Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White
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and fellow-commoners. But for Newton the shame of having to empty the chamber-pots of rich contemporaries, or the stigma of running errands for his tutor, must have weighed heavily.
Although he may have had an easier time of it than most subsizars, Newton was still, in the eyes of the college and his contemporaries, on the lowest rung of the social ladder. As a consequence, he would have been treated with contempt by those in superior social positions or else ignored by the sons of the wealthy who considered the university a playground – a place in which to waste a few years before accepting undemanding roles in the upper reaches of society.
Aside from making him even more determined to create an impression, this new humiliation did little for the positive aspects of Newton’s personality as a youth. It fuelled the flames of his insecurity and led to a desire to improve his social status and to sever further the links with his family, to leap at any chance of social improvement. If Hannah had imagined that by deliberately making life difficult for her son he might be persuaded to give up notions of an academic life and return to the family farm, she clearly did not know him. If her actions created anything positive it was to convince him he had to break away from Woolsthorpe, to turn even further in upon himself and to excel within his vocation.
The academic pattern at Cambridge had been set by the Elizabethan Statutes of 1571, which not only dictated the manner of dress and conduct of students and academic staff but also determined the structure of degree courses. To obtain a BA, all students had to reside in the university for a minimum of twelve terms of tuition (four years) and to attend all public lectures given by the members of the college faculty. There was really only one course. The first year covered rhetoric, the art of eloquent oral and written communication, encompassing classical history, geography, art, scripture and literature. Also, by the end of their first year students were expected to be fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew.
For a time, Newton became a conscientious and dedicated student, but, initially at least, he neither shone nor attracted the attention of his masters. In fact, he was all but invisible. Like most of his fellow students, he had little intellectual guidance. Upon his arrival, he was assigned a tutor who was both his teacher and a surrogate parent – one Benjamin Pulleyn, of whom little is known except that he entered Trinity in 1650 as a sizar and rose to the position of Regius Professor of Greek, a seat he occupied for twelve years. Pulleyn was a lax tutor in an academically sterile university. Known as a pupil-monger – he took on as many students as possible, to bolster his meagre income – he did almost nothing to help Newton, who was just one of over fifty undergraduates in his care.
Within weeks of his arrival, Newton had cut himself off from the other sizars and, following the pattern of life at school in Grantham, he began a very lonely first year at the university. It is significant that not one anecdote of Newton’s earliest period at Trinity has been passed on to us from fellow students. There is no record of a personal relationship with any other student even in the most vague terms, except that he appears to have detested his room-mate. We only know this from two ‘confessions’ which appear in the Fitzwilliam Notebook. The first of these is ‘Using Wilford’s towel to spare my own’; the other involves Newton owning up to the sin of ‘Deceiving my chamberfellow of the knowledge of him that took him for a sot’.8 From the first of these we can glean that Newton’s first room-mate was the otherwise unknown Francis Wilford, who appears in the Alumni Cantabrigienses as a pensioner admitted to the college on the same day as Newton. It is also clear that Newton did little to endear himself even to the unfortunate Wilford; small wonder his first year was a lonely one.
Apart from the frustration his mother had caused him, Newton had two other problems during his early days at the university. The first was his age. Almost nineteen that first autumn, he was two years older than the average student. Although some have suggested that this may have been to his advantage academically, in terms of helping him to mix with the other students it could only have been a hindrance. The second and more serious difficulty, and one which was to remain with him throughout his academic life, was his Puritan faith. The teaching of the era centred around the great universities was supported and sustained by the orthodoxy of the Anglican Church. And, although the Restoration had heralded a religious tolerance that would remain a central pillar of British society, Newton was expected to subscribe officially to the tenets of the Anglican Church and to keep his Puritan beliefs to himself.
But, in spite of the potential problems offered by his religious leanings and the extra barrier they created between him and other, orthodox, students, his Puritan ethics also fuelled his drive to learn and focused his thoughts and energies. The distress his mother had caused him early in life had left Newton damaged and emotionally impotent. Puritanism offered him a world with strict emotional and sensual limits in which he did not have to find excuses for his inability to love – a world in which the twin pillars of God and Knowledge (the search for which was a God-given responsibility) could replace most other needs. With Puritanism and the thirst for understanding as his guides, he could at least attempt to shun sex, ignore any lingering desire to marry or to have a family, and keep in check his material ambitions and social goals.
In his first academic year, at least, Newton was preoccupied with sin and with the slightest let-up in religious observance – an obsession which led later in that year to the purchase of the notebooks in which he confessed his misdeeds, past and present. Although he lightened up a little and enjoyed the odd ale and game of cards in a tavern later in his postgraduate days, during his first few months in Cambridge, outside his lectures and tutorials, Newton existed in a permanent state of isolation – lonely, disorientated and trying to feel his way into an alien world of new-found but largely scorned freedom.
His was not the Puritanism of the political extremist (of which there were still many following the turbulent days of civil war and regicide); nor was he the Puritan of the Victorian caricature – the solemn kill-joy who saw debauchery and evil in all the doings of his fellow man. Newton was of the type that elevated the principles of hard work and dedication to learning as the highest hopes of humanity. He believed that the acquisition of knowledge and the unravelling of Nature’s truths were to the greater glory of God. But to his contemporaries he must have appeared a flashing beacon of misanthropy.
If he professed indifference towards almost every other student he encountered, they must have been even more dismissive of him. He could suffer this, and indeed appeared to care little what his fellow students thought of him. An example of his high-mindedness comes from the oldest letter in Newton’s hand, written to a sick friend around 1661:
Loving friend,
It is commonly reported that you are sick. Truly I am sorry for that. But I am much more sorry that you got your sickness (for that they say too) by drinking too much. I earnestly desire you first to repent of your having been drunk & then to seek to recover your health. And if it please God that you ever be well again then have a care to live healthfully & soberly for time to come. This will be very well pleasing to all your friends, especially to
Your very loving friend.
I.N.9
During his early days at university it was not just his pious detachment from everyday pleasures that so alienated Newton: he did little to encourage others to like him. An example of this was his decision to become a money-lender.
It is easy to imagine Newton at the age of nineteen or twenty growing to accept that he could not mix easily with the other students. He had also been left to his own devices to supplement Hannah’s allowance, and by this time he was certainly showing an active interest in money. Indeed, one of his repeated confessions in the list of sins of the Fitzwilliam Notebook is that of paying too much attention to money: ‘Setting my heart on money more than God’, as he put it. This was followed by several incidents of ‘relapse’.10 Being the meticulous record-keeper for which he was later renowned, Newton noted every transaction in another notebook he purchased at Trinity:
His Puritan