Headnote: This is a page intended primarily to be of use for those interested in the blog-book session coming up in the Saturday morning session. It’s as near as I can recover from the many, many versions of the proposal I used to sell my upcoming book to an American publisher — Harcourt as was, now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt — and a British one, Faber & Faber.
I don’t mean to suggest that this is a generalizable model, just an example of one approach that worked in the marketplace. As noted in the Wiki page for the session — to be moderated by David Munger and myself—besides the fact that this proposal worked, the other feature of note is that the book that evolved from this proposal differs from this ancestral form in key ways, while maintaining a clear connection to its origins.
Enough throat clearing. Here’s the document:
Newton and the Counterfeiter
A strange and fatal story of genius, crime and punishment
A book proposal by
Thomas Levenson
The End:
On March 22, 1699 an execution convoy set out from Newgate prison, bound for Tyburn, carrying half a dozen convicts on their final journey.
Some of the condemned men traveled in style. John Arthur, a famous highwayman, sat at ease in a coach. The mob cheered as he paused at public houses along the way, arriving at the gallows as drunk as he cared to be. William Chaloner enjoyed no such luxury.
The most notorious counterfeiter of his day, Chaloner once boasted that he had coined 30,000 guineas of false gold – an astonishing sum. But coining counted as high treason in Britain, and traitors to the state went to their deaths in exemplary misery.
Chaloner rattled over the streets on a rough sledge. There were no sewers in seventeenth century London, and little in the way of gutters. As the sledge bounced along, filth fountained, human waste splattering Chaloner’s clothes, arms, and face. No one bought him gin; no one cheered his name. Once Chaloner reached the execution ground, stinking, wet, cold, and mercilessly sober, the end came grindingly slow.
The punishment on the books for traitors had been handed down from medieval times: a noose tied loosely to prolong the suffering, death at last by slow strangulation; then, after the body was cut down, it was drawn and quartered; last, the head was raised on a pike for the edification of the crowd. Chaloner’s fate was only slightly less gruesome: hanging on a short rope, yielding a long, slow, agonizing strangulation, and then, once the hangman’s dance finally ended, the rush for souvenirs. The whole show lasted for hours.
A week before, the man who doomed the coiner to a traitor’s death received a last, pathetic letter. Chaloner wrote:
“ O dear sir no body can save me but you O God my God I shall be murderd unless you save me O I hope God will move yor heart with mercy and pitty to do this thing for me…”
Isaac Newton, the victor after three years of war against Chaloner, did not trouble himself to respond.Overview
I propose a book that tells the tale of this unique confrontation, one that matched London’s master criminal against the greatest scientist in history. The crime story constitutes the core of the book, a narrative of deceit, murder, pursuit and punishment. It is an account that would make a fabulous novel, were it not true. But it is the historical reality –- along with the man at the center of the action– that makes this book much more than a crime thriller. Rather, it is the best kind of popular history: a single, simple story that illuminates the essence of the times in which the handful of lives and deaths it records played out.
No other book on Newton has focused on this aspect of his career – his adventures as a criminal nemesis — nor have even the most recent of them explored the deeper insight into Newton and his times that the confrontation with the counterfeiter reveals. This story becomes important, rather than merely interesting, as it reveals one of the first battles in the ongoing war between science and traditional religious faith. Newton was a man divided, at once a devout Christian and the author of the scientific approach that threatened his deep faith. Unwittingly, Chaloner had the misfortune to remind Newton of the vulnerability of God. Newton had his revenge on the counterfeiter — but the gap between his belief and his knowledge remained unhealed. Scientific reason corrodes belief; the power we gain over nature corrodes the certainty of revelation. That loss tormented Newton –- and the tension between science and faith that he experienced so strongly haunts us to this day.
The Players
William Chaloner was a vicious man, without doubt. But in his own sphere, he was brilliant, an acknowledged leader. In just seven years, propelled by five or six skillfully arranged deaths, he rose to the top of London’s criminal world. Around 1690, he abandoned a wife and an unknown number of children in the countryside. For a short while after coming to London, he sold old clothes, but within a year, he made his first killing as a stool pigeon, informing on alleged traitorous conspiracies. Finally he turned to counterfeiting. Before he was done, he had forged his way into fantastic wealth, enough to set up a house in Knightsbridge (a fine address then and now), a service of silver plate, and influential friends in parliament and at court.
And then he overreached, and chose to challenge Isaac Newton. Newton, newly arrived in London to take the post of Warden of the Mint, was charged with protecting the King’s coinage from counterfeiters. Chaloner launched a frontal assault on the new warden, accusing Newton of corruption –- or worse –- and of botching the job of manufacturing new currency. He offered, fox-and-henhouse-style, to help the Mint out with the task. Newton recognized the threat, and bitterly resented the insult. Acting on his suspicions, he set out to prove Chaloner guilty of coining, and hence treason to the crown.
In Isaac Newton, Chaloner’s nemesis, we find the man who more than any other embodies what we now call the scientific revolution. He discovered the laws of mechanics, the study of forces and motion which explain everything from why bridges stand up (or fall down) to guiding a rocket from Earth to Mars. His theory of gravity unified the understanding of events on earth with the forces that guide the cosmos – a radical break with the earlier view that saw heaven and earth as utterly different realms. His studies of optics launched the science of light that we use now to analyze the farthest reaches of space and time. His invention of the calculus created the mathematical language, that, as one successor famously put it, nature itself seems to speak. There is a reason Newton is remembered as the greatest scientist in history. He was.
But most people do not know that Isaac Newton, for all of his breakthrough discoveries, was a man of faith so deep that he devoted far more of his adult life to theology than he ever did to science. They do not know that his faith drove him to a secret career as a would-be magician, an alchemist laboring in a secluded workshop in which he pursued occult knowledge and divine mysteries. In work hidden to most of his contemporaries, he devoted decades to what we would now deride as fantasy: the alchemist’s search for the secret method that would transform base metal into gold. He was no mere greedy profiteer. Newton pursued his hidden study not for love of money, but in the desperate search for a direct encounter with God, with the divine spark that alchemists believed governed all transformation in nature. In the end, his quest failed, leaving him at the point of madness –- and then on to his confrontation with London’s master criminal.
Plan of the Book
Newton and the Counterfeiter centers on a focused telling of Newton’s pursuit of Chaloner. The larger themes of discovery, magic, the search for God and the threat posed by science will all be there – but only as they emerge from the specific incidents that drive the narrative forward.
This focus on a central story means that the book will be fairly short – about 60,000-80,000 words long. The model here is Dava Sobel’s Longitude, a story with truly world-spanning significance, spun from a tightly controlled account of a single, fraught quest.
Newton and the Counterfeiter breaks down into six main sections and an epilogue. They are:
Chapter One: The Professor goes to London
Newton’s carriage ride to London in 1695 marked the beginning of Newton’s public life; at the same time, it brought to end the most extraordinary scientific career in history. The grand drama of Newton’s life began in the summer of 1665, the plague year. Newton was then twenty-three years old, a young scholar at Cambridge University. As the towns emptied he retreated to his home in rural Lincolnshire. There, for two years, he confronted revolutionary mathematical ideas. When he was done, he had invented the calculus, the mathematics that studies change over time. At that moment, alone in all the world, Newton possessed the tools that would allow him to explain the patterns humankind observed in nature. To this day, that plague season is known as Newton’s Annus Mirabilis –- his miracle year.
It would take him another two decades to turn his breakthrough into the full Newtonian system of the world. He kept his discoveries quiet, revealing only the occasional hint. But pressure from his friends, and the desire to confound his foes won out in the end, so when the astronomer Edmund Halley begged him to explain the motion of comets, he compiled the work of two decades, publishing his masterpiece in 1687. In the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or the Principia, as it is commonly known, Newton derived and then used the laws of motion and gravity to explain everything from the flight of a cannonball to the tides to the motion of heavenly objects. All this he accounted for through the mathematical analysis of a handful of concepts — force, matter and motion.
In many ways, this Newtonian abstraction remains the foundational idea, the constitution through which the republic of modern science governs. But in its claims, methods, its power over nature and nature’s ways, the new science clearly threatened conventional faith. Newton understood the threat from the beginning. As far back as his undergraduate years at Cambridge he recognized that if everything in nature could be accounted for simply as different combinations of matter in motion, God’s role was necessarily diminshed. What role could God play in Newton’s new world of whirring atoms and their patterns? An insignificant one. Newton himself asked what might lie behind his clockwork cosmos. He concluded that there could be nothing, “except God” – and then crossed those two words out.
And yet, young Newton believed absolutely in a God so commanding that he came to defend the Unitarian heresy that even Jesus was subordinate to the one God’s will. Hence the tragic edge to Newton’s story. Newton was fully a man of his time – what else could he be? He was the first to sense the full implications of the confrontation between modern science and the claims of religious belief; he was, in other words, the man Newton, but not truly a Newtonian man.
Hints of a crisis came in 1693, with what has become known as “the black year.” That June, Newton disappeared from public view for approximately six months, falling into a silence so profound that the rumor spread that he had died. Newton never spoke of what had happened to trigger the crisis, but soon afterwards, he let friends know that he wanted some kind of official position that would allow him to leave Cambridge, his home of thirty-five years. In 1695, the opportunity came, and Isaac Newton came to London to take up a seemingly prosaic job for the greatest mathematician of the age: managing His Majesty’s Mint.
Chapter Two: Base Metal and Gold
In fact, Newton was a more appropriate choice for Warden than his patrons knew. The Mint, after all, was in charge of assessing the purity of silver and gold, and of manufacturing uniform coins, each precisely the correct weight. Newton well understood the challenges involved. From almost the beginning of his time in Cambridge, Newton had obsessively explored the occult wisdom that promised to transform base metals into gold, experimenting in a shed built into the wall of Trinity College. The work was a fine prelude to his tasks at the Mint, as his alchemical research turned on precision measurement, accurate tests of purity, and a mastery of the techniques of working hot metal. But that was an unintended consequence of an obsession that seems utterly removed from the realm of reason and science in which he was the acknowledged master.
Why? What made him pursue a line of inquiry so at odds with the implications of his own greatest discoveries? It wasn’t greed; Newton did not care much for money in his Cambridge days, and ultimately died rich without magical assistance. He was driven instead by a deeper motivation: the rescuing of his faith.
To alchemists, and emphatically to Newton, God intervenes directly in nature, providing the spark that produces all change, all growth. Alchemy sought to understand the method by which the divine hand works its miraculous transformations – and hence the attempt to turn lead into gold had nothing to do with greed. As Newton wrote, “Alchemy tradeth not wth metals as ignorant vulgars think…but rather to profit and edifcation inducing first ye knowledge of God…”
Thus, for Newton, alchemy provided a solution to the conundrum his physics posed. God may not be necessary to drive motion in the heavens; but the deity remained absolutely present as the agent of all change in nature. If only he could replicate the process by which the divine “grew” gold out of lesser methods, he would have incontrovertibly affirmed the presence of God in daily experience. That desperate hope intoxicated the young Newton, and he would spend twenty years passionately seeking that intimacy with the divine. The culmination of his quest came in 1693, when he completed his most ambitious attempt to derive the secret of alchemical transformation. He appears to have convinced himself that he had found a method that could grow pure substances out of base metal, using “oyles shine in ye dark & fit for magicall uses.” At last, it seemed, he had glimpsed the trace of God’s hand in nature. Several months of intense labor and writing followed — culminating in the final, apparently crushing proof that he had failed.
Simultaneously, Newton suffered another catastrophe: the end of a relationship that was the closest he ever came to romantic love. Four years earlier he had met a handsome, accomplished Swiss mathematician named Nicholas Fatio de Duillier. Fatio, twenty years younger than Newton, was also entranced by alchemy. Beginning as a disciple –- and then protégé — he swiftly became the older man’s closest companion.
There is no evidence that the pair ever went beyond Platonic infatuation. But Newton, a famously celibate misogynist, nonetheless revealed himself as vulnerable. In his last letters to Fatio in the spring of 1693, the great man came close to begging, pleading with him to come to Cambridge. Shortly after Newton finished his last alchemical treatise, Fatio cancelled a visit to Cambridge. Newton replied urgently, clearly panicked. A second letter pressed Fatio to visit; further messages promised money. Fatio declined. That summer the younger man fled London and dropped out of sight for a year.
Recent research has confirmed what almost all of Newton’s contemporaries did not know: that these two crises were followed by Newton’s mental collapse. In the summer of 1693 Newton fell into what seems to have been an acute episode of paranoid depression. Here we learn the details of that black year referred to briefly in the preface: Newton’s paranoia; his paranoid letters to friends; the rumors of his death; of a mysterious fire in his chambers; the sad, uncharacteristically humble notes of apology that followed his recovery; the hasty finality of his decision to abandon the university. Newton was a high – strung, secretive man all his life, but the admittedly sketchy records of these few months add up to a portrait of true madness.
Six months later, he recovered — but not entirely. After his lost year he never again attempted independent, original scientific or alchemical research. And so it was off to London, there to serve in a post most incumbents treated as a sinecure. But any hopes Newton might have had for an uneventful start were crushed at the start, for almost as soon as he took up the Wardenship, London’s most notorious counterfeiter, the coiner William Chaloner, mounted what was in effect, an attempted coup at the Mint.
Chapter Three: Money for Nothing
In this chapter, a parallel to the previous one, we meet William Chaloner. Chaloner was not a writing man, so there are fewer direct sources to draw upon than Newton left us. But he was a notorious figure, the subject of at least one contemporary pulp biography, so there is enough material to give rise to a compelling portrait of a thoroughly bad man.
This much is known: In the 1680s, he was living in a provincial village. He married and fathered at least one child. He was poor. Poverty was always hateful to him, so some time around 1690, he abandoned his family and moved to London. There he became a jappaner, a man who sold used clothes that had been re-dyed black.
There was no possibility of wealth in the old clothes trade, though, and most jappaners barely scraped by – but not Chaloner, who now revealed himself to be a genuinely unusual man, an innovator who was in his own way brilliant. There were no real police in Britain then — none would exist until Sir Robert Peel organized London’s force in 1829. Worse, there were no reliable methods to identify individuals –- no fingerprints, no photographs, nothing but the web of human relations that connected one person to another. What passed for law enforcement was entirely ad hoc, based loosely on a system of rewards for information and the threat of force.
Chaloner effectively exploited both sides of the law. He won his first big score by persuading two printers to run off about forty copies of a treasonous document. Anticipating the double game played by Jonathan Wilde, the historical “thief taker” at the heart of David Liss’s recent novel A Conspiracy of Paper, Chaloner then turned the two men in. They were hanged, and Chaloner pocketed the £1,000 reward.
Chaloner next apprenticed himself to a master coiner, a man skilled at the complex art of striking accurate copies of gold coins. He turned out to be a swift and expert student – able within a year to add his own innovations to the counterfeiter’s tools. One challenge faced by both legitimate officials and by counterfeiters was the etching of clear designs and deep grooves in coins. Chaloner invented a pair of machines that could mark metal with the desired precision. The two devices were in fact good enough that he once again managed to “fun” the government (his term), and win an award of £200 pounds for the creation of what he intended to use as criminal implements. His ultimate goal was to persuade the mint to adopt his inventions – thus giving him control of a technology that would allow him to make exact copies of the king’s currency.
This was the high point of Chaloner’s career. He bought a house in an expensive neighborhood, Knightsbridge, furnished it well, and spread enough of his wealth around to gain significant influence in Parliament. By the time the new Warden appeared in town, Chaloner was rich and apparently destined to get richer still. The untested newcomer seemed to offer him yet another opportunity—and so he proposed to Newton that one of his confederates, Thomas Holloway, might be of use in the mint, supervising the making of new coins. Newton did not take the bait. Instead, he added Chaloner’s to his list of suspicious men to watch.
Chapter Four: First Blood
In Newton’s early days as warden, though, Chaloner remained low on his list of priorities. The coiner’s sudden rise attracted little comment at first, and the reason was not that Chaloner was discreet (he wasn’t); nor that official London turned a blind eye (it didn’t – it just had few effective ways to look); nor even that Chaloner was simply better at his criminal craft than other would-be robber barons (though he was). Rather, he simply took advantage of the opportunities presented by the seemingly mundane problem of the exchange rate between silver and gold. Silver shillings were undervalued against gold guineas, compared to the value of silver on the European mainland. Trading on this disparity, speculators sucked the silver coinage out of England, trading it for gold in Holland and France. That left London and the countryside desperately short of ready money –- the smaller denominations used by most small businesses. Paper money and other financial instruments were just beginning to emerge, and so at the very moment modern capitalism was emerging in Britain, hard cash was ferociously in demand. Without enough money in circulation, the British economy was stumbling just at the point of rapid growth. Chaloner was one of the first to recognize the opportunity that the shortage of cash presented.
Chaloner’s chance to make a truly impressive score came when the government decided to solve the currency crisis in one grand stroke, by replacing the entire stock of coins in Britain with new currency, weighed and measured precisely. Newton as warden was in charge of the massive industrial operation — the re-coinage that would, it was hoped, correct the mis-pricing of silver. (Newton’s secret alchemical training paid off during the production process. He had to manage the flow of silver and gold through the Mint in half ton lots, and his accounts to the Treasury were accurate to one tenth the weight of a silver penny.)
The currency reform meant that anyone with access to Mint machines and plans would have an unprecedented opportunity to grow rich – which is why Chaloner tried to infiltrate Newton’s operation. But while Chaloner understood his moment better than most, he misjudged his man. In his eagerness to gain access to the inner operations of the Mint, he challenged Newton directly. After his failure to infiltrate Newton’s staff, Chaloner sent a pamphlet to Parliament in which he charged Newton with incompetence, or worse, outright corruption. A special parliamentary committee convened to investigate, and Chaloner, with his connections and his flair for the well-placed bribe, had the advantage. The investigating committee partly endorsed his claims and ordered Newton to let Chaloner into the Mint to examine its machines and to demonstrate his own techniques for manufacturing currency.
Newton angrily refused, and tried to turn the tables by arresting Chaloner on counterfeiting charges. He had what he thought was a solid case –- a confession about a new coining operation from Thomas Holloway, the man Chaloner had already tried to place on Newton’s staff. With Chaloner in jail, and Holloway under the Warden’s protection, Newton was confident enough to move to trial.
The ensuing hearing was a fiasco, proving that the Cambridge don did have lessons to learn about life in the big city. Newgate Prison was a sieve. Chaloner had regular visitors, plenty of money, and a justified reputation as a dangerous man to annoy. Previous witnesses against him had ended up dead, so when Holloway received the message he should consider taking a long journey, Newton’s prize witness took the hint and left for Scotland, beyond the reach of Newton’s English writs. The case against Chaloner collapsed.
The defeat could not have been more embarrassing for Newton. Chaloner turned again to Parliament and demanded compensation for the damage done to his reputation. Newton was forced to reply – and his frustration is obvious on every page of his bitter denunciation of Chaloner.
On his release, Chaloner immediately began to plan new crimes, just as Newton predicted he would. Newton retreated in public, but privately set about recapturing his quarry — this time, in a net that would hold.
Chapter Five: The Hunt
The humiliation of Chaloner’s escape was intolerable, and so, in the midst of the enormously difficult recoining, Newton turned his extraordinary powers of concentration to the problem of annihilating his enemy. His detective pursuit of Chaloner through London’s underworld turned into a masterpiece of empirical research –- an echo in the human realm of the techniques of experimental discovery he had mastered in his Cambridge years.
Critically, Newton chose to turn the pursuit of evidence against Chaloner into his personal quest. Remember: there were no police to whom Newton could turn. The Mint had to defend itself, undertaking the investigation, arrest and prosecution of any criminal threatening the currency. Chaloner was clearly too wily and too dangerous for a mere Mint employee to tackle. So Newton himself donned disguises and ventured at night into neighborhoods of London few respectable citizens risked by day. He interviewed Chaloner’s associates wherever he could –- the notorious Dogg pub is one location on record. All the while, as Newton tracked the minor players, Chaloner remained oblivious to the danger. He continued to petition Parliament for reparations for his earlier arrest, while boasting of what he would be able to do once he got his hands on the Mint’s official casting tools.
Newton took note, thanks to one of the men Newton had already turned into an informer. The first two men captured –- both held for passing false coins — were followed by fourteen more, each brought to the Tower of London. There, Newton revealed himself to be a ruthlessly violent, devastatingly effective interrogator. He proved skilled at balancing physical punishment with rewards weighed out with alchemical precision. He would offer a few extra days of life, a last minute offer of leniency for a wife or companion, but almost never a genuine reprieve for even the smallest fish in the net. Accounts of some of Newton’s prisoner investigations survive in Mint papers, but others were destroyed apparently because they recorded a level of brutality that was unacceptable, even in that age of routine official violence. Informers in Newgate Prison reported at least one death threat against Newton by a coiner who had endured one of the warden’s investigations. (The farce of Chaloner’s first trial had taught Newton several lessons – including the need to keep an ear and eye in the holding cells.)
Newton did not care. In the Tower, with no hope of escaping his wrath, his prisoners talked and talked and talked. Several historians have commented on Newton’s ruthlessness, his (to modern eyes) shocking eagerness –- even pleasure –- in his pursuit of coiners in general and Chaloner in particular. Many previous writers have treated his ferocity as the product of deep-seated psychological damage. Others simply see it as typical of the times, a measure of the general bloodthirstiness of a nation so recently enmeshed in a bitterly violent civil war. But none of these explanations, and hence none of the major biographies of Newton, actually place this episode in the context of Newton’s personal history of ideas and belief –- and without that context it is impossible to understand why Newton employed such focused violence in his campaign.
And that context is the same one in which Newton pursued his alchemical crusade. As noted above, in its purest form Newtonian science leaves God no role in history, in the unfolding of time. At best, the deity assumes the role of the craftsman who builds a machine, winds it up, and lets it go. Yet Newton had hoped that his alchemical investigations would redeem his belief that divine action did intervene in daily life. The confirmation would come if he could “grow” precious metals from base mixtures, just as an oak grows from an acorn. But by the time he came to London, he recognized that proof of that nature was beyond him. Then, in Chaloner, he almost immediately confronted a man trying to forge false gold out of base metal, a precise parody of the alchemical quest. To Newton, that was much more than an offense against the crown. Rather, it was blasphemy, a mockery both of God, and of one of God’s most impassioned servants: the Cambridge don turned Warden of the Mint.
Chapter Six: Victory
Newton’s response to insult was always the same, whether the battle was over scientific priority or his prerogatives as the master of Britain’s money. He was a devoted practitioner of the doctrine of overwhelming response, seeking not just to defeat any rival, but to devastate him. In his pursuit of Chaloner, he recognized no limits. In November 1698, he had assembled enough evidence to arrest Chaloner again. This time, he gave the forger no chance to undermine the trial. Newton completed a total of 30 interrogations before he brought Chaloner to court. Nearly everyone close to Chaloner inside and outside of Newgate Prison became a spy. Reports of Chaloner’s jailhouse conversations reached the Tower in a day or two at most. Chaloner’s money bought him competent lawyers, but even for him there were too many witnesses to bribe or intimidate. The old double game didn’t work either: Newton brushed aside his rival’s offer to turn informer against any number of other offenders. The trial in early March was almost a formality.
In the two weeks that followed his conviction, Chaloner played his last cards. His feigned madness in prison had not delayed the trial, but he retained just enough money and influence at court to secure a pardon hearing before the King himself. The appeal was rejected on the spot. Five days later, he was bound to his sledge, and dragged every jolting, filthy mile to Tyburn. There, at last, the hangman coaxed William Chaloner slowly, agonizingly, to his death.
Newton never gave any public sign that Chaloner’s person merited his attention. He did not attend the execution.
Epilogue: Newton at Bay
Newton died in 1727, 84 years old, a truly great age for the times. He was rich, leaving an estate valued at £31,821 — purely coincidentally, almost the same amount Chaloner claimed to have forged. He died as famous as any Englishman in history, recognized as the man who defined his age. Pope captured his legend in his famous epitaph: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night/ God said Let Newton be! /And all was Light.”
But the public image of the great man that Newton enjoyed for the last three decades of his life masked a much more prosaic daily reality. Once Newton moved to London, his active scientific career stopped. He became an institutional man, running the Mint, leading the Royal Society, organizing his famous campaign against Gottfried Leibniz to claim priority in inventing calculus. In place of new work, he issued new editions of the great Principia and published the landmark work Opticks, based on work completed years before. His alchemical studies ended too; he conceded failure after 1693, and never again tried to imitate God by mixing metal.
God much occupied his mind. From about 1705 on, he devoted himself more and more to his theological investigations. He spent years working up a chronology of biblical events, studying the prophesies of the Hebrew Bible, and working up calculations for the precise date of the Last Judgment. In one prediction, he set the year 2060 as the likely date for the Second Coming –- but when he worked out his biblical arithmetic on other occasions the date of Jesus’s return moved further and further into the future.
Through it all, though he retained his deep belief in the one God he had always served, he implicitly acknowledged defeat in one crucial battle. At no time after the mid 1690s did he explicitly try to reconcile his physics with his faith.
That’s what gives this book its dramatically new view of Newton. Every biography to date has centered on his scientific life. Newton and the Counterfeiter will reveal a different figure, a man poised between the times that made him, and those he made. The creation of his Newtonian system came at enormous personal cost, the loss of an intimate connection with a living savior.
William Chaloner was the luckless man who first experienced the brunt of Newton’s pain and rage at the threat to certain faith. The Newtonian world we inhabit struggles with that loss still.
The Competitive Landscape
There are no books in the publishing marketplace that cover the same territory as Newton and the Counterfeiter. It distinguishes itself precisely because it is not a biography, not a comprehensive account. Instead, it tells one clear, focused tale, one in which the actions of the principal characters have direct consequences, leading inevitably to the climax of capture, punishment and death.
There have been a few popular biographies of Isaac Newton, most recently James Gleick’s well-written and well-received brief life, Isaac Newton. Richard Westfall published the still-definitive full-length biography Never at Rest in 1980. But these and all recent Newton biographies have skipped over this drama — understandably, given their focus on providing a more comprehensive review of Newton’s scientific development and his results. Their accounts of Newton emphasize the long sequence of events that saw a young, penniless man become one of the grandees of Europe. These books are, at bottom, traditional “great man” accounts of a life and times.
By contrast, my book will present a genuinely different view of Newton. The right point of reference for Newton and the
Counterfeiter is a book in which Newton appeared as a secondary character: Dava Sobel’s Longitude. As in that work, Newton and the Counterfeiter retains a sharp focus on a single, rich story that can bring to life the time and place in which the core narrative takes place. No other book has explored what it cost Newton to become the patron saint of science. No other book has revealed his character in such depth, as none of them have focused on the central tale of the confrontation between Newton and Chaloner, with its elements of life-and-death combat, meticulous detective work and brutal violence, all bound up in a grand drama of the search for God in nature.
I can’t wait to write it.
Logistics
This project has the virtue of offering a clearly bounded research task. The major collections of Newton papers are well organized, and an international collaboration is putting Newton’s writings online for easier access. Much of the critical material for this book will have to be tracked down in the papers of London’s Royal Mint; fortunately, its records are in good shape at Britain’s Public Records Office, and Newton’s work as Warden is properly documented.
None of these primary sources for this book are new, or completely unknown within the academic community. What is new is the juxtaposition of two previously unconnected strands of historical materials: Newton’s alchemy, easily the least well-known aspect of Newton’s life, and the body of material that surrounds his work at the Mint, both his own papers and accounts of the life of a criminal in England at the time.
In addition to the original documents, I will be able to make use of the extensive secondary literature on all the major subjects that touch on this story – Newton himself and Newton’s scientific work and impact; Britain’s currency crisis; and the last days of alchemy in 17th and early 18th century Europe are all active and productive areas of research. Chaloner himself is somewhat more elusive. But between contemporary newspaper accounts, parliamentary records, his few surviving writings, and the Mint documents it is possible to reconstruct his rise and fall, and there is a fully detailed and quite gruesome record of the broader context of crime and punishment in 17th century England.
The plan of the book, with its clearly demarcated narrative calls for a relatively short manuscript. As noted above, I am aiming for the 60-80,000-word range. Given that scope, and given that the material to be mastered is so clearly defined, I am confident that I can deliver an acceptable manuscript in twelve to eighteen months.
About Thomas Levenson
By way of background: I am currently an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching in its Graduate Program on Science Writing. I have written three books to date: Einstein in Berlin (Bantam, 2003); Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science (Simon and Schuster, 1994); and Ice Time: Climate, Science and Life on Earth (Harper and Row, 1989). Please see the attached reviews.
My film – making career has centered on long-form documentaries about science and its history, mostly for the PBS series NOVA. I have produced ten one or two-hour programs on subjects ranging from a biography of Albert Einstein to the engineering and the art of the dome through history (a program hosted by David Macaulay). I have just completed my work as the executive producer of Origins, a four part special NOVA series on the birth and evolution of the cosmos and life that premiered on PBS on September 28 and 29, 2004. I have received an Emmy, a Peabody and an AAAS/Westinghouse award for my programs.
There is one aspect of my broadcast work that helps the publishing side of my career directly: I understand what works and what don’t when being interviewed on radio or television.
