was his Puritan faith. The teaching of the era centred around the great universities was supported and sustained by the orthodoxy of the Anglican Church. And, although the Restoration had heralded a religious tolerance that would remain a central pillar of British society, Newton was expected to subscribe officially to the tenets of the Anglican Church and to keep his Puritan beliefs to himself.
But, in spite of the potential problems offered by his religious leanings and the extra barrier they created between him and other, orthodox, students, his Puritan ethics also fuelled his drive to learn and focused his thoughts and energies. The distress his mother had caused him early in life had left Newton damaged and emotionally impotent. Puritanism offered him a world with strict emotional and sensual limits in which he did not have to find excuses for his inability to love – a world in which the twin pillars of God and Knowledge (the search for which was a God-given responsibility) could replace most other needs. With Puritanism and the thirst for understanding as his guides, he could at least attempt to shun sex, ignore any lingering desire to marry or to have a family, and keep in check his material ambitions and social goals.
In his first academic year, at least, Newton was preoccupied with sin and with the slightest let-up in religious observance – an obsession which led later in that year to the purchase of the notebooks in which he confessed his misdeeds, past and present. Although he lightened up a little and enjoyed the odd ale and game of cards in a tavern later in his postgraduate days, during his first few months in Cambridge, outside his lectures and tutorials, Newton existed in a permanent state of isolation – lonely, disorientated and trying to feel his way into an alien world of new-found but largely scorned freedom.
His was not the Puritanism of the political extremist (of which there were still many following the turbulent days of civil war and regicide); nor was he the Puritan of the Victorian caricature – the solemn kill-joy who saw debauchery and evil in all the doings of his fellow man. Newton was of the type that elevated the principles of hard work and dedication to learning as the highest hopes of humanity. He believed that the acquisition of knowledge and the unravelling of Nature’s truths were to the greater glory of God. But to his contemporaries he must have appeared a flashing beacon of misanthropy.
If he professed indifference towards almost every other student he encountered, they must have been even more dismissive of him. He could suffer this, and indeed appeared to care little what his fellow students thought of him. An example of his high-mindedness comes from the oldest letter in Newton’s hand, written to a sick friend around 1661:
Loving friend,
It is commonly reported that you are sick. Truly I am sorry for that. But I am much more sorry that you got your sickness (for that they say too) by drinking too much. I earnestly desire you first to repent of your having been drunk & then to seek to recover your health. And if it please God that you ever be well again then have a care to live healthfully & soberly for time to come. This will be very well pleasing to all your friends, especially to
Your very loving friend.
I.N.9
During his early days at university it was not just his pious detachment from everyday pleasures that so alienated Newton: he did little to encourage others to like him. An example of this was his decision to become a money-lender.
It is easy to imagine Newton at the age of nineteen or twenty growing to accept that he could not mix easily with the other students. He had also been left to his own devices to supplement Hannah’s allowance, and by this time he was certainly showing an active interest in money. Indeed, one of his repeated confessions in the list of sins of the Fitzwilliam Notebook is that of paying too much attention to money: ‘Setting my heart on money more than God’, as he put it. This was followed by several incidents of ‘relapse’.10 Being the meticulous record-keeper for which he was later renowned, Newton noted every transaction in another notebook he purchased at Trinity:
His Puritan caution showed in the fact that he never lent more than £1 to a debtor, and when he did deal with such large sums his nervousness shows in a note beside this transaction: ‘to be paid on Friday’.11
Newton was never a big-time loan shark, but by the end of his second year business was flourishing and he kept it up until he became a man of independent means two years later. Quite how he started in business is unclear. Bearing in mind his own precarious financial position when he first arrived at Trinity, one can only assume he took a risk by making a short-term loan and then began to realise the potential of the venture.
A short time later, things began to improve on other fronts. Eighteen months after arriving at Trinity, Newton managed to change room-mate. John Wickins, the son of the Master of Manchester Grammar School, entered Trinity as a pensioner early in 1663 and met Newton towards the end of his first term. Sadly, aside from a few comments about Newton’s hypochondria and brief descriptions of his work patterns, Wickins, who lived with Newton for over two decades (until he gave up his fellowship in 1683), left little record of their close association.12 The most detailed recollection that he passed on to his son Nicholas in old age was a brief description of his first meeting with Newton, in 1663:
My Father’s intimacy with him came by mere accident. Father’s first chamber-fellow being very disagreeable to him he retired one day into the walks where he found Mr Newton solitary & dejected. Upon entering into discourse they found their cause of retirement the same & thereupon agreed to shake off their present disorderly companions & chum together, which they did as soon as conveniently they could & so continued as long as my father stayed at college.13
Wickins’s reticence in discussing what must have been one of the most important relationships of his life is odd. He and Newton separated in 1683 under a cloud, and, despite Wickins living for another thirty-six years, the two men never met again.
So, who exactly was John Wickins, and what was the nature of his relationship with Newton? From the story of their introduction, it is clear they must have been of similar temperament. Both were unhappy with their ‘disorderly companions’ and each quickly saw a kindred spirit in the other. Their staying room-mates for the next twenty years (including a move in 1673 to rooms in Great Court) is evidence of their closeness.
Wickins also became Newton’s assistant. He regularly transcribed experiment notes and helped set up apparatus and monitor investigations. Their rooms became a live-in laboratory, at first strewn with documents and simple home-made optical instruments but later crowded with furnaces and bottles of chemicals. Wickins eventually became a clergyman, married and had a family. Shortly after his departure, Newton sent him a parcel of Bibles to be distributed to his flock in the village of Stoke Edith, near Monmouth. The only other correspondence occurred some thirty years later, when Wickins wrote to ask his erstwhile room-mate for a further donation of Bibles and attempted to start a friendly exchange. Newton duly sent the Bibles but brushed off any subtle overtures of Wickins by ending his letter with the rather curt ‘I am glad to hear of your good health, & wish it may long continue, I remain … Newton’.14
For all the attempts that have been made to find clues in the meagre correspondence between the two men, the strongest evidence for an acrimonious break lies in the fact that Wickins neither wrote a word about Newton nor related more than a scrap of anecdote about their time together. When, soon after Newton’s death in 1727, Robert Smith, Plumian Professor of Natural History at Cambridge, wrote to Nicholas
