Reading Popular Newtonianism

Print, the Principia, and the Dissemination of Newtonian Science

Laura Miller

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813941257
• eBook ISBN: 9780813941264
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Sir Isaac Newton's publications, and those he inspired, were among the most significant works published during the long eighteenth century in Britain. Concepts such as attraction and extrapolation—detailed in his landmark monograph Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica—found their way into both scientific and cultural discourse. Understanding the trajectory of Newton's diverse critical and popular reception in print demands consideration of how his ideas were disseminated in a marketplace comprised of readers with varying levels of interest and expertise.

Reading Popular Newtonianism focuses on the reception of Newton's works in a context framed by authorship, print, editorial practices, and reading. Informed by sustained archival work and multiple critical approaches, Laura Miller asserts that print facilitated the mainstreaming of Newton's ideas. In addition to his reading habits and his manipulation of print conventions in the Principia, Miller analyzes the implied readership of various "popularizations" as well as readers traced through the New York Society Library's borrowing records. Many of the works considered—including encyclopedias, poems, and a work written "for the ladies"—are not scientifically innovative but are essential to eighteenth-century readers' engagement with Newtonian ideas. Revising the timeline in which Newton's scientific ideas entered eighteenth-century culture, Reading Popular Newtonianism is the first book to interrogate at length the importance of print to his consequential career.

The Weight of Authority in Newton’s Reading and Correspondence

In the Principia (1687), Newton synthesized print conventions and methods to position his authority such that writers cited and responded to his book in popular texts. The traces of Newton’s reading in different genres link authority and print in ways that echo in his printed works, especially the Principia. Newton’s reading records and correspondence reveal the tensions between the community and the individual that became part of the Principia’s publication history. The materiality of texts—central to Newton’s reading—ultimately achieved a primacy that Newton would explore more fully in the Principia. This chapter analyzes several key moments when Newton took a position on the physicality of manuscript and print and their uses to communicate and authenticate forms of evidence. Newton’s treatment of manuscript and printed evidence in the works he read and in the Principia evinces the limitations and the potentiality of using the printed book to convey authority.

When scholars write about a topic of interest to Newton, they tend to survey his related reading: for example, works on Newton’s mathematical work engage his discussion of mathematics in correspondence and notebooks; scholars who focus on Newton’s alchemy discuss his readings in alchemy. Because this book is about the dissemination of Newtonian natural philosophy—with the accompanying implication that we are looking at the public face of Newton’s work across genres—I analyze Newton’s reading history insofar as it relates to publicity. To this end, I focus largely on Newton’s reading in theology because his theological inquiry and his public persona intersected. Not only was Newton’s work toward understanding the nature of the universe part of his theological perspective, it also inflected Newton’s daily life as a professor at Trinity College, Cambridge. Newton’s reading practices showed how he, like other readers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, filtered classical and contemporary sources, spoke explicitly about forms of textual evidence, and commented on the disparity between publicity and privacy—all factors that helped form the Principia’s publication context.

Traces of Newton’s Reading

Other scholars have stressed the links between Newton’s reading and his manuscripts. Jed Z. Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold delineate the process whereby Newton engaged with classical and religious history to write his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms.¹ In the Chronology, Newton researched unusual historical texts alongside conventional classical authorities.² He also attempted to be systematic about what he read: whether he responded to ancient theological texts that opposed Anglican doctrine, or contemporary criticism, or the Bible itself, Newton engaged intensively with printed material and manuscripts as a reader. Ann Blair has written persuasively about how early modern readers like Newton managed the large influx of new knowledge from both contemporary and classical sources that accompanied increased print circulation.³ Readers’ notes provided valuable assistance in managing information from diverse print and manuscript sources. As in the early modern humanist reading practices Blair and Anthony Grafton have studied, readers from the late seventeenth century such as Newton chose how to filter evidence from classical sources, how to incorporate new knowledge, and how much authority to grant to ancient texts.⁴ Buchwald and Feingold’s study of Newton’s chronology has also shown that it is useful to analyze Newton’s reading in different rhetorical contexts.⁵ To understand Newton’s relation to the public, we will benefit from looking at his reading practices—especially those in theology—where Newton actually wrote about people’s public and private identities, and the intersection of those identities with extant—and public—power structures. Understanding Newton and his public-mindedness in this capacity is essential to understanding his popularization, and contributes to our understanding of the Principia beyond the mathematical and scientific context that produced it.

Newton’s reading across genres reflects the Principia’s publication context: the traces of his reading expose Newton’s focus on two central topics: how to value different forms of evidence and how to evaluate publicity, especially the often tense relationship between an individual and a community.⁶ These interests play out most frequently in Newton’s theological reading and correspondence but are also supported by Newton’s chronology work, his alchemy, and other correspondence of his that related to print publication. His focus on evidence and individual-community tensions would affect Newton’s uses of mathematical evidence in the Principia as well as underscore the tensions between Newton the individual and the community—the Royal Society—who were both his peers and the audience that influenced his publishing decisions. The valuation of different forms of evidence and the balance between individual goals and community demands structured Newton’s reading in addition to furthering his professional pursuits.⁷

The large volume of extant manuscripts related to Newton’s reading makes it difficult to study his reading comprehensively.⁸ None would doubt that Newton was passionate about books; he owned more than 2,100 books at the time of his death in 1727.⁹ Newton had inherited more than 300 books from his stepfather; he built the rest of his collection gradually.¹⁰ Some records of Newton’s purchases and of gifts from his friends survive, but he did not make consistent notes regarding his purchase or acquisition of books. His reading is itself a magnum opus: he left behind more than 2.5 million words of manuscript writings on theology—the equivalent of 100,000 double-spaced typewritten pages today.¹¹ Newton’s reading notes are diffusive and frequently disorganized, yet are also extensive, thoughtful, and questioning.¹² These manuscripts’ sheer quantity prevented them from being used fully until the twentieth century—and even so, they compose a large textual corpus.¹³

The majority of texts Newton read were theological, mathematical, or scientific in nature, rather than literary texts, with a notable exception—Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Newton owned Latin editions of Galileo’s Dialogue on Two Chief World Systems and Starry Messenger, as well as several copies of Descartes’s Geometry, a copy of his Principia Philosophiae, and a copy of his Meditations on First Philosophy.¹⁴ The literary texts that he owned were older works, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and his responses to them had little to do with observing their literary merit.¹⁵ Because of their allusions to shape-shifting and change, the Metamorphoses were important to practicing alchemists like Newton. Newton owned several editions of the Metamorphoses, which demonstrates his interest in the text, yet complicates analysis of how he read it. A pocket-sized Latin copy with several manuscript annotations included references to alchemical recipes, signs of heavy use, and additional marginal annotations.¹⁶ For Newton and other alchemists, the physical transformations described in the Metamorphoses could serve as clues for alchemical experimentation.¹⁷

Because the Metamorphoses could be useful in alchemical practice, Newton read this work differently than a person who read for content or entertainment. For example, Newton annotates the story of Actaeon and Diana in volume 3, book 2, of the Metamorphoses in ways that appear to make little sense, given the story line. In the story, Actaeon sees Diana naked and she silences him, threatening to change him into a stag if he cries out. Actaeon calls for his hunting party and is changed into a stag; his dogs then attack him, killing him. This is an exciting passage; however, Newton’s marginalia do not annotate the climactic moment when the dogs attack, but the section describing the various dogs that attack Actaeon. An excerpt from George Sandys’s translation of the Metamorphoses, a copy of which Newton also owned, shows the section that was heavily annotated:

While thus he doubts, his dogs their master view,

Black-foot, and Tracer, opening first, pursue:

Sure Tracer Gnossus, Black-foot Sparta bare.

Then all fell in, more swift than forced Air:

Spie, Ravener, Clime-cliff, these Arcadia bred:

Strong Fawn-bane, Whirl-wind, eager Follow-dread;

Hunter, for sent; for speed, Flight went before.

Fierce Salvage, lately gaunched by a Boar.¹⁸

Rather than offer criticism on the text or editorial commentary, or even a personal reaction to the text, Newton’s marginalia comprise a list in English next to the tiny volume’s long Latin catalogue of the attack dogs:

1 blackfoot

2 spio.

3 climb-cliff

4 fawn-bains

5 whirlwind

6 follow-dred

7 flight

8 hunter

9 salvage¹⁹

The list continues as the passage progresses, including an additional eleven entries of dogs, including “ranger, shepherd, greedy, catch, courses, blab, patch, tiger, ‘alce’ strong, blanch, mourner.” These footnote annotations, given in English next to a Latin text, resemble a list of vocabulary words, but are most likely an attempt to infer an alchemical recipe from the catalogue of names. Thomas Willard reinforces this interpretation: alchemists believed that “if [Ovid] knew the answers, they could be found in the poetry, no matter how much he hid them.”²⁰ The engaging plots of the Metamorphoses appear to have been less noteworthy to Newton in his search for alchemical clues, and the latter parts of this particular copy of the Metamorphoses are unmarked.

The proliferation of copies of the Metamorphoses that Newton owned testifies to the hold alchemy took on his curiosity during the late seventeenth century, and exemplifies one use he made of the books he read.²¹ If imaginative literature offers few strongholds for studying Newton as a leisurely reader, the imaginative use of texts and language in other forms was important to Newton’s reading notes and correspondence. His awareness of material texts and their language undergirds Newton’s use of print and narrative technique in the Principia. The traces of reading that Newton left in books show his intense physical engagement with texts: smudges, stray pen marks, odd notes, and calculations appear throughout his printed books, and Newton also dog-eared many pages for future reference.²²

The Authority of Textual Evidence

Newton’s correspondence with colleagues reveals the pressures between individuals and communities that penetrated Newton’s life and exhibits the centrality of publicity to his work. Even when Newton placed himself at a remove from social circles, his letters show that he remained the subject of gossip and discussion among his peers. Rumors of his death appear in two letters from Newton’s colleague and rival, Astronomer Royal John Flam-steed (1646–1719).²³ In the first letter, Flamsteed writes that “Mr. Hanway brought me news from London that you were dead but I shewed him your letter which proved the contrary. He had it from Sir C. Wren to whom he wrote immediately to satisfy him of the falsehood of that report.”²⁴ In a later letter, Flamsteed writes that “[your letter] served me to assure your friends that you were in health they having heard that you were dead again.”²⁵ The letters Newton wrote in response to Flamsteed become objects to be interpreted as proof that Newton himself was alive as well as proof that Flamsteed had intimate access to the celebrated, reclusive Newton. When the receipt of a letter from Newton can stand for Newton himself, this transferability indicates a slippage between persona, text, and author that I will later analyze in the reception of Newton’s works.

Their correspondence took place in the years shortly after the publication of the Principia, so Newton’s exchange with Flamsteed is contemporary to significant developments in his own public identity. If a letter could stand in for a person, a printed book like the Principia stands for its author and affects his reception. In spite of his colleagues’ seeming interest in Newton’s well-being, neither Flamsteed nor the others mentioned in his correspondence actually visited Newton to check on his health. Apart from Hanway’s visit to Flamsteed where the letter was produced as evidence, the men wrote to one another in lieu of face-to-face interaction: Newton to Flamsteed, Hanway to Wren, Flamsteed to Newton. This dated manuscript letter from Newton would represent Newton, even though the actual, verifiable Newton lived a short ride away from Greenwich in London.

Beyond quieting rumors of his own death, Newton had a broader historical stake in the authenticity of letters and the use of letters as evidence for life, as his theological reading shows. Multiple manuscript copies remain of Newton’s theological manuscript “Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and His Followers.” The origins of the Trinity in church history occupy a majority of the manuscript, which focuses on letters as proof of life and which questions textual authenticity. Robert Mark ley discusses this manuscript at length as “an incomplete, unabashedly heretical history” of the steps that “led to the triumph of Trinitarian doctrine in the fourth century.”²⁶ The m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 · The Weight of Authority in Newton’s Reading and Correspondence
• 2 · The Attractions of Print in the Principia
• 3 · Newtonian Popularization and Masculinity in Two Poems about Newton
• 4 · Extending Popularization in English-Language Editions of Francesco Algarotti’s Works
• 5 · Reading Popular Newtonianism at the New York Society Library, 1789–1792
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index