The unpublished manuscripts and their author’s changing image
Sarah Dry – TheNewAtlantis.com
When Isaac Newton died on March 31, 1727 at the age of eighty-four, he left no will but a houseful of possessions, a fat bank account, and a clutch of greedy relatives. An inventory of his estate was soon drawn up. Alongside such items as a chocolate pot, mathematical tools, and crimson goat-hair bed furnishings, the document (which filled a sheet of vellum some seventeen feet long) listed boxfuls of manuscripts. Almost 1,900 booklets, many of them folded or sewn to gather four, eight, twelve or more leaves, were bundled and stacked in no apparent order. No list or catalogue itemizing their contents was found.
Even without a list, it was clear that not only the form but the contents of the papers were a mix. There were “reams of loose and foul papers,” as their first inheritor put it, on a bewildering variety of topics. Here were the expected notes on natural philosophy and mathematics. But here too were less predictable (and, on closer inspection, less orthodox) writings on the nature of prophecy, on the Apocalypse, and on God. Newton had, the papers revealed, spent hours and hours on an extremely detailed history of the early Church. Similarly prodigious reading notes and experimental records showed how much time Newton had spent on alchemical investigation — years, and even decades, from the looks of the notes, rather than only days or months.
Newton had always been wary of sharing his scientific work, but he had kept this non-scientific material more private still. Only a few people had seen just a small portion of it. The rest was known only to Newton himself. This private material showed that he had devoted much of his long life not only to mathematics, physics, and optics, and to the administration of the Royal Mint that he undertook for three decades in London, but also to theological, historical, and alchemical subjects.
The catalogers facing this unassigned legacy confronted questions that have excited and bedeviled Newton scholars ever since: How could one man have pursued so many, and such disparate, interests? What bearing, if any, did his theological and alchemical investigations have on his scientific work, and vice versa? What was the relationship between Newton’s science and his faith? Newton himself was not much help. There is precious little to be found in the papers on the vexed issue of his methods of discovery and how, for example, he might have ranked the analytical tools he used for his scientific studies against those he used for historical, theological, or alchemical questions.
The value of the papers Newton left behind has always depended on how — and whether — to link them together. While only a handful of people have ever seen the papers until very recently, news of their remarkable contents has leaked out into the public domain at intervals during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The reactions they provoked have varied widely and tellingly, revealing changing attitudes toward the private nature of a public man. Against the icy perfection of his scientific achievements, Newton’s madness, his meanness, and even his dullness have periodically been declaimed. The different Newtons that have been successively discovered in his writings tell a history not simply of how the life of one man has been reimagined in the nearly three hundred years since his death, but of the role of science, and scientists, in society more generally.
Once the more readily liquidated portion of Newton’s estate — made up mostly of stock and annuities and totaling the staggering sum of about £30,000, the purchasing power of roughly $6 million today — had been shared out, the relatives agreed to release the papers to Catherine, Newton’s half-niece and long-time housekeeper, and her husband, John Conduitt, who had assisted Newton in his role as Master of the Mint and who took up the position after him.
Catherine and John Conduitt wanted to secure Newton’s reputation not only as a genius but also as a Christian. A cursory glance at his millions of words of religious writings had convinced them there was plenty of evidence of Newton’s lifelong and exemplary Christian faith. The papers also made it clear that Newton believed Christianity had been corrupted in the fourth century by the insertion of the doctrine of the Trinity. For Newton, true Christianity did not exalt Christ as a full equal to God the Father. To orthodox Christians, including devout Anglicans like John and Catherine Conduitt, this was a serious heresy, and if it were made public that Newton defended it in writing, his papers would have caused a scandal, ruining his reputation as a scientist and statesman.
By keeping his beliefs secret and sufficiently adhering to the mainstream Christian rituals and rites to ward off undue suspicion, Newton had managed to lead a life of both quiet study and public service. In private, he contrived to practice his faith by scholarly means. By not leaving a will, Newton introduced an ambiguity into his legacy that may have been deliberate. He could leave the papers uncategorized and his wishes for them unstated, thereby protecting John and Catherine Conduitt from explicitly taking responsibility for the papers’ unorthodox contents. This risky strategy left writings on which he had expended decades of work in limbo until a time when future generations might be able to appreciate the truths they contained. The chances were high that the papers would be lost, destroyed, or prematurely published. But Newton was lucky. The papers remained protected by the bonds of family and friendship, by secrecy and sheer neglect.
True to their desire to celebrate the memory of their famous relative, John and Catherine Conduitt helped to create the image of a mythic Newton blessed with almost divine insight and a Christian faith of almost saintly purity to go with it. They had done so by keeping his papers largely private and by publicly promoting Newton as a monument to pious science. The man himself — imperfect, surprising, self-contradicting — faded from sight.
When John and Catherine died, their daughter Kitty inherited the papers. She married into the aristocratic Portsmouth family, who continued to keep the manuscripts almost entirely hidden away at the family seat in Hampshire, Hurstbourne Park. The secrets they contained remained all but unknown for the rest of the eighteenth century.