Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White

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СКАЧАТЬ century, living conditions must have seemed very cramped to a boy brought up in a manor house set in acres of open space. Yet, by all accounts, Isaac was content living with the Clarks. If Arthur Storer was indeed his antagonist until the fight in the churchyard, then we can imagine the schoolboy arguments and rivalries within the Clark household when the adults were out or busy in the shop. It is easier to imagine the rows and recriminations after the fight, when Arthur and Isaac returned home, one with cuts and bruises all over his face, the other still rigid with anger.

      Fortunately for Isaac, the Clarks appear to have been a very placid couple who raised their children with a distinctly far-sighted liberalism quite atypical of the time. Furthermore, Clark – proud of his position as an apothecary and, according to contemporaries, a cheerful, open man – encouraged the inquisitive Newton to watch him at work and to ask questions.

      To Newton, bored with school and searching for something to stimulate his intellect, the apothecary – a repository for chemicals from which remedies and medicines of all descriptions were concocted and sold to the public – was a place full of wonders. On the shelves around the walls of the shop stood jar upon jar of strange-coloured powders and liquids – yellow sulphur, silver mercury, red lead oxide. The shop provided him with his earliest experience of the possibilities of chemistry. It also offered an opportunity to conduct his own experiments.

      We know from his surviving notebooks that Newton did not simply watch Mr Clark go about his business but transcribed remedies and cures from books he discovered alongside the chemical jars. He may have even devised his own recipes. In these journals we find descriptions of how to produce paints and pigments, methods by which glass may be cut with chemicals, and ‘a bait to catch fish’. We also encounter cures for various illnesses – such as that for fistulas (here meaning surgically produced openings into the body), which involved ‘drinking twice or thrice a day a … small portion of mint and wormwood and 300 millipedes well beaten (when their heads are pulled off) in a mortar … & suspended in 4 gallons of ale in its fermentation’.²¹ Newton was evidently a hypochondriac from an early age and was fond of concocting remedies which he both used upon himself and offered to others. He listed over 200 different human ailments in the Morgan Notebook under the heading ‘Of Diseases’.

      As well as receiving his earliest knowledge of primitive chemistry from Clark the apothecary, Newton acquired from him an introduction to the concept of brotherhood.^* Along with all other members of his profession (which at the time existed in a anachronistic limbo: part shopkeeping, part quack medicine), Clark was a member of the Society of Apothecaries. Perhaps, upon his return from regular meetings of the society at its then premises in Water Lane in London, the affable Clark would hint at the proceedings and glamorise the rules and regulations of the organisation to the ever-inquisitive Newton. In this way he not only inspired the boy to delve into the arcane world of cures, remedies and recipes but provided him with another valued piece of knowledge: the concept that there existed brotherhoods through which individuals could communicate and circulate information.

      Primitive chemistry and the charms of the apothecary’s world were not the only distractions in the Clarks’ home. Living under the same roof was Mr Clark’s stepdaughter, Catherine Storer, the only female other than his mother and later his half-niece Catherine Barton to whom Newton is known to have been emotionally attached.^*

      It is difficult to assess accurately how important Catherine Storer was to Newton, because we have only her account of their relationship – conveyed to Stukeley shortly before Newton’s death. By this time Newton was a world-renowned scientist and, aside from the fact that she was in her early eighties and doubtless romanticising her own past, for Catherine to exaggerate her place in the great man’s boyhood affections would have been quite natural.

      They were certainly close friends. This much is demonstrated by their writing to each other during Newton’s early days in Cambridge. Further evidence comes from a conversation Stukeley recalled having with Newton shortly before the scientist’s death. Newton, he claimed, expressed a desire to return to live out his days in Woolsthorpe and showed a particular interest in acquiring a property near to where Catherine had once lived.²² However, Catherine Storer’s suggestions to Stukeley that she and Isaac were sweethearts, and that Newton had at one time seriously considered passing up his academic career in order to marry her are most probably pure fantasy. In his memoirs, Stukeley recounted Catherine Storer’s tale, saying:

      Sir Isaac and she being thus brought up together, it is said that he entertained a love for her, nor does she deny it. But her portion being not considerable, and he being [a] fellow of a college, it was incompatible with his fortunes to marry, perhaps his studies too. It is certain he always had a kindness for her, visited her whenever in the country, in both her husbands’ days, and gave her forty shillings upon a time, when it was of service to her. She is a little woman, but we may with ease discern that she has been very handsome.²³

      Catherine may have harboured hopes, but any spark of romantic interest that Isaac might have shown her was soon extinguished. As his academic performance improved, he was drawn to the attention of his headmaster, Henry Stokes, who saw in him a talent he could not allow to go to waste.

      No record of Newton’s academic progress survives, but it is safe to assume that by the time the boy was sixteen Stokes was already viewing him as a likely candidate for university entrance. What Hannah’s initial reaction to her son’s progress might have been is unknown, but late in 1658, as Stokes was about to suggest that her son should consider a university education, Hannah decided to remove him from King’s School.

      Hannah had shown little consideration for education, and it had been at the insistence of her brother, the Cambridge-educated William Ayscough, that Isaac had attended an elementary school while living with his grandparents. Ironically, it could have been Stokes’s enthusiasm that prompted Hannah to remove Isaac from the school. She saw little need for her son to be educated; her husband had demonstrated how the farm could be managed even without the benefit of literacy.

      At first Hannah had her way. For most of 1659 Isaac lived at the manor with his mother and Barnabas Smith’s children. But, in the notebook started in 1662, the list of his ‘sins’ during the period in which he lived there indicates that it was a time fraught with bitterness and family arguments.

      He was, for the most part, an obedient and respectful son, but the stress of being taken away from an environment in which he was blossoming and the threat of having his life ruined again by the wishes of his mother were evidently too much. The Fitzwilliam Notebook lists his crimes as ‘Refusing to go to the close at my mother’s command’, ‘Striking many’, ‘Peevishness with my mother’, ‘With my sister’, ‘Punching my sister’ and ‘Falling out with the servants’. The signs of strain are clear.

      Whether it was to show deliberately how bad he was at farm duties or through genuine inability and absent-mindedness, he did not perform his duties at all well. Stukeley tells us that:

      When at home if his mother ordered him into the fields to look after the sheep, the corn, or upon any rural employment, it went on very heavily through his manage [i.e. he did not conduct the task well]. His chief delight was to sit under a tree, with a book in his hands, or to busy himself with his knife in cutting wood for models of somewhat or other that struck his fancy, or he would go to the running stream, and make little millwheels to put into the water.²⁴

      His lack of interest even brought an admonition from the authorities. The records of the manor court of the nearby village of Colsterworth show that on 28 October 1659 an СКАЧАТЬ