World (May 1998), 27.
2. Universal Magazine 3 (1748), 295 (the Marquis de l’Hôpital).
3. The fullest and best biography of Newton is Westfall, Never at Rest, my major source of information throughout this book, to which I shall refer only for quotations. There are far too many other modern biographies to list here, but the ones mentioned in this book include: Hall, Newton: Adventurer in Thought; Manuel, Portrait of Newton; White, Last Sorcerer. Fauvel et al. has some excellent introductory essays, and Gjertsen is useful for reference.
4. Isaac Barrow, quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 102.
5. Quoted ibid., p. 143.
6. Humphrey Newton (no relation), quoted ibid., p. 209.
7. Bate, Shakespeare; Dobson; Holderness.
8. Poole. By the time of Newton’s death, the difference had grown to eleven days.
9. Williams, Keywords; Mann; Smith, Four Words; Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, pp. 146–55.
10. Kant, Critique of Judgement, §47, pp. 176–7; Schaffer, ‘Genius’.
11. Abrams; Bone.
12. Quoted in Iliffe, ‘ “Is he like other men?” ’, p. 176; Osler.
13. Woodward; Brown.
14. Johns, p. 320; Snobelen, ‘Reading Newton’s Principia’ (letter to William Derham quoted p. 159).
15. British Library Add. MSS 32548, fol. 32 and 32456, fol. 73.
16. Williams, Pope; Jenkyns; Webster, ‘Taste’; Maty, pp. 62–3.
17. Desaguliers, Experimental Philosophy, vol. 1, p. vi; Shapin, ‘Of gods and kings’; Stewart, ‘Other centres of calculation’, pp. 133–4.
18. Young, p. 76; Jordanova, ‘Science and nationhood’; Anderson, pp. 11–49.
19. Daniels, especially pp. 32–42; Roe, pp. 33–45.
20. London Journal, 26 August 1732 (edited version in Gentleman’s Magazine 2 (1732), 917–18) (I am grateful to Mark Goldie for this reference).
21. Gentleman’s Magazine 8 (1738), 591 (reprinted from Universal Spectator, 25 November 1738); Mullan.
22. London Journal, 26 August 1732 (edited version in Gentleman’s Magazine 2 (1732), 917–18) (I am grateful to Mark Goldie for this reference).
23. Albury. Halley’s poem was edited several times, and the lines on Motte’s frontispiece are not identical to the original.
24. Walters; Nurmi; Essick. See also the frontispiece of vol. 2 of James Hervey’s Meditations and Contemplations (1748 edition) and plate 10 of Blake’s There Is No Natural Religion.
25. Monthly Review 20 (1759), 300–1 (on William Lovett, who showed Hutchinsonian and Behmenist leanings); Schaffer, ‘Newtonianism’.
26. Quoted in Gascoigne, p. 234.
27. Gascoigne: Richard Bentley (Boyle Lecture of 1692), quoted p. 223.
28. Iliffe, ‘A “connected system” ’; Keynes.
29. Westfall, Never at Rest, p. xi, and ‘Newton and his biographer’.
30. By Pyio Rattansi, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, Michael White.
31. Rob Iliffe, quoted in IC Matters (Autumn 1999), 13.
2: ICONS
1. Maude, Viator, p. ii (Appendix). There are no complete catalogues of Newton’s portraits and their engravings. The best sources are: Smith, ‘Portraits’; Webber, pp. 203–21; Gjertsen, pp. 440–8; the archives of London’s National Portrait Gallery.
2. Kneller painted a similar version that was acquired by Caroline of Anspach and kept at Hampton Court: Stewart, Kneller (1971), p. 64, and Millar, vol. 1, pp. 27–8. Iliffe, ‘ “Is he like other men?” ’ and ‘Isaac Newton’; Shapin, ‘The philosopher and the chicken’.
3. Crompton, ‘Portraits of Newton’, p. 3; Fortune and Warner, pp. 51–65.
4. Wolf, p. 349 (letter from James Logan to William Burnett, 1727); see also p. 350; Martin, Biographia Philosophica, p. 361.
5. Simoni. For example, James Northcote’s The Worthies of England and James Barry’s Elysium.
6. Richardson, vol. 1, last page of unpaginated preface.
7. Atterbury, vol. 1, p. 180.
8. Pointon, Hanging the Head; Jordanova, Defining Features; Shawe-Taylor, The Georgians and Genial Company; Simon.
9. Muirhead, p. 29; Nenadic.
10. From a 1712 letter to the Spectator, quoted in Stewart, Kneller (1983), p. 58.
11. Villamil, p. 13; Maude, Viator, p. vi; Avery, David Le Marchand, pp. 76–8, and ‘Missing’.
12. Letter from Bentley to Newton of 20 October 1709: Turnbull, vol. 5, pp. 7–8; Fortune and Warner, pp. 50–65; Baker, ‘Verrio and Thornhill’.
13. Letter from Cotes to Newton of 20 July 1712: Turnbull, vol. 5, pp. 315–16 (quotation p. 316). Letters from Bernoulli to Varignon of 20 February 1721 and from Varignon to Newton of 26 September 1721: Turnbull, vol. 7, p. 166 and ibid., pp. 160–66.
14. Guerlac. Letter from Varignon to Newton of 17 November 1720: Turnbull, vol. 7, pp. 104–7 (quotation p. 105); see also Newton’s letter to Varignon of 19 January 1721: Turnbull, vol. 7, pp. 119–23; Manuel, Isaac Newton: Historian, p. 383.
15. Exceptions include a few Grand Tour parodies, a Kneller portrait of Pope, and a drawing of Newton by William Hoare.
16. Stukeley, pp. 12–13, 85; letters from Stukeley to Conduitt of 15 July 1727 (Keynes MS 136) and 22 July 1727, quoted in Brewster, Memoirs (1855), vol. 2, p. 414. See also Stewart, Kneller (1983), pp. 71–2.
17. Spence, vol. 1, p. 350 (on Lord Pembroke); Pointon, Hanging the Head, pp. 53–78.
18. Hawkins, Franks and Grueber, vol. 2, pp. 469–73; Smith, Portrait Medals; Snelling, plate 29.
19. From Addison’s 1713 Dialogues upon Medals and Pope’s epistle To Mr Addison, both quoted in Wimsatt, Portraits of Pope, p. 50.
20. Abbé de Guasco, 1767, quoted Haskell, p. 5; Yarrington.
21. Paulson, Hogarth: High Art and Low, pp. 1–4, 59, 100; Webb, ‘Busts’; Uglow, pp. 168–70.
22. Bindman and Baker, pp. 9–23, 187–9.
23. Webb, Rysbrack, pp. 76–91; Llewellyn.
24. Dobson, pp. 134–84; Universal Magazine 3 (1748), 249, and 34 (1764), 241; Gentleman’s Magazine 1 (1731), 159–60, and 11 (1741), 548. Several readers contributed Latin translations of Pope’s couplet: Gentleman’s Magazine 11 (1741), 601, 663, and 18 (1748), 164.
25. Gentleman’s Magazine 1 (1731), 169. See also Gentleman’s Magazine 11 (1741), 663.
26. Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, pp. 183–5; Ralph, pp. 69–73; Physick, pp. 80–5.
27. Royal Magazine 9 (1763), 116–17, repeated in Universal Magazine 34 (1764), 241–2.
28. Berteloni Meli; Millar, vol. 1, pp. 27–8; Universal Magazine 3 (1748), 298.
29. Pietas Academiæ, E1 recto (by Edward Turner).
30. Hunter, pp. 126–8.
31. Webb, Rysbrack, pp. 146–54; Wilson, pp. 143–5, Webb, ‘Busts’; Colton (quotation p. 918 from the London Journal, 1732).
32. Willis, pp. 106–27, plates 111–58; Hunt, ‘Emblem and expressionism’; Etlin, pp. 184–97; Paulson, Emblem and Expression, pp. 19–34.
33. Hunt, Figure in the Landscape, pp. 127, 142; Gilpin, pp. 28–9.
34. Gilbert West, Stowe, reproduced in Hunt and Willis, pp. 215–27 (quotation p. 219).
35. McKitterick; Baker, ‘Portrait sculpture’.
36. Nature (26 March 1927), 466.
37. Thomas and Ober, pp. 161–72.
38. Baker, ‘Portrait sculpture’; Curtis, Funnell and Kalinsky; Montagu quoted in Bindman and Baker, p. 120.
39. Sharpe, p. 93.
40. Original by Bernard Picart, reproduced Haskell, p. 10; Duportal, p. 369.
41. McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, especially pp. 100–45.
42. McSwiny; Haskell, pp. 4–13; The European Fame of Isaac Newton; McSwiny’s ‘Worthies’ do not seem to be connected with those at Stowe, which were erected later.
43. Kinns, pp. 399–43.
44. Portrait by Joseph Highmore discussed in Kerslake; Symonds.
45. London Daily Post (1 May 1738); Birch.
46. Universal Magazine 3 (1748), 289–301.
47. Munby, Cult of the Autograph Letter.
48. Cambridge, pp. 328–9.
49. Curtis, Funnell and Kalinsky; Pierre Grosley, quoted in Bindman and Baker, p. 114.
50. Cooper, Life, pp. 103–4, 116–18; Gentleman’s Magazine 11 (1741), 102; Coleridge quoted in Holmes, p. 265.
51. Thrale, vol. 2, p. 795. For Pope’s portraits, see Wimsatt; Reily and Wimsatt.
52. D’Oench, pp. 45–6; Reily and Wimsatt, pp. 150–1.
53. Webb, Rysbrack, pp. 117, 221–2; Reily and Wimsatt, plate 11, pp. 145–6. The lines on the socle, adapted from Ovid’s Fasti, were: NEWTONUS ANGLUS: Promissum ille sibi voluit prœnoscere calum / Nec novus ignotas hospes adire domos (translation by David Money).
54. Webb, Rysbrack, pp. 197–9; Mallet, ‘Portrait medallions’.
55. Man at Hyde Park Corner; Uglow, pp. 529–31.
56. Hughes, ‘Portrait busts’; Dawson, pp. 64–86; Reilly; Taylor, ‘Artists and philosophes’.
57. Henig, Scarisbrick and Whiting, pp. 281–3; Times, 16 September 1796, 3d (the gem was by Nathaniel Marchant, one of Tassie’s French rivals); Gray, pp. 32–45; Raspe, pp. lxxv, 746, 799.
58. Halfpenny, pp. 139–40, 172–3; Hughes, ‘Notable earthenware figures’; Rackham, vol. 1, p. 117.
59. Pye (there were 240 pennies in a pound).
3: DISCIPLES
1. Shapin, ‘Boyle and mathematics’.
2. Blake, p. 474 (‘Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses’).
3. Nash (quotation p. 55); Cunningham; Osler.
4. Hume, p. 166.
5. Turnbull, vol. 1, p. 328 (letter to Henry Oldenburg of 5 December 1674); Snobelen, ‘Reading Newton’s Principia,’ pp. 160, 159 (Gilbert Clerke).
6. Ditton: quotations from pp. 1–7 of unpaginated preface; see Markley, pp. 184, 213–14.
7. Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, pp. 97–134.
8. Addison, ‘Oration,’ pp. 204, 198.
9. Ll. 1–2 of Glover’s unpaginated poem in Pemberton.
10. Maclaurin, pp. xix–xx (by Anne Maclaurin, referring to Cotes’s preface of the second edition of the Principia); Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, pp. 146–55.
11. Quoted without a source in Nicolson, p. 17.
12. Guicciardini, pp. 262–4.
13. Mullan (quotations pp. 42–3).
14. Tollet, pp. 25–7; quotation pp. 66–7 (from ‘Hypatia’).
15. Algarotti (quotation vol. 1, pp. iv–v).
16. Stevens, pp. 68–9.
17. Schaffer, ‘Newtonianism’; Hales (quotation p. xxxi).
18. Guardian, 24 March 2001, 11 (and elsewhere).
19. Biographia Britannica, vol. 5, pp. 3210–44.
20. Manuel, Newton: Historian, p. 142; Hunter, pp. 126–8.
21. Bond, vol. 1, p. 44 (12 March 1711).
22. My major sources for the following account are Force, and Stewart, Rise of Public Science, pp. 31–141.
23. Boyle’s will quoted in Gjertson, p. 86.
24. Gascoigne; Alexander, p. 11 (letter to Princess Caroline of November 1715).
25. Snobelen, ‘Newton, heretic’ (Viscount Percival quoted p. 381).
26. Henry Newman, quoted in Force, p. 20; Snobelen, ‘Reading Newton’s Principia’.
27. Guicciardini, pp. 99–117; Dobbs.
28. Manuel, Newton: Historian.
29. Fara, pp. 134, 155–6.
30. Manuel, Newton: Historian, pp. 166–93; Popkin, ‘Fundamentalism II’. For example, Priestley, Chart of Biography, p. 13, and Barbauld, p. 90.
31. Chambers, vol. 1, p. 399; Henry Fellows, quoted by Ada Lovelace in Toole, p. 99 (letter of 21 July 1837).
32. Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, pp. 97–134. The following account is based on Popkin, ‘Origins of fundamentalism’ and ‘Fundamentalism II’.
33. The Socinians were a related unorthodox religious sect. Henry Fellows, quoted by Ada Lovelace in Toole, p. 99 (letter of 21 July 1837); The Great Mystery of Godliness Incontrovertible, by Ebenezer Henderson (1830); Froom, vol. 2, pp. 658–69 (‘Transmitting the luminous torch of prophetic interpretation’ is the frontispiece of vol. 1).
34. Newton, Daniel, p. xiv. Jim Bramlett, at www.Idolphin.org/ angels299.html, 14 Sepember 1999.
35. Clubbe, p. 12; Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, pp. 196–7; Shell.
36. My major sources for this account are Bowles, Rousseau, and Roy Porter’s introduction to Cheyne. Quotations from Cheyne, pp. 338, 326.
