Elizabeth had pasted into her manuscript a photocopy of the diagram Newton drew to describe his experiments with his eye. In one of his notebooks he had drawn his own eyeball, exposed and swollen to fill the precious paper, and mapped it out with letters to reference points on its inner surface. He had sketched the path of light from a tiny sun, as well as a hand, severed from a body, grasping a bodkin the size of a rapier, pushing, prodding, and pressing on the eyeball without compassion. The rest of Newton’s body was missing from this picture, represented on the sheet of paper only by out-of-scale body parts, a hand at war with an eyeball.
The picture made me want to touch my own eye. Sitting there reading these descriptions at Elizabeth’s desk, I also found myself curious—was the miracle of colour to be reduced then to pressure on the eyeball, pressure made by some vague cosmos out there? My momentary experiment with the smooth end of a fountain pen produced only a lingering and uncomfortable pain and dark shapes that seemed to dance over the page. I couldn’t imagine repeating that act, protective of the filmy fragility of my eye, imagining piercings and burstings, blood and pain.
The bodkin in his eye socket was only a start. Next Elizabeth described how, curious about these stains of colour, Newton tried out and recorded other experiments. When he stared at the spring sun reflected in a mirror for as long as he could bear, he discovered that all the light-coloured objects in his rooms turned red and all the dark-coloured objects blue. The coloured phantasms, as before, pulsed and twisted until they slowly decayed and vanished. Then he found that, as before, in a darkened room he could still see a blue spot fading to white, circled by rings of red, yellow, green, blue, and purple long after he had stopped staring at the sun. When he opened his eyes the pale objects in the room had turned red again and the dark objects blue, as if by closing his eyes he had recreated the effect of the sun. Even more extraordinarily, he described in his notebook how he learned to conjure the phantasms by will. Just by imagining the sun stains in complete darkness, lying on his bed at midnight, he could bring them back as bright and clear as when he had first seen them.
Eventually Newton’s eyes were so damaged by staring at the sun, his retina so singed by these optical ghosts, that he was forced to lie down for three days in a darkened room; it took three long days for his sight to return.
I could, with all these details Elizabeth had described, imagine Newton lying there under a thin blanket in the dark of his rooms, perhaps more frustrated at having to stop working than conscious of his own pain. Among the scattered papers covered with the jottings and drawings of his optical and mathematical experiments, thinking through the new set of problems the experiments had produced: what were the coloured spectres and what made them linger and return at will?
And while Newton lay there, in the spring months of 1665, the plague was creeping towards Cambridge from London. In paragraphs like these, Elizabeth described the plague as a scuttling thing, carried by rats, insidious and malevolent:
The Great Plague of 1665–66 did not appear suddenly—it had been ripening and spreading its tendrils across Europe for years. The particular strain that killed so many in the summers of 1665 and 1666, however, was carried by rats coming ashore in London from ships at several landing points along the Thames between Stepney and St. Paul’s Covent Garden in April and May. From there the plague would follow the rats along the trade routes, radiating through and out from London.
Across Cambridge, while Newton lay in the dark waiting for his sight to return, rats, warmed by the spring sun, stirred in their burrows behind wainscots, under floorboards, and in thatches, and gathered their young about them. As temperatures rose, fleas stirred and bred in the warmth of rat down, blankets, and skin. As rats died by the thousands, some in only a matter of hours, the fleas sought out human blood, passing the bacillus into the human bloodstream. Within three to six days of an unfelt fatal fleabite, perhaps scratched for a moment, victims began to shiver and vomit, became quickly intolerant of light, and, seeking darkness, closed shutters, took to their beds, with aching bones in their backs, aches in their heads and limbs, swelling sores under their armpits. Joiners and carpenters boarded up houses; painters daubed red crosses on doors; the rich ordered their carriages and left for the country. Across England clergymen continued to predict apocalypse—God was visiting his wrath on a country of sinners, they said. Babylon is falling.13
A drawing of four consecutive panels, reproduced in The Alchemist, showed the progress of the plague from London to outlying cities and towns. In the first, panicked Londoners were drawn “flying” London for the towns and villages, climbing onto any half-watertight boat or barge. Then processions of people, miles long, were shown “flying by land,” ribboning their way out of the city by foot, sure now that death was behind them, not knowing that it was in their very clothes and skin. In the third box, death struck—here the processions were for the dead, searchers ahead, ringing their bells and heading for the plague pits. In the last panel there were more horizontal bodies than vertical ones—too few people to bury the dead.
According to Elizabeth’s sources, Cambridge actually fared rather well during the plague years, because, by careful planning, those “flying” London multitudes were largely kept out of the city. Elizabeth told of how John Herring, the mayor of Cambridge that year, called the aldermen to council to plan strategies as if the plague were an invading army already making its way north. Ahead of the enemy, the aldermen employed labourers to build temporary pesthouses on the outskirts of the city, on Midsummer Common and Coldhams Common.
As the plague approached, the men of the watch and ward, a kind of territorial army, boarded up all minor entrances to the city, purified the few people who were allowed to enter in smoke-filled waiting places, and poisoned all the city cats and dogs. At night searchers carried the sick and dead to the pesthouses, where the sick were put into isolation and tended. If any man, woman, or child survived at a pesthouse for a full lunar cycle—and some did—they were allowed to return to the city at two A.M., on the condition that they fumigate their lodging with lime-slaked smoke with the shutters closed for a full two hours before dawn. A Lazarus returned from the dead.
I could see from the reproduction of the old map pasted into The Alchemist that seventeenth-century Cambridge had had its own kind of moat, where the King’s Ditch had once been dug to keep out the Vikings, a ditch from one point of the River Cam to another making a protective circle of water. I traced with my finger on the map the irregular arch of the King’s Ditch round to where it joined the natural watercourse of the river and down to that strange oval of ground just next to Trinity, where the river passed around Garret Hostel Greene and where they would build the Wren Library in the 1670s.
Turning the map so that the oval lay to the left of the city, so that north was at the top, the map of Cambridge, ringed by water, suddenly seemed to me a reversed image of Newton’s drawing of his own eyeball, with the oval of Garret Hostel Greene as the pupil. I put the two pictures next to each other—Newton’s eye looking to the right and the eye of Cambridge looking to the left. Another coincidence. One image echoing the other. In the spring of 1665, while Cambridge aldermen were working hard to keep out all infections from the fragile city, protecting and closing down all its borders and entrances, Newton, in his rooms at Trinity, was sticking sharp objects into his own eye socket, opening it up in order to understand the laws of light.
I turned the prism, Newton’s prism, over in my hand and watched its imprisoned colours glint at me, pools of blue and the occasional flash of red. It seemed to have a knowledge behind its hard surfaces, pools into which I might never reach, secrets it would never tell; it was as silent as Elizabeth herself.
But Elizabeth wasn’t silent—I had her words; I could reach into these pages and find her, as she pursued Newton through Cambridge streets in search of better tools to understand light. Why, she asked, did Newton stay in a plague-stricken city after all the other undergraduates and fel
lows had been sent away for their own safety in July 1665? The answer was the prism.
In August 1665, Newton would have seen the wagons and the searchers making their way around the streets, their bells tolling, carrying the sick and the dead on carts past Trinity and down Jesus Lane to the pesthouses out on the common. He would have watched the strange effects of light through billowing smoke as the wind blew through the city’s empty streets, a wind blown across the Fens from the Urals. Cambridge would have been surreal that summer: embattled, boarded-up windows and gateways, tolling bells and silences, smells of brimstone and pitch.
For a man sleepless, half starved, and with his eyes burned and exhausted from experiment, a man whose imagination was fired by thoughts of apocalypse and prophesy, the city must have seemed like a vision from Revelations. At a time when for many others the four horsemen of the apocalypse were virtually at the gates of the city, it was as if the plague simply did not exist for the young philosopher. He saw it, perhaps even felt his own fragility in it, but fragility was no more of any consequence than the pain in his eyes caused by the optical experiments.
Newton stayed because he was not finished; his questions were still unanswered. He would not leave his laboratory rooms, where his optical notes and mathematical papers were laid out with minute calculations and summations of infinitesimal arcs of curves and algebraic symbols, not for the four horsemen, not for anything. Believing in spirits as he did and in the miracles of alchemy, and watching his own extraordinary success, he must have felt that something divine was passing through him, perhaps even that it had conferred an immortality on him that would protect him from the plague. But he had also reached the limits of what he could do with his own eye. Now he needed a prism to answer new questions he had framed about the composition of colour. The prism would come to him if he waited—some of the finest glass sellers in Europe would converge on Stourbridge Fair in late August.
Near the end of that first summer of plague in Cambridge, Isaac Newton bought a prism at Stourbridge Fair. One of his relatives recorded that memory many years later:
In August 1665 Sr I, who was then not 24 bought at Sturbridge Fair a prism to try some experiments upon Descartes book of colours and when he came home he made a hole in his shutter & darkened the room & put his prism between that & the wall found instead of a circle the light made with strait sides & circular ends &c. wch convinced him immediately that Descartes was wrong & he then found out his own Hypothesis of colours though he could not demonstrate it for want of another prism for wch he staid till next Sturbridge Fair & then proved that he had before found out.14
Puzzlingly, Newton remembered buying a prism at Stourbridge Fair in the year that the records show the fair was cancelled because of the plague.15 But, given that the cancellation was not announced until August, it is likely that many of the traders who came by water, setting off from their homes in Europe long before they could possibly have heard about the outbreak of the plague, would have continued sailing the fen waterways to the north, reaching Stourbridge Common without coming anywhere near the city, or its watch and ward. The aldermen might then have taken the view that so long as the traders stayed out of the city, the fair posed only a moderate health risk to the citizens of Cambridge, given that most of the students and fellows had already left the city in July. So Newton stayed to buy the prism and wander through the curiously empty and depleted fair, and when the sun’s lowered elevation in late August or September brought those first optical experiments of 1665 to a close, he returned to his hometown Woolsthorpe, where sometime in that autumn or the following autumn, in his mother’s orchard, he determined the basis for the law of gravitation.
On his return to Cambridge the following spring, Newton began a new series of light experiments in April 1666 with an additional prism in his rooms in Trinity.16 This time he turned his largest room into a giant eyeball, with a hole in the shutter of his window acting as the retina. Through the hole in the shutter he directed and turned and reangled the rays from the sun which fell on the shutters of his room for about two hours a day around noon. Newton would be ready, waiting for the sun to travel round, busying himself in preparation or writing up his notes from the previous day, laying out paper and pens, ready to record the details of his complex and varied experiments, for the sun would not oblige him for long. He had been waiting all winter for this.
Other natural philosophers before Newton had used prisms to experiment with light and colour, including Descartes,17 but no one yet had made the projected spectrum large enough or let the rainbow-freighted ray travel far enough. Newton let the beam of coloured light travel twenty-two feet from the hole in the shutters at his window to the wall at the other end of his room; there, where the beam met the wall, it made a rainbow-coloured shape three times as long as it was wide. He coined the word spectrum, or ghost, to describe the lozenge shape that glowed on his wall, narrow in the middle with curved edges. The shape of his ghost was conclusive—the seven coloured rays from the shutter hole were travelling at different speeds, for otherwise they would have made a circle. This was how colour was made: rays of light travelling at different speeds.
Gradually, through a series of experiments with several prisms, Newton came to prove that colours are simple; white light is the mixture. Colours make white; colours come first; white is a hybrid. This claim was a simple one, but it also turned current knowledge upside down. Until 1666 white had been associated with simplicity and purity. Now Newton argued—and indeed had proved—that individual colours were first principles, pure and simple. White was made of colour. Jan Vermeer had come to know this too by a different route, also using camera obscuras and prisms at around the same time as Newton’s experiments in Cambridge. So had the Dutch painters de Heem and Osias Beert, who studied the whites of oyster flesh in their table pieces. White, the Dutch painters knew, was laden with other colours, a heady and complex mixture—never pure. In Cambridge, Newton had proved it.
But with the smoke and smell of burning brimstone and superstition seeping through shutters everywhere in the city, at a time when God’s wrath seemed visible on every street and punishment ubiquitous, few might have been interested in a young man’s claims that he had worked out how white was made. For the moment the young man was silent. He checked his notes. He honed his observations and kept his own counsel.
It was when I finished that last page of Elizabeth’s chapter that I glimpsed the rubbed-out pencil annotations on her script for the first time, in the right margin, next to the section on Revelations and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Handwritten and erased, surviving only as tiny imprints, those marks might have escaped my notice if the bright morning light, falling on the paper at a certain angle, had not brought them into visibility for a second. Elizabeth Vogelsang had written in the margins of this section two questions:
Did he think he was invincible? Had someone made him think he was invincible?
And then, sometime later, she had rubbed both questions out.
Newton, Elizabeth believed, had come to think himself invincible. In 1665 and 1666 he believed his body to be beyond the reach of plague or death. And she believed that someone had been responsible for that Faustian audacity.
Eleven
I met Kit a week or so later down at the café in Chesterton; afterwards she walked with me down Landing Lane and Ferry Path, the towpath into town. She was heading for her stall, I for the library. We had, for once, time to spend. It was one of those fine October days—the sun on the river, bushes and trees along the riverbank, a spectrum of greens. From time to time runners jogged past us. Reflected colours ran from the brightly painted barges into the water. Greens—so many greens all around us: the silver-green of the underside of the willow trees, the emerald of the grass along the bank, the mottled grey-brown-greens of the scrubland of the common on the other side. Virginia Woolf had once described the riverbanks as being on fire on either side of the Cam, but there was no such fire here now. Or at least n
ot yet. There was red—rowan berries, rose hips, pyracanthas—but the red sat against the astonishing palette of autumn green like the sparks of a newly lit fire, like drops of crimson blood in the hedgerows. It was yet to pull itself to a blaze or a haemorrhage. And those famous willow trees she had described as weeping in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders, had been pollarded since she walked here, so there was no elegant weeping for them anymore, only the flurry of silver-green leaves, shorn demented heads against the sky. The river still reflected everything that passed over it, as it had done for Woolf, who would drown herself in another river in 1941: sky, bridges, red berries, and from time to time the colours melted, forked and quaking, as rowers oared their way through the reflections, only to form again as if their surfaces had never been broken.
“Crimson,” Kit said, waking me from a muddled reverie on colour and light. “That’s what everyone wants right now. Shades of burgundy and claret. I’ve just dyed a whole load of cotton shirts—they’ve all come out slightly different shades, depending on the porousness of the original material. Perfect. Won’t look like a job lot. Bet I sell all of them by the end of the week.”
“What? Sorry…Missed that.” I was watching the ripples in the water fanning out from one of the rowing boats.
“Shirts, you know, the stall. Your mind’s wandering again. You asked why my hands are so red. I’ve been dyeing clothes and I forgot to wear gloves. Berry colours are in again, so I’ve been dying shirts red—for the stall.”
“Sorry, yes. Lemon juice might do it. He did that too.”
“Who did?”
“Newton…dyed things.”
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