Newton, page 27
In the mid-eighteenth century, as described in Chapter 2, Robert Smith, who succeeded Bentley as Master, enrolled Newton to boost Cambridge’s standing as an international centre of excellence. Smith wanted to enhance Trinity’s reputation as a progressive, successful institution whose own former Fellow had created the new natural philosophy being taught in the modernized educational syllabus. Newton’s physical presence is now overshadowed by tributes to other famous Trinity men who succeeded him, but ever-swelling crowds of tourists admire his statue in the chapel, the stained-glass window in the library, and the busts and pictures that Smith either bought or persuaded Trinity men to donate.
Privileged visitors shared the experience of an undergraduate during Smith’s regime who was invited to Newton’s rooms, where ‘every relic of [his] studies and experiments were respectfully preserved to the minutest particular, and pointed out to me by the good old Vice-Master with the most circumstantial precision’. The College was also building up a small collection of Newtonian memorabilia. One of the most prized was an original death-mask, taken by Rysbrack and used by Roubiliac and Romney to create their posthumous images of Newton. However, it seems that some relics only later acquired a special significance: in a 1790 guidebook, locks of Newton’s hair and three of his mathematical instruments are listed indiscriminately among intriguing curiosities including a dried human body from Madeira, a giant kidney stone and a papal indulgence. By the 1970s, the authenticity of this hair had become crucial in assessing claims that Newton had suffered from mercury poisoning.11
Particularly during Whewell’s twenty-five-year reign as Master, in the nineteenth century Trinity College continued to be converted into a shrine for venerating academic ancestors. Most Victorians believed they would be eternally reunited with their loved ones after death, and staunch University men regarded their Colleges as extended families. Whewell explained condescendingly that it might not occur to ordinary people ‘how close are the ties which connect a Fellow with his College . . . the tie is closer even than that of the natural family. With those who thus belong to us we share as it were an intellectual blood.’ As a young undergraduate, Whewell had reconciled himself to spending some of his scarce funds on Newton’s Principia – ‘a book that I should unavoidably have to get sooner or later’, he commented to his father. This reluctant purchase proved a valuable investment, since Whewell dedicated much of his academic career to promoting Newtonian methods of science and mathematics. Although mocked by his students as the whimsical Professor F. Uel who experimented with old buttons and ginger-beer caps, Whewell reinforced the College’s reputation as an elite hothouse where aspiring scholars could literally follow in the hallowed footsteps of their distinguished forefathers.12
As he struggled to define an identity for scientists, Whewell was constantly torn between worshipping Newton as a singular inspired genius who transcended normal codes of behaviour, and extolling him as a man who, though blessed with unusual sagacity, provided an appropriate moral exemplar for less gifted researchers working collaboratively and methodically. Despite these vacillations, it often served his own and the College’s interests to portray Newton as a unique product of the Cambridge education system, an outstanding genius hailed as the intellectual patron saint of mathematical astronomy, itself the summit of the scientific hierarchy. In a widely reported public speech, Whewell spoke of Trinity’s Newtoniania with reverence: ‘We still point out his chambers – we shew his works, his manuscripts, his instruments, locks of his silvery hair.’13
Like medieval saintly relics, the College’s unique possessions reinforced its threatened authority in Victorian England. As national campaigns to reform the education system gathered strength, staunch College men emphasized the value of traditional methods and sought to refute accusations that Cambridge was old-fashioned and monastic. Defenders of the status quo implied that wisdom could be absorbed just by breathing in the University’s holy atmosphere, enriched by the spirit of scholarly predecessors: ‘the genius loci finds an utterance and exerts an agency . . . As we go beneath “Bacon’s mansion”, or about Milton’s mulberry tree; as we kneel where Newton knelt, or dine in halls where the portraits of Erasmus, and Fisher, and Taylor, look down upon us . . .’14
Other Trinity Fellows wrote scholarly texts that perpetuated this shared intimacy with Newton in an eternal collegiate fraternity transcending time. One of Whewell’s contemporaries scoured College records to publish details of Newton’s eating and drinking habits that were inaccessible to less privileged researchers. However, he failed to resolve one problem that continues to perplex Trinity hagiographers: which rooms did Newton occupy at different stages in his College career? In 1963, Lord Adrian – then Master of Trinity – pursued this question in a scholarly inquiry that underlined the proximity of his own study to where Newton might have lived: it is hard to disagree with his endearing conclusion that ‘it all sounds too good to be true’.15 In the 1990s, scientists analysed soil samples in a frustratingly inconclusive attempt to determine the exact location of the Trinity College laboratory in which Newton carried out his alchemical investigations.
Cambridge life is structured by ceremonial practices that re-enact an idealized scholarly past, and Trinity still pays homage to Newton. In 1992, the 350th anniversary of his birth, a commemoration feast was held in the dining hall, which is decorated with icons of Trinity men – including Newton. As the Fellows enjoyed a five-course banquet, in which the Kentish fruit salad was presumably an exotic reference to Newtonian apples, the choir sang Newtonian Enigmas, a poetic tribute specially composed for the occasion by the Nigerian novelist Ben Okri. Employing the language of religion, this secular hymn sanctified Newton by imbuing his optical experiments with biblical resonances of the Light of God:
It is not in the nature of Light
That it grows.
But yours does . . .
Amen.16
Grantham: local hero or national genius?
The birthplaces of famous people started to become pilgrimage centres during the second half of the eighteenth century, when British tourists became interested in exploring their own country rather than embarking on a European Grand Tour. Many of them flocked to Stratford, where the actor David Garrick was nurturing the nascent Shakespeare industry. More esoteric travellers undertook longer journeys in their search for sources of inspiration, although reality did not always match expectations. John Keats, for instance, eagerly anticipated visiting Burns’s remote cottage, but he later complained that ‘The Man at the Cottage was a great Bore with his Anecdotes . . . O the flummery of a birth place! Cant! Cant! Cant! It is enough to give the spirit the guts-ache.’17
It was a far less successful poet, Thomas Maude, who first advertised Newton’s Woolsthorpe cottage in his didactic tours of rural England (Figure 8.2). ‘When I passed the threshold of his house,’ gushed Maude, ‘methought I stood on Ether . . . Imagination viewed the Philosopher ranging universal space . . . When I entered the room where his infant eye first saw that Light which he so accurately defined, I was pervaded with enthusiasm.’ At the end of the eighteenth century, the word ‘enthusiasm’ still carried strong religious connotations, and Maude’s description evoked the transcendental experience of entering a sacred space.18
Although it looked so idyllic in pictures, this remote farmhouse still had its windows boarded up to economize on window tax and bore ‘as melancholy and dismal an air as ever I saw’. Even after it was spruced up in the early nineteenth century, few visitors embarked on the three-hour round trip from Grantham. As coachmen ferried travellers along the Great North Road, they pointed out this holy birthsite, extolled by Brewster:
Here Newton dawned, here lofty wisdom woke,
And to a wondering world divinely spoke . . .
All hail the shrine! All hail the natal day!19
Modern Grantham seems prouder of its second famous native, Margaret Thatcher, whose childhood home has been converted into the Premier restaurant. The daughter of a local grocer, this former chemist boasted about her bust of Michael Faraday, the blacksmith’s son who symbolizes rags-to-riches scientific success stories. In her coat-of-arms, she paired a Falklands Admiral with Newton, another Grantham child who made it to the top, thus enlisting him in her politicized manipulation of England’s cultural heritage (Figure 1.1). Yet in the town itself, the most prominent tribute to Newton is the dilapidated Isaac Newton shopping centre.
Like Thatcher, Victorian propagandists also promoted Newton as both a local hero and a national exemplar for the aspiring classes. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Newton had become a standard advertisement for England’s cultural heritage, used to boost the reputation of home-born talents such as ‘HENRY PURCELL, who is as much the pride of an Englishman in Music, as Shakespeare in productions for the stage, Milton in epic poetry, Lock[e] in metaphysics, or Sir Isaac Newton in philosophy and mathematics’. The English nation was being defined not by allegiance to its monarch but by the achievements of its members. As the source of knowledge shifted from faith to reason, some of the emotional commitment formerly dedicated to saints was becoming transferred to the country’s national heroes.20
Professional associations were also developing – scientists, architects, engineers – whose members were bonded by their work. They often set Newton in a progressive lineage that included Galileo, Kepler and Laplace. On the other hand, English scientists prefer to place him with Darwin and Faraday in a distinctly national scientific brotherhood. One journal candidly confronted this conflict of allegiances: ‘Science is of no country; – but nevertheless we cannot help feeling some national pride in the circumstance that physical astronomy was the creation of British genius.’ Significantly, this reference to Britain rather than England comes from a Scottish source.21
Even as nationalist sentiments strengthened, many people remained loyal to their own towns and regions. Edmond Turnor, the wealthy inheritor of Newton’s home, emphasized Newton’s Lincolnshire connections and traced his local ancestry back to the early sixteenth century. Turnor’s Newton is not only the area’s most distinguished son but also an absentee landlord concerned about sheep grazing, whose heirs dispensed £20 to the parish poor.22 Turnor’s brother Charles later erected a prominent obelisk in the grounds of their estate. Now in the car park of the National Union of Teachers, this symbol of eternal fame urges local inhabitants to ‘recollect with pride that so great a philosopher drew his first breath in the immediate neighbourhood of this spot’.
Woolsthorpe held double significance, since this place of Newton’s birth was also, like the shrines of the early saints, blessed with its own holy tree marking Newton’s inspiration as a young man. Shakespeare’s mulberry tree generated impossibly enormous quantities of ladles and snuff-boxes, but the Newtonian apple tree industry was conducted at a more refined level. Visiting on a pilgrimage from France, Biot ‘gathered a few leaves to carry them religiously back home’, while even the sceptical Brewster visited twice and purloined some of the roots. De Morgan maliciously remarked that he ‘must have had it on his conscience for 43 years that he may have killed the tree’, but whatever Brewster’s culpability, by the middle of the century the original tree had blown down and been converted into a chair.23
Just as the apple tree locates Newton in mythical rather than factual space and time, so Woolsthorpe has come to typify an idealized English rustic past. Acquired at a low price thanks to the Turnor family’s generous and patriotic determination to prevent the cottage from being exported, during the Second World War the Royal Society donated Woolsthorpe to the National Trust. Even though the nineteenth-century extensions had substantially altered its appearance, Newton’s cottage symbolized the English values under threat. In 1942, the third centenary of his birth, Country Life extolled ‘the simple mathematical symmetry of that creeper-covered little manor house . . . this sacred shrine . . . What a grand and typically English countryside this is . . . [that] played its part not only in giving an impetus to the boy’s intellectual urge, but also in providing him with that quiet, modest, engaging character that so endears him to us.’ Well before Thatcher encouraged the heritage industry to focus on preserving the mansions of famous aristocrats, the National Trust was far more interested in attracting visitors to its splendid country homes and gardens than in commemorating British cultural achievements. It converted this ordinary farmhouse into a romanticized distillation of rural Englishness, decorated with furniture of diverse styles and periods that were mostly unconnected with Newton.24
Funding was one of the problems faced by the nineteenth-century publicists who were trying to establish Newton as a Lincolnshire hero. The Lincoln Mechanics’ Institute welcomed a donated bust and invited visiting lecturers to talk about Newton, but a scheme to install his statue in Lincoln Cathedral was deemed too expensive.25 In 1854, Grantham town council started to raise money for a statue commemorating Newton’s arrival at the grammar school 200 years earlier (Figure 8.3) As with other monuments to men of science, debates about its construction resonated with tensions that spread throughout Victorian society.26
State support was one of the central issues. Scientific campaigners complained that the state’s unwillingness to erect a memorial to Newton reflected England’s embarrassingly poor international record for financing research. Unlike in other European countries, in England public monuments were mainly constructed through private patronage, and the government cited Newton as a precedent when refusing to fund a monument for Faraday. The government did allocate money to commemorate soldiers and statesmen, but middle-class people were becoming more interested in celebrating civic heroes. Capitalizing on this public concern, Brewster stressed the value of scientific rather than military achievement by declaring that ‘Newton’s glory will throw a lustre over the name of England when time has paled the light reflected from her warriors.’27
The drive to commemorate scientists and inventors was boosted by Prince Albert, who recommended founding the National Portrait Gallery to celebrate the country’s achievements. Arguments raged about who should be included. Amid rumours of corrupt selection procedures, Newton became an uncontroversial candidate, prominently displayed in preliminary exhibitions. Partisan journalists proclaimed that ‘We have outlived the age in which only statesmen and heroes were publicly honoured, in which poets were thrust into the darkest corner of a cathedral, and the professors of science venerated only by pedants and scholars.’28
Newton’s statue also highlighted tensions between metropolitan and provincial interests. Many British statues were – like Newton’s – organized by local groups who combined patriotic sentiments with the desire to embellish their own city. Writers for the national press ridiculed claims that this statue’s site was ‘consecrated’ by the master’s footsteps. Derisively bracketing Grantham with other towns trying to profit from their famous citizens, they insisted that ‘the partial tribute of a mere local memorial cannot discharge this long-neglected debt of the English people. England cannot do justice to herself except by rearing, in the Metropolis itself, a great and glorious monument.’ In contrast, the Manchester Guardian defended regional autonomy and provincial civic pride. The city already boasted an expensive, privately financed marble statue of its own famous chemist, John Dalton, and the newspaper maintained that some eminent men would prefer their work to be appreciated by local supporters rather than receive the ‘colder but larger admiration’ of a London monument.29
These conflicts simmered during the four years it took to build the statue. Grantham council raised £600 from local patrons, but almost twice as much poured in from individuals throughout the country. Queen Victoria donated a Russian cannon captured during the Crimean war to be melted down for the statue – Grantham’s Newton was a national hero whose monument literally embodied England’s military triumph. In London, the Royal Society refused to contribute, but the BAAS virtually took the project over. The opening ceremonies were timed to follow immediately after the BAAS conference, and the President (the naturalist Richard Owen) played a prominent role. By the time the statue was completed, the unveiling ceremony had turned into a national event. The circulation of engravings, books and newspaper articles helped this provincial memorial to become the property of the entire country.30
The statue’s appearance must have been hotly debated. Because engravings were relatively cheap, local sponsors of statues were familiar with their hero’s appearance. Rather than the idealized classical figures favoured by connoisseurs, they demanded a realistic representation. As phrenology reached its peak, people felt that a sculptor should capture a subject’s personality by faithfully depicting his features and cranial characteristics. Newton presented a problem for practising phrenologists, because his death-mask revealed a sharply receding forehead that made his profile closely resemble that of a native American Indian. Unfortunately, this left no room for his organ of causality, but one phrenologist devised an ingenious solution: by comparing Newton’s head with that of a blind but stupid woman, he conveniently demonstrated the superiority of Newton’s observational powers.31
Art critics were often scathing about the style of privately funded memorials. The selection committee picked William Theed, a society sculptor trained in the classical style who provided statues for Osborne, the royal residence on the Isle of Wight. Theed effectively reconciled the subscribers’ conflicting demands by working with a death-mask to produce a Newton who held a traditional pose but had a realistic face. Reporters stressed that the Grantham statue was a true likeness, and glowingly described the ‘brow grandly developed and beautifully proportioned’ that indicated ‘the unmistakeable presence of a lofty and commanding intellect’.32
