Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White
after arriving back at Trinity on 25 March.
The examination consisted of three days of oral questioning in the college chapel, followed on the fourth day by a written paper. On 1 October a tolling bell summoned the candidates to learn their fate before the senior fellows: ‘by the tolling of the little bell at 8 in the morning the seniors are called & the day after at one o’clock to swear them that are chosen’.19
With the fellowship came both responsibilities and privileges. The most important benefit was that Newton now had a job for life and could continue to study at his leisure, pursuing whatever academic route he wished. The college provided a stipend of £2 and a small allowance for ceremonial costumes and academic robes. He was also given a room free of charge, and upon passing his Master of Arts examination the following spring he was accepted as a major fellow and was granted an increase in his stipend to £2.13s. 4d. as well as an improved livery allowance of £1.3s. 4d.*
Newton was clearly delighted by the turn of events. He had pushed back barriers in science and mathematics, had made truly significant discoveries, had declared his social status as a scholar and a gentleman, and had risen through the ranks of the academic élite. Now he knew he was out of reach of the restraining hands of his past. And, for the only time in his entire life, he let his hair down.
For the following year, as he acquired his MA and rose to the rank of major fellow (in March 1668), he led the life of a comfortably placed and successful young man. Uncharacteristically, he visited taverns with Wickins, played bowls, and cast aside the image of the single-minded Puritan, even recording in his notebook a loss of fifteen shillings playing cards.20 He paid for his and Wickins’s rooms to be decorated by a professional painter, and bought new furniture, carpets and pictures and a whole wardrobe of expensive clothes.*
Because Newton was footing most of the bill, he got to choose the colour scheme and the details of the decoration, revealing a new personality trait – an obsession with the colour crimson. New cushions, chairs, bedspreads and curtains were almost all dominated by crimson. He surrounded himself with the colour, and it was a fixation that persisted into old age. In a list of possessions drawn up by Catherine Conduitt after her uncle’s death, there are recorded ‘a crimson mohair bed complete with case curtains of crimson Harrateen’ and, in the dining-room, ‘a crimson settee’. Other listed items included crimson drapes and valances in the bedroom, a crimson easy chair, and six crimson cushions in the back parlour of the house.21
Why Newton was so struck with the colour we will probably never know, but the obsession went back a long way. As a teenager, in 1659 he had recorded in the Morgan Notebook some three dozen recipes for the formulation of coloured dyes, and the vast majority of these were for different shades of red. An example is ‘Take some of the clearest blood of a sheep & put it into a bladder & with a needle prick holes in the bottom of it then hang it up to dry in the sun, & dissolve it in alum water according as you have need.’22 Newton’s optical experiments are also suggestive of his interest in colour, but the reason for his particular interest in crimson is nowhere explained. It would be easy to draw from this predilection conclusions about his underlying psychological drives – that he was obsessed with the colour of blood, for example – but such ideas contribute little towards a sensible understanding of the man. Rather than revealing any deep insights into his motivations or neuroses, a fascination with crimson probably demonstrates little more than an odd quirk of personality. It is interesting because it shows Newton to have a human side – a weakness for something so materialistic as colourful decorations.
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