Michael White - Isaac Newton - The Last Sorcerer

Although by all accounts Newton was a quiet child, he also possessed a malicious streak, as is evidenced by his private outbursts against Smith recorded in the Fitzwilliam Notebook. Hannah may well have been relieved when a year after her return he was old enough to attend King’s School in Grantham, seven miles away – a distance much too great to travel each day.

Established sometime during the 1520s, by the time Newton arrived King’s School had for some 130 years provided a solid grounding in what were then considered to be the basics of education: Latin, Greek and Bible studies. In 1654 the headmaster was Henry Stokes, a graduate of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and a man who later exerted a profound influence upon the course of Newton’s early academic career.

If the years immediately following Hannah Newton’s departure for a new life with Smith and the confusion of her return moulded Isaac’s emotional make-up, then those between his arrival in Grantham and his leaving for Cambridge in 1661 laid the foundations of his intellectual outlook. He had two major influences in this new life. The first was the routine of a formal education; the other was his new home environment as a lodger with the family of the local apothecary, the Clarks, who had close links with Grantham School and provided accommodation for a succession of pupils in their apartment above the apothecary shop next to the George Inn on the High Street.

At first, school was of little interest to Isaac, as is shown by his lacklustre and completely unexceptional academic status. He was quick to learn but was also a natural autodidact, ignored by most of his teachers and disliked by the other boys. Pupils were expected to learn the core curriculum of classical languages and scriptural studies parrot-fashion. It all required little imagination and offered no inspiration for inquisitiveness. It is, to the modern mind, astonishing that Newton had no formal mathematical training until he entered Cambridge (and even then mathematics was not part of the standard curriculum during his first years as an undergraduate). To compensate for this dull fare, Isaac first read the books handed down to him by his stepfather and later those he found in the library of St Wulfram’s church in Grantham – a long, narrow room above the church porch. Most of these texts were dry fodder indeed: theological tracts and Puritan propaganda that Newton was encouraged to read by a Puritan divine and lecturer at the school named John Angell.

These theology books and the encouragement of Angell led Newton into a religious doctrine he maintained for the rest of his life, but they did not provide the intellectual meat he needed. Fortunately, other books came his way. The most important in leading him to scientific inquiry was The Mysteries of Nature and Artby John Bate, which Isaac discovered when he was about thirteen. He was totally captivated by it and spent 2 1/ 2 d. on an exercise book into which he copied out long passages.

Bate’s book, first published in 1634, was full of detailed instructions for making wonderful machines and devices, and it was from following these that the teenage Newton was able to design and build working mechanical models for which he gained something of a reputation as a schoolboy. Some seventy years later, Stukeley was able to find a few old folk who still remembered Newton’s miraculous models – windmills that actually worked, into which the boy sometimes placed a mouse to turn the sails; kites; perfectly functioning sundials; and paper lanterns with which he found his way to school on dark winter mornings. The ancient villagers to whom Stukeley referred knew nothing of Bate’s book, which might go some way to account for such hyperbole as ‘Newton’s innate fire was soon excited. He penetrated beyond the superficial view of the thing … He obtained so exact a notion of the mechanism of it, that he made a true and perfect model of it in wood; and it was said to be as clean a piece of workmanship as the original.’ 16

Model-building provided a suitably insular pastime for a boy who appears to have had no friends at school. According to Stukeley’s interviewees, Newton tried to interest his schoolmates in his cerebral activities; rather than being content to watch his contemporaries indulge in what Stukeley calls ‘trifling sports’, Isaac apparently tried to ‘teach them … to play philosophically’. 17

It is easy to detect here the personality of a boy crying out for attention and companionship but simply unable to communicate with others of his age. He had been an only child, and under the best of circumstances such an upbringing can cause children to have difficulty in adjusting when they first encounter others of similar age at school. Stukeley and his followers have tried to imply that the matter went deeper than this: that there was something totally otherworldly about Newton as a boy. And no doubt he was exceptional; he was certainly a talented youth, even if at this age he showed little interest in the official curriculum. Thanks to Stukeley’s first-hand accounts, we know Isaac could draw and write well. ‘Sir Isaac furnished his whole room with pictures of his own making, which probably he copied from prints, as well as from life,’ claimed one interviewee. 18Another recalled in her dotage that Newton had written a poem for her, which she could still recall from memory. 19And, although his mathematical talent had not yet emerged, his interest in mechanical devices illustrates that the skill and curiosity of the scientist, the talent for constructing experiments and testing ideas, was already awakened.

What eventually transformed his unhappy relationship with official learning was a seemingly trivial event. On the way to school one morning, one of the boys in his class (according to some historians, Clark’s stepson, Arthur) kicked Isaac hard in the stomach. What provoked the attack is open to conjecture, but it is significant that the bully was one place above Newton in their class ratings. Enraged, Isaac challenged the other, much larger, boy to a fight after school. According to John Conduitt, who popularised the tale:

[A]s soon as the school was over he challenged the boy to fight, & they went out together into the church yard, the schoolmaster’s son came to them whilst they were fighting & clapped one on the back & winked at the other to encourage them both. Though Sir Isaac was not so lusty as his antagonist he had so much more spirit & resolution that he beat him ‘til he declared he would fight no more, upon which the schoolmaster’s son bad him use him like a coward, & rub his nose against the wall & accordingly Sir Isaac pulled him along by the ears and thrust his face against the side of the church. 20

Still not content, before leaving the bully to nurse his wounds, Newton declared he would not rest until he had overtaken his combatant’s academic position. According to Conduitt, Isaac not only overtook the bully but, within a short time, rose to first place in the school.

The rooms Newton shared with the Clarks above the apothecary shop must have been crowded at this time; Mr Clark and his wife had three children from his wife’s previous marriage – Catherine, Eduard and Arthur Storer. Newton probably shared a room with one or both of the brothers, and in any event, given the size of apartments above town-centre shops of the seventeenth 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.