Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer

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 Isaac Newton was fined 3s. 4d. ‘for suffering his sheep to break the stubbs of 23 of loes [loose?, meaning unenclosed] furlongs’. On top of this, he was obliged to pay 1s. on each of two further counts, ‘for suffering his swine to trespass in the corn fields’ and ‘for suffering his fence belonging to his yards to be out of repair’.25

Following this, Hannah decided that her son should be supervised by a servant from the household who would look after him and give the boy proper instruction. Predictably, the idea failed because Newton quickly turned the situation to his advantage, allowing the servant to do all the work while he sloped off to read or to pursue other interests.

Each Saturday, Isaac set off dutifully with the servant to Grantham to sell the farm produce and to purchase supplies for the following week. Arriving at the Saracen’s Head, the inn in Westgate, he would instruct the servant to continue with the business of the day while he went off to visit Mr Clark at his shop in the High Street.

What drew Newton there was a collection of books that Clark had acquired from his recently deceased brother, Dr Joseph Clark, the usher (assistant teacher) of King’s School. The apothecary himself was interested in the collection, but had little time to read. Perhaps Newton had offered to catalogue the books in exchange for the chance to read them; be that as it may, somehow he managed to persuade Clark to allow him to spend almost all of each Saturday in the back room behind the shop in solitary bliss studying texts on physics, anatomy, botany, philosophy and mathematics – his first real exposure to these things. From Bate’s The Mysteries of Nature and Art Newton had discovered the elements of experimentation and practical skills – lessons he would never forget but would employ both as an orthodox scholar and in his role as alchemist. But here were texts by greater writers and natural philosophers. We do not know for sure the contents of the library, but it is safe to assume a scholar such as Dr Clark would have collected the works of the great names of the past and perhaps the more controversial figures of the day, and it is likely that Newton now first discovered Francis Bacon and René Descartes, Aristotle and Plato, acquiring a fuller and more useful education than he could possibly have gained within the narrow confines of the school curriculum.

Word of Isaac’s truancy soon reached two different parties involved in the argument over his future. Hannah heard of her son’s antics through the complaints of the servant, and Henry Stokes discovered how his ex-pupil was showing admirable determination not to fall under his mother’s yoke. Stokes had tried to dissuade Hannah from taking Newton away from school but had been unsuccessful. Now, hearing how Isaac was doing everything he could to foil his mother’s efforts, Stokes decided to try again.

Initially, nothing changed. Despite the irritation caused by her son’s behaviour, Hannah would not listen to suggestions that he should pursue an academic career and desert the farm. To be fair, Hannah was herself poorly educated and could not have appreciated the world of learning that Isaac took to so naturally. To her, the only thing that mattered was the management of the estate: it was the source of their prosperity, and she could not understand what her son could possibly gain by attending university. She had already lost two husbands and was expected to maintain a farm, run a household and look after three young children. She could not bear to lose Isaac too.

But, after Stokes appealed to her a second time, she realised she could hold Isaac back no longer. (Her decision was no doubt sweetened by Stokes’s offer to remit the standard charge of forty shillings paid to the school by the parents of all boys who came from beyond the town.26)

Stokes then talked to William Ayscough (who had probably influenced Hannah’s change of heart and was himself a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge), and probably to Humphrey Babington, a relative of the Clarks and a fellow at Cambridge University. Together they smoothed the way for Isaac’s admission, and by the autumn of 1660 the young man was back in Grantham preparing for Cambridge.

Helped by those around him who understood his desire to learn, Isaac now, for the first time, found himself completely content. Throughout his childhood and teenage years he had constantly been pulled in different directions. At school he clashed with the teaching tradition on the one hand and his contemporaries on the other. He eventually found his true nature not from the comfort of others or through the small accomplishments of orthodoxy, but in the discovery of a larger world beyond the confines of his upbringing. By 1660 he had passed the threshold and entered the world in which he would flourish.

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