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Gunpowder and Geometry: The Life of Charles Hutton, Pit Boy, Mathematician and Scientific Rebel
Benjamin Wardhaugh


August, 1755. Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne.In the fields, men and women are getting the harvest in. Sunlight, or rain. Scudding clouds and backbreaking labour. Three hundred feet underground, young Charles Hutton is at the coalface. Cramped, dust-choked, wielding a five-pound pick by candlelight. Eighteen years old, he’s been down the pits on and off for more than a decade, and now it looks like a life sentence. No unusual story, although Charles is a clever lad – gifted at maths and languages – and for a time he hoped for a different life. Many hoped.Charles Hutton, astonishingly, would actually live the life he dreamed of. Twenty years later you’d have found him in Slaughter’s coffee house in London, eating a few oysters with the President of the Royal Society.By the time he died, in 1823, he was a fellow of scientific academies in four countries, while the Lord Chancellor of England counted himself fortunate to have known him. Hard work, talent, and no small share of luck would take Charles Hutton out of the pit to international fame, wealth, admiration and happiness. The pit-boy turned professor would become one of the most revered British scientists of his day. This book is his incredible story.























Copyright (#uff0dc745-4c90-50a2-a7f3-2f9e08fa11c3)


William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright В© Benjamin Wardhaugh 2019

Cover illustrations: engraved illustrations of Artillery Carriages В© bauhaus1000/Getty Images; engraving of Charles Hutton В© Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.

Benjamin Wardhaugh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008299958

Ebook Edition В© February 2019 ISBN: 9780008299972

Version: 2019-01-11




Dedication (#uff0dc745-4c90-50a2-a7f3-2f9e08fa11c3)


In memory of Jackie Stedall


Contents

Cover (#u3292d2d8-fcb7-5321-a562-010dc985344c)

Title Page (#u1d960bdd-978c-51ad-8ed1-0eaecbc4c6f3)

Copyright

Dedication

1 Out of the Pit (#ue345f5b1-82d2-5efe-9aec-1f66da3785c8)

2 Teacher of Mathematics (#u401aba69-ce0f-5a6a-af0c-ef17d98db43e)

3 Author (#ud890dbc0-0e60-5dc2-b5a3-6885e379c70b)

4 Professor (#u6ca54adb-127d-5d54-be16-d424e8966778)

5 Odd-Job Man (#u83d3f5a8-ca90-5468-8ed4-02ac92f826ce)

6 Foreign Secretary (#uf8667902-9452-5a63-b0a3-c7351efae824)

7 Reconstruction (#uc2b32c70-a05c-54d4-a0e0-44f80cf42ffa)

8 A Military Man (#u2a0894ed-cc2b-5be3-98c0-c34bbd7a6985)

9 Utility and Fame (#u28ae3271-3916-5f15-890c-10b5bd62e7bf)

10 Securing a Legacy (#u1762f49e-8f5f-559d-9036-657556f68783)

11 Controversies Old and New (#u507cbf2c-b65a-5da3-8b4c-706e77281ada)

12 Peace (#uecd0e409-fd96-5275-8806-94e0bd98580e)

Epilogue (#u9dfadd1a-8797-5b94-9ac5-b09add0568f1)

Notes (#uc6ee0870-bb3b-52e0-a88b-1472450572e5)

Select Bibliography (#u542a6f06-90c9-51d0-8ce4-61c113dbdd62)

Image Credits (#u4308739d-23d2-5cad-bf1e-b5db71e47126)

Index (#u3fdad54d-bf2c-5e1c-ab4b-834f36acf0c8)

Acknowledgements (#uae56b6bd-3baf-5473-9f15-acef6b5e920d)

About the Author (#u4c4164e1-f718-58d0-bbd4-35f705ac02fc)

About the Publisher (#ue5787060-a88a-5667-84eb-a2adae3ed41b)




1 (#ulink_798cdfbd-b1fb-5a27-a43d-c6259a6a879c)

Out of the Pit (#ulink_798cdfbd-b1fb-5a27-a43d-c6259a6a879c)







August 1755. Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne. In the fields, men and women are getting the harvest in. Sunlight, or rain. Scudding clouds and backbreaking labour.

Three hundred feet underground, young Charles Hutton is at the coalface. Cramped, choked with dust, wielding a five-pound pick by candlelight. Eighteen years old, he has been down the pits on and off for more than a decade, and now it looks like a life sentence. No unusual story, although Charles is a clever lad – gifted at maths and languages – and for a time he hoped for a different life.

Many hoped. Charles Hutton, astonishingly, would actually live the life he dreamed of. Twenty years later you would have found him in Slaughter’s coffee house in London, eating oysters with the president of the Royal Society. By the time he died, in 1823, he was a fellow of scientific academies in four countries, while the Lord Chancellor of England counted himself fortunate to have known him. Hard work, talent, and no small share of luck would take Charles Hutton out of the pit to international fame, wealth, admiration and happiness. The pit boy turned professor would become one of the most revered British scientists of his day.

This book is his incredible story.






Newcastle upon Tyne occupies a fine site for a town: a long south-facing slope, down towards the river. The Great North Road runs through it: 90 miles north to Edinburgh, 250 south to London. And the river joins the town to the world. As the old song goes,

Tyne river, running rough or smooth,

Brings bread to me and mine;

Of all the rivers north or south

There’s none like coaly Tyne.

By the time coaly Tyne passes under the bridge at Newcastle it has seen the Pennines and the wild country of Northumbria: land fought over by the Romans and the Picts, the English and the Scots. If the water had once been dyed with their blood, by now it was dyed with coal.

The town was spacious and populous. Only three English towns were bigger; but still Newcastle was no sprawl early in the eighteenth century. Just five main streets within the old town walls, and open country beyond them to east and west.






We know next to nothing about Charles Hutton’s parents, Eleanor and Henry. It’s probable they moved to prosperous, growing Newcastle from elsewhere: possibly from Westmorland, on the other side of the Pennines.

Eleanor and Henry seem not to have prospered in any tremendous way in Newcastle, though neither were they at the bottom of the heap. Henry was a �viewer’ in the collieries: something less, that is, than a land steward or estate agent, and something more than a manual labourer. Viewers were literate, numerate men who kept the colliery’s records and compared notes with their colleagues at neighbouring mines. They measured and calculated rates of production, kept an eye on how fast the pit was filling with water and how well the pumps were coping. They allocated labour, planned, inspected. Some stayed up at night to catch coal thieves.

Viewers were expected to be down the pits daily, but also to see the estate agent daily. They faced two very different worlds: the wealthy owners and the men who hewed the black diamonds out of the rock beneath their feet. They had responsibility and power; some abused it, keeping owners ignorant about the mine work. Many used their position to command high fees. The coal industry was expanding, and new shafts and new mines depended on the advice of experienced colliery viewers. High-end viewers had their own assistants and apprentices: minor deities in their own field.

One source says Henry Hutton was a land steward for Lord Ravenscroft, a step further up still. We don’t know if it was true, and it may just be a garbled reflection of the fact that he oversaw a mine or mines on that nobleman’s land in Northumberland. Either way, he was a man who had a good deal more than the very minimum.

By 1737 Eleanor and Henry lived with their children – three or four boys, perhaps more – in a thatched cottage on the northern edge of Newcastle. Nineteenth-century historians would be rather sniffy about this �low’ dwelling (low, probably, both literally and metaphorically); but compared with the cottages of the miners themselves it was luxury. Thatch, indeed, was a luxury, as was the ability to live more than a stone’s throw from the pit mouth.

Just as Henry Hutton worked at – was – the interface between landowner and manual workers, his house stood on the edge in more than one sense. Sidegate, their street, was one of the first to burst out of the still intact medieval town walls, and while open land surrounded it on both sides, a stroll down the hill took you back to the bustle of Newcastle. Away to the north it led across the Great Northern coalfield, engine of England’s prosperity.






The �low’ cottage of Hutton’s birth.

Charles, Henry’s youngest son, came into the world on 14 August 1737. A fortnight or so later his parents took that stroll downhill to the parish church of St Andrew’s, just inside the town wall – stubby tower, Norman interior, bright new set of bells – and he was baptised.

For a few years, all was well. There were games with other children in the street; there were fights. Ladies liked little Charles; they thought him uncommonly docile and good-natured.

The Huttons sent some, perhaps all, of their children to school. On the walk from their cottage to St Andrew’s they passed Gallowgate (actual hangings were a rarity by Hutton’s time: one every few years, if that). And on the corner of Gallowgate a house stuck out awkwardly into the street. In it an old Scots woman kept what the usage of the day optimistically called a school. That is, she took in a few of the local children and endeavoured to show them how to read, with the aid of a Bible. Charles Hutton remembered her as no great scholar; when she came to a word she couldn’t read, she would tell the children to skip it because �it was Latin’. But he did learn to read.






In the summer of Charles’s sixth year his father died. Swiftly his mother remarried; with several children to keep, the youngest of them five years old, there was perhaps little real choice. Their new father, Francis Frame, occupied a lower station than Henry Hutton. He was an �overman’ in one of the collieries: a labourer, but one who was also employed to superintend the others. Not necessarily literate, not necessarily numerate: there was a system of marks and tally sticks to avoid the need for that. His pay might have been half that of a viewer, and he basically worked underground. And he had to live near the pit. Shifts might start in the small hours, even at midnight, and you couldn’t be walking a mile or two in the dark just to get to the colliery. The family left the house in Newcastle, and moved north into the coalfield itself. And coal changed from a distant background, a what-my-dad-does, to an immediate daily reality for Charles Hutton.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of it went down the river each year, and the market was growing all the time. Over the course of the eighteenth century the industrial revolution and the steam engine would increase Britain’s hunger for coal to stupendous levels. As the coal trade grew it expanded away from the river, north and south; new collieries were opened and new wagon routes built to serve them. Landowners gambled huge sums on the chance of reaching a profitable seam, but they also told themselves – and believed – that they were doing a public service: providing jobs, providing coal.

The so-called Grand Alliance of colliery owners was sinking new pits on north Tyneside, where coal to last hundreds of years lay undug. The villages there – Jesmond, Heaton, Long Benton – would now be the Hutton family’s world. This was the true coal country. The landscape of the Great Northern coalfield was all pits and pit villages; the hills and the fields, the river and the tearing clouds formed little more than a scenic backdrop. Streams were everywhere, making steep little valleys and shaping where you could build, where you could walk. And where you could dig. The wet got into the pits, and a mine on north Tyneside could raise a dozen or more times as much water as it did coal. Horses plodded around horse-gins to wind the ropes that brought it all up, and unwind them again to send the men down.

The members of the Grand Alliance were technophiles, and they installed the new atmospheric engines designed by Thomas Newcomen – forerunners of the steam engine – at their pitheads to do some of the winding work. The machines were cheaper to run than horses, but they were loud, and they added to the noise, the smoke and the dust. It’s hard to get a sense of it today, now that the pits are closed and the collieries built over with smart modern houses. On a clear day you can see down from Long Benton, where the Huttons worked, to the spires of Newcastle’s churches, and beyond to the rolling country south of the river. There are still some open fields nearby – playing fields, now – and the long line of the old wagonway, down towards the river, remains as a peaceful footpath; birds sing in the hedges.

In the 1740s it was a very different place. The wagonway had wooden rails, and the Long Benton colliery and its neighbours ran an endless procession of horse-drawn wagons on them, taking the coal down to the staithes at the river’s edge. The spires of Newcastle may have been visible through the clouds of coal dust and smoke, but they represented a distant, unattainable world.

Nearly all collieries provided housing for the underground workers, and the Huttons presumably lived in such a dwelling. Long gone now, the miners’ cottages were packed in tightly, in rows as close to the pit mouth as could be managed. They were drab and uniform; two rooms was usual, with an extra chamber in the roof. Quite a few had gardens for vegetables, or even a pig or cow, or some hens. The tradition on the Great Northern coalfield – at least later – was for growing prize leeks.

The pit villages were isolated physically and socially. It was an unusual environment, supporting an unusual kind of work. The miners made a close-knit world, with massive revelry at weddings and christenings (and any other excuse): roaring bagpipes and roaring men; hilarious, vulgar, open-hearted.

Middle-class visitors typically found the miners and their families shocking, barbarous, uncivilised. Translated, that probably means miners’ pubs were noisy, their homes not absolutely spotless, and their knowledge of scripture of a slightly less than prizewinning standard. The miners’ world may have been rough and simple; squalid it was not.

They were proud of their appearance. Like sailors, you could tell the miners anywhere by their clothes: checked shirts, jackets and trousers with a red tie and grey knitted stockings. Long hair in a pigtail. And of course the pall of coal dust, almost impossible to wash out completely. Rings of it circled their eyes, and it made the cuts and abrasions of underground work heal into distinctive blue scars.






Charles Hutton would remember his stepfather Francis Frame as a kind man. But he was not Lord Ravenscroft’s land steward, nor anything like it, and there was no avoiding the fact that the family’s expectations had fallen. There had probably never been any question about what work the boys would go into, but if there had been hopes of climbing the ladder to become viewers and overmen they probably now hoped for nothing more than the status of plain coal hewers.

And by the age of six, or certainly by the age of eight, little Charles was old enough to start work. One report says he spent some time operating a trapdoor in the pits. For a miner’s lad this was typical entry-level work, done by the youngest boys. Different areas of the pit were isolated from each other by trapdoors, usually kept shut to make sure the air flowed where it was supposed to and reduce the risk of gas build-up and explosion. Each trap had a boy to pull the cord that opened it, and shut it again after men or coals had passed. Boring but crucial work; mines blew to smithereens if a trapper lad fell asleep on the job and let the bad air reach the candles. Solitude, silence and darkness worse than any prison. You learned not to fear the dark.

You learned much else, too; starting in the pits was not so much a training as total immersion in a culture. The all-male environment had its traditional ways: ancient facetiousness and long-lived jokes; bravado in the face of shared danger. Men died in the pits, often: candles in the gassy dark (there were no safety lamps as yet); shaft collapses; suffocation. Firedamp and chokedamp, the miners called the bad airs, and they were especially common in the northern pits. By the 1750s coal owners were asking the newspapers not to print reports of pit explosions; they were bad for morale, bad for trade.

So you learned the feel of the mines and the smell of the different airs, good and bad. You gained the true pitman’s instinctive sense of danger. You also learned to cling to the rope that pulled you up and let you down the shaft. Shafts could be a few hundred feet deep, and there were no cages to ride in. You just clung on, with your leg through a loop of rope. If your hands grew tired, you died. If the horses pulling the rope were startled and bolted, you died. Eventually that would happen to Francis Frame, in an accident at Long Benton colliery after Charles had left. Over the course of a life’s work in the pits your chance of dying in an accident was probably as high as one in two.

By the time the exploitation of children in the pits became the subject of official inquiry – in the 1840s – it had attained the proportions of a national disgrace. Boys were working twelve- or even eighteen-hour shifts that started at midnight; they were seeing the sun on only one day a week and they were getting rickets, bronchitis, emphysema. They were prostrated by exhaustion and they were not growing properly.

There’s no real reason to suppose conditions were better in the eighteenth century, but Charles Hutton was spared the very worst of it. There were schools in some of the local villages. Some pit villages had them, too, with practice varying seemingly from pit to pit: near-universal illiteracy at one; school provision built into the miners’ contracts at another. Hutton attended schools. He was bright, and neighbours were already saying the lad could go far, urging his parents to keep him at school. Kept in school he was: the hope of his family, even while his brothers went down the pits.

It must have made for some friction at home and in his village. The few pennies per day he would have earned on the trapdoors might not have been a real sacrifice for his family. But the fact that others were being prepared for a life in the coal mines and he wasn’t must have made for a difference, and not perhaps a pleasant one.

About this time Hutton injured his arm. The story he would tell many years later involved variously an accident or a quarrel with some children in the street. Nothing more than ordinary horseplay, perhaps, but by the time he confessed it to his parents the bone wouldn’t set properly, and it left him with a lasting weakness in his right elbow. Another reason to train his mind rather than his hands, at least for now.

A schoolteacher named Robson taught him to write, at a school a short step across the hill in the village of Delaval. Hutton may well have studied from a new, locally produced grammar book. Written and printed in Newcastle, Anne Fisher’s New Grammar promised to teach spelling, syntax, pronunciation and even etymology through its carefully graded series of exercises. Unlike other grammar teachers she kept it practical, and there was time set aside in her programme for taking dictation from a newspaper read aloud (the London Spectator was her preference) as well as spot-the-mistake games. Like every textbook author, she hooked her learners with aspirational promises. By the time you were done, she said, you’d be able to write as correctly as if for the press, engage in polite and useful conversation, and compose a properly styled letter to any person of quality. London and its cosmopolitan values were never far from her thoughts. Yet she had her other foot firmly in the North, and her correct pronunciation was a distinctly northern one. Say the following words, she advised, as though the o was a u: Compasses, Conjure, London.

As well as his schooling, young Hutton was indulged with pennies for books of stories, and – perhaps more precious – time in which to read them. He was fond of the so-called �border ballads’, the traditional songs of north Tyneside and the Scottish Borders: True Tom and his visit to Elfland, Tam Lin and his rescue from the fairies. By his early teens one of his lifelong habits was already in place: book collecting.






The routine of these years was disrupted more than once by events from outside the North-East. In September 1745, when Hutton was eight, the southward march of the Bonnie Prince and his army sparked panic in Newcastle. Some citizens hastily signed a pledge of loyalty to King George. Others spent their time walling up the town gates and mounting cannon to repel the Jacobite horde. Some fled from the northern villages to the dubious safety of the town. Others fled further south with all they could carry.

The events developed as farce rather than tragedy as far as Newcastle was concerned. Charles Stuart and his army came nowhere near; they took a western, not an eastern route down through England. The gates were unbricked, the cannon dismounted, and the King’s soldiers moved on. People came back to their homes and their work, some of them presumably feeling rather shamefaced.

One eyewitness to the ’45 in Newcastle was a visitor whose presence would ultimately wreak rather more upheaval, both for Newcastle and for Charles Hutton. John Wesley first visited the town in 1742. He was one of the middle-class commentators who was shocked by the drunkenness, cursing and Sabbath-breaking he found there, and he considered the field ripe for his mission.

He preached in the fields, and he preached in the churches, including the Huttons’ old parish church of St Andrews (where he found the congregation notably well-behaved). He visited some of the pit villages, and preached there too. Over time, Newcastle became John Wesley’s northern headquarters, the third point of a triangle whose base was London and Bristol, and he would visit again and again over the years.

The founder of Methodism was a small neat man in a gown and bands; he had been an Oxford tutor and he was good at calm, reasonable argument. But he had also been in the mission fields in North America, and he knew how to reach his hearers’ hearts, with an explosive combination of plain language and restrained rhetoric.

The results were extraordinary, with people crying out from a piercing sense of their sins or falling down in dread of the wrath of God. The dramatic personal changes, or some of them, lasted long after Wesley himself was gone. Charles Hutton was deeply impressed – he started to think of himself as a Methodist, and to call himself one.

It wasn’t about leaving the Church of England: that came much later for Wesley’s supporters. But it was about reinventing yourself and your relationship with God: about getting a new sense of what a life and a self could be. It was Christianity made both primitive and experimental, with doctrine founded on scripture, experienced and confirmed emotionally, and integrated into your personal habits, into who you were both internally and visibly.

Several of the anecdotes we have about Charles Hutton in his youth are concerned with his piety. He threw away his collection of profane stories. He built a cabin in the woods where he could pray on the way to school. He read devotional tracts. Time would eventually lower the temperature of Hutton’s enthusiasm, but he would remain a follower of Methodism – later shifting towards Unitarianism – until his thirties.

Some of the practical characteristics he gained at this time he would take to his grave, and they laid the foundation of much he achieved as an adult. �Never be unemployed for a moment,’ wrote Wesley; �never be triflingly employed.’ Charles Hutton would retain into old age a reputation for the good ordering of his time and his thoughts. Hard-working, self-disciplined, cheerful yet grave, and gifted at organising both ideas and people, he could have been a model for such works as Wesley’s Character of a Methodist. But perhaps the most important lesson Charles Hutton took from Wesley was that you could reinvent who you were, remake your mental world and your character. You could forge a destiny of your own choosing, both in the next world and – perhaps – in this.






By his early teens Hutton was living with his family in the village of Heaton, and attending school half a mile away at Jesmond. His teacher, Jonathan Ivison, was a would-be clergyman: a university graduate marking time while he waited for his first benefice.

Ivison represented another link to a wider world for Charles Hutton. He was no spectacular example of worldly success, but he illustrated the very different kind of life that could be reached through education. And his teaching provided direct access to parts of that education. He taught Hutton some Latin and some mathematics, and Hutton discovered talents for both. These were whole new worlds to explore: ancient literature or the heady abstractions of algebra and geometry could easily occupy a person for a lifetime. Meanwhile Hutton’s ability at accounting drew some attention, and presumably provided evidence to his family that keeping him in school remained a reasonable choice. And he was also learning practical geometry and surveying: food for the mind, but skills that could one day be of use in the world of the collieries, too.

His continued success at school reportedly made Hutton a favourite with those who taught him. He seems to have become quite close to Ivison. Ambitious, always keen to be at the top of everything in hand, he was envied by other students.

But time was running out. Hutton couldn’t remain the hope of his family for ever, and unless an unexpected opportunity opened up the only route his family or his world could offer him was a career in the coal pits, perhaps working up to overman or viewer if he was very lucky. At fourteen he passed the age when schooling for boys of his class ended and work or apprenticeship began; and it wasn’t clear what was going to happen next.

Indeed, it’s not clear what did happen next. Jonathan Ivison gained his benefice in the autumn of 1751, when Hutton was fourteen, and after hasty ordination he was licensed as curate at Whitburn, near the coast in County Durham, a couple of days later. Whitburn was nine miles from the schoolroom at Jesmond – a dozen by road – and commuting between the two was scarcely feasible. Schools were transient things, and there was no particular reason this one would stay open once its single teacher was gone.

Yet Ivison’s new salary was just twenty-five pounds a year: barely enough to live on. He badly needed more money. One report says Hutton acted as Ivison’s assistant. It’s possible he acted as his substitute, keeping the school open while Ivison performed his parish duties half a day away. There was nothing awfully unusual about the head of the class helping to teach the younger children, and nobody ever denied that Hutton was the head of this and every other class he ever entered.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Hutton was spared a return to the pits for a few more years. There’s no hint in any of our sources that he ever did the kind of work to which teenagers normally graduated in the mines: �putting’, that is, dragging or pushing the heavy wicker baskets full of coal from the face to the shaft.

But his reprieve was not to last indefinitely. The next firm fact we have about him is a pay bill from the Long Benton colliery for September 1755, when he was eighteen. He was working as a coal hewer in the �Rose’ Pit, under his stepfather Francis Frame as overman.






Put one leg through a loop in the rope, and hold it hard for the breathless minutes of descent: three hundred feet down. At the shaft bottom the darkness is total, outside the reach of a few brief candles. Long, dreary galleries lead off in every direction, and it’s oppressively warm. Walls of coal; wet under foot. Fossils in the roof to remind you of the weight of rock, the inexorable crushing force ever-present above your head. Constant noise: rushing water and the distant thud of the engines; corves of coal being dragged past by teams of exhausted, shattered boys. Grimy, weary men everywhere, bustling in the gloom.

Strip to the �buff’: short breeches, low shoes, cotton skull-cap (or even less). Take your wedge, hammer and five-pound pick. Kneel, sit, stoop to get at the coalface. Or just lie down. Coal seams could be as little as two foot six high, and Hutton was a tall young man. Channels of sweat in the coal dust on your face.

First, make vertical cuts from the top of the seam to the bottom, dividing the coalface into what the men called �juds’. Then, undercut the juds one by one: skilled and, by some accounts, athletic work. Next hammer in wedges at the top of the jud, and bring down the coal section by section. It could take an hour or two, and then, of course, you did it again. And again, all day. A hewer could bring down four tons or more in a shift. Putters bundled it away in the wicker baskets, and up it went to the daylight.






At the coalface.

It was hard, it was dirty, it was dangerous. But coal hewers were actually the elite of the pit; indeed, it’s surprising Hutton was allowed to do the work as young as eighteen, and without working his way up through gruelling years at the back, and then the front, of a corf of coal. Francis Frame perhaps used his own position in the pit to make it happen. Hewers were relatively well paid: quite possibly better paid than manual workers in other fields like agriculture. And they worked shorter hours than the trapper boys and the putters: seven or eight hours of the day, starting in the very early morning.

The stars are twinkling in the sky,

As to the pit I go;

I think not of the sheen on high,

But of the gloom below.

Not rest or peace, but toil and strife,

Do there the soul enthral;

And turn the precious cup of life

Into a cup of gall.

That was Joseph Skipsey, the �Pitman Poet’, in the 1860s: but the words could have applied to Hutton, or to many and many another.

Charles Hutton had known, briefly, the life of a country schoolteacher, and had felt the stirrings of a talent for both languages and mathematics. A world wider than the pit had come into view more than once during his short life, in the person of John Wesley and in that of Jonathan Ivison: university graduates both, and holders in their different ways of promises about what life could be.

In a pamphlet for children, printed in Newcastle, Wesley wrote that you shouldn’t ever wish for more than you have. Men are fallen, grace is a gift, and if we had what we deserve we’d all be in hell. But however docile Hutton was, and however resigned to the will of Providence, it’s hard to imagine he didn’t wish.

I think Charles Hutton’s return to the coal pit must have represented desperation – perhaps exasperation – on the part of his family. The hope that if he stayed in school he might somehow make a better or a different life for himself was showing no clear sign of paying off, so far as we know. Children younger than him were earning their keep; the favoured youngest son had been indulged for many years, but he would not be indulged for ever. One source says he was �taken from school’, and there is almost the sense of a violent abduction away from his natural element to the now quite alien world of the pits.

The pit, and its cup of gall, could have been the rest of his life: for a time there must have been no reason to imagine anything else was going to happen. Two things made a difference.

One was that Hutton was bad at hewing coal. The pay bills show him bringing down less coal than his fellows, and as a result he was employed less – much less – than they were. In old age Hutton would say his injured arm was to blame for his poor performance at the coalface. Maybe it was, though we never hear that the lame arm affected him later in his life. Maybe it was simply that his schooling and his comparative lack of experience down the mines had left him without the strength, the endurance and the skills the work needed.

The other thing was that Hutton was using his time away from work to exploit his connections, to invent a way out of colliery life and make something quite different for himself. Who knows just what hustling Charles Hutton did during the months he worked down the pit, in the winter of 1755–6. But it came to the point that he knew he had it in his power to escape, and some sort of scene appears to have taken place at the colliery. He was �laid idle’ one day, whether for some fault or simply because a more able man was available, and he made a fuss about it. He told the overman that he’d soon be out of his power, that he was going to go to a more respectable life. It must have been quite a row; men who were there remembered the scene seventy years later.

But Hutton was speaking the truth, however ungraciously. Jonathan Ivison had been the curate at Whitburn for four years now, and if his Jesmond schoolroom had been limping along meanwhile, it was time to pass it on for good to someone who lived near by. Ivison knew the man for the job. Presumably he squared it with the owner of the building where the school was held. And presumably he squared it with Francis Frame. For he wanted Charles Hutton to take over.

At the age of eighteen, Hutton was legally a minor and too young, in theory, to set up on his own in any trade or profession. (He was also, perhaps crucially, too young to have signed any sort of binding contract at the colliery.) But it’s hard to imagine his parents having much hesitation about an offer that would get the useless hewer away from the coalface, where he was little more than an obstacle in the way of fitter, stronger men, and would secure him – if he pulled it off – an income and even a career. One day in March 1756 Charles Hutton clung to the rope and ascended to day for the last time.




2 (#ulink_dc79e4c1-fc44-5642-b005-00913ca07eb7)

Teacher of Mathematics (#ulink_dc79e4c1-fc44-5642-b005-00913ca07eb7)







Autumn 1758. High Heaton, near Newcastle. Silence (or almost). Boys seated at rows of desks. Slate pencils squeaking; quills scratching on paper. Another harvest is in the fields, and the coalface is as hellish as ever. But Charles Hutton is above ground now, in what was once Jonathan Ivison’s schoolroom.

The young schoolmaster is seated at the front, where he can see all the boys. One at a time comes forward, shows his work, is praised or blamed. Can he spell the words set the class; has he written his fair copy fairly enough? Can he read the passage assigned? Has he worked the sum correctly and by the right method? Does he know his catechism answers? He is given a new exercise to do or a new instruction or definition to copy down in his book; sent back to his desk.

Over the course of the day and the week the work cycles through reading, writing, arithmetic, divinity. The boys spell from a textbook: probably the same one, by Ann Fisher, that Hutton learned from himself. They read from the Bible, learn to count or do their sums from another book. Start again on Monday.

It would be intriguing to know how Charles Hutton spoke to his students. Firmly or gently? Leading or prodding? What was he really like as a teacher? We shall never know.






A master and his pupils.

But the books he wrote, later on, record something of the quality of thought that went into Charles Hutton’s work in the classroom; they hint at a man who had his material impeccably organised, who always had something new to show the student, a new trick, a new bit of complexity to stretch the growing mind. The Georgian classroom involved lots of one-on-one teaching, most of the children working quietly while the teacher spoke with each in turn at his desk. It demanded huge agility of mind from the teacher, as each student to be seen was at a different place and needed a different sort of help.

It’s easy to imagine that a teacher with a less than perfect grasp of the material, or who relied too heavily on a printed textbook, would end up with most of the students spending most of the time on repetitious exercises they only partly understood, and would quickly find he had lost the weaker ones. But for the exceptionally wide-awake teacher the system provided a maximum of flexibility and opportunity. It depended on having the material very clear in your mind, and above all minutely graded into separate steps. Hutton seems to have excelled at this. He would make a few enemies during his long life, and pick up criticism, some of it deserved. But no one ever denied he was a superb teacher.

He was talented, he was full of energy and he worked hard. The school at High Heaton ran both days and evenings, teaching local boys and adult miners, some of them Hutton’s former mates from the pits. Local children flocked to him as students, to such a degree that the schoolroom proved too small. So Hutton obtained the use of a room in nearby Stote Hall, and there he and his scholars trooped daily for their lessons.

It’s demolished now, the former mansion of Sir Robert Stotte; only the gateposts and gatehouse survive. But photos show an imposing house. It looked over the small valley of Jesmond Dene and you can still retrace Hutton’s walk of a quarter of an hour or so from one village to the other. First a very gentle rise through what was then open farmland; then down the hill and across a steepish valley of never-farmed woodland. Sloping paths and views away through the trees. It was already a walk into a very different world from that of the colliery, and infinitely removed from the coalface in the Rose Pit.

And yet for many, schoolteaching was a despised profession, a mark of failure for a man of education. �School’, indeed, is a grand term for what was no more than a room provided by someone’s goodwill and in which Hutton collected pennies for teaching young children to read and write, to add up and remember a few Bible stories. Chemist and religious controversialist Joseph Priestley was typical: �Like most other young men of a liberal education, I had conceived a great aversion to the business of a schoolmaster, and had often said that I would have recourse to anything else for a maintenance in preference to it.’ Elementary teaching in particular was widely seen as work for old women, widows, or the humblest members of society. Nor did it bring any very great material rewards for its long, demanding hours: pay only slightly above that of a labourer; no such thing as promotion; no such thing as a pension.

There was no teacher training. Giftless graduates stumbled into teaching and stumbled through it; impecunious clergymen practised it with a savage resentment that they took out physically on the children in their charge (it was the boast of Dr Parr of Harrow that he never flogged a boy twice in the same lesson). A typical contemporary observation is contemptuous of what went on in small ragged schools like Hutton’s:

Poor Reuben Dixon has the noisiest School

Of ragged Lads, who ever bow’d to Rule;

Low in his Price – the Men who heave our Coals

And clean our Causeways, send him Boys in Shoals.

Indeed, teaching unruly boys just a few years younger than himself demanded more natural authority than Charles Hutton yet possessed. He would be remembered ominously as having �kept up the most rigid order’ as a teacher, and sometimes having carried �his severity too far’. One student from these early days recalled that he �assumed a degree of importance’ in the classroom: pomposity might have been a blunter word. For a while he affected a large academic gown and, to complete the effect, a scarlet cap. Even his best friends were embarrassed. He turned up to a parish election in this finery, and �his friends, who would have supported him in the state of a Caterpillar, were so disgusted when they saw him transformed into a Butterfly, that they did not support him and he lost his election’.

Hutton was very young, and the phase passed. The excellence of his teaching continued. He quickly determined that the schoolroom at Stote’s Hall would not be the end of his journey. With the ferocious energy and the self-discipline that would attract comment again and again, he set himself to improve still further. He read all he could: not chapbooks of romantic stories now, but the hardest and the newest mathematical books he could lay hands on. Newton’s works and the works of his contemporaries and disciples: Christiaan Huygens, Roger Cotes. Descartes and his followers. Textbooks of gauging and surveying, and the works of Hutton’s own contemporaries in Britain and beyond.

On top of his teaching and his reading, he went down the hill to Newcastle in the evenings and attended classes given by a Mr Hugh James, who specialised in mathematics. It was a conspicuously demanding regime, and his mother feared for his health. But Hutton could see where his future lay, and he had determined to pursue it as hard as he could, whatever the cost.






In fact it was his mother that died, in March 1760. She was buried near her first husband in St Andrew’s, Newcastle, on the seventeenth of that month.

Hutton was twenty-two. We don’t know just how relations stood between him and his mother when she died, or even whether he had already moved out of the family home. We do know that less than three weeks later he returned to St Andrew’s to be married. His bride, Isabella, was four years his senior; she had trained as a dressmaker. The marriage licence gives her maiden name as Hutton, so she may have been a relative. The scarcely decent haste hints at a family drama now lost from view: a match on which the enamoured couple were keener than were their families, perhaps. Soon there was a son, Henry, known to his parents as Harry.

They moved into rooms in Newcastle itself, just off the Flesh Market: central, bustling, but rich in shrieks and stink. And just a week after his marriage Hutton advertised a new school in the Newcastle papers.

TO BE OPENED

On Monday, April 14th, 1760, at the Head of the Flesh Market, down the Entry formerly known by the name of the Salutation Entry, Newcastle, A Writing and Mathematical School, where persons may be fully and expeditiously qualified for business, and where such as intend to go through a regular course of Arts and Sciences, may be compleatly grounded therein at large.

He promised to teach writing, arithmetic and shorthand, as well as a long list of mathematical subjects: accounts, algebra, geometry, mensuration, trigonometry, conic sections, mechanics, statics, hydrostatics, calculus. Any youths not satisfied by these would also be shown their applications to practical life: navigation, surveying, gunnery, dial-making, measuring, geography, astronomy.






The tree of mathematical knowledge.

It all seems premature, precocious, absurdly risky. Hutton was just four years out of the coal pits; he was quite unknown, his fees were twice those asked by his rivals and his list of subjects promised an impossible range of expertise, including any number of practical subjects in which the twenty-two-year-old had no practical experience. He was aiming very high, hoping to become a different class of teacher: a specialist in mathematical training, no longer bound to the drudgery of teaching the very young to read and write. Friends advised him to promise less, and ask for less money. He didn’t listen, and the result was a struggle, the high prices keeping some away during years when Hutton’s family was growing.

But there was real demand for this sort of thing: specialist mathematics teaching for boys up to fourteen or even older. In a period when a quarter of the country was unable to read, northern parents had a reputation for being keen to educate their children, for sending able, well-educated boys to London to work in counting houses and trade. Trade was increasing during the eighteenth century, and the demand for those boys multiplied; they became bookkeepers, accountants, land stewards, surveyors, navigators (think of James Cook, who would sail round the world on a Whitby coal-ship; while he was still in the coal trade he learned all the mathematics he could at Newcastle schools between voyages). Schools proliferated, and Newcastle became England’s best-educated city after London: four charity schools and the prestigious Trinity House School were founded in the first half of the century, and its well-regarded grammar school flourished. A few landowners maintained schoolmasters for the benefit of their employees, and it wasn’t unknown for the employees themselves to club together to fund a school, as they did at the Newcastle ironworks. Hutton had picked a growing market.

Teaching mathematics at this level meant teaching to add, subtract, multiply and divide, to find square roots and cube roots (Hutton had his own special method for this). It meant fractions both natural and decimal: how to read and write them and how to do arithmetic with them. It meant handling England’s enormously complicated systems of units: grains, scruples and drams for drugs; yards, poles and furlongs for length; firkins, kilderkins and barrels for beer; and many, many more. It meant converting between currencies, which brought similar difficulties: how many Flemish guilders will I buy with one hundred and seventy-three pounds, fourteen shillings and twopence, if one pound is worth thirty-five stuivers three and a half penning?

Above all, it meant reasoning with proportions: or rather, for the less able who were the majority, applying a series of rote-learned rules that would tell you the right answer in certain situations to do with linked ratios. If eight yards of cloth cost twenty-four shillings, what will ninety-six yards cost? In how many days will eight men finish a piece of work that five could do in twenty-four days? In a school career a child might do hundreds, if not thousands of these problems.

It was dry stuff; but Hutton made it work, and over time the numbers at his school grew. By 1764 he moved downhill to the more fashionable, though somewhat unfortunately named �Back-Row’, where he, his school and his family shared premises with a dancing master named Stewart. Hutton got involved with selling tickets for the man’s public balls. Stewart’s prices (half a guinea at entrance and a guinea a quarter for six days’ teaching each week) would have limited his students to the well-to-do, but still the presence of a dance school in the house can only have been disruptive, both to Hutton’s own teaching and to his domestic life.

We have few glimpses of that life. In one of his books Hutton, searching for a memorable image, remarked that a triangular prism �is something like a hat box’. Indeed it is: but hats in hat boxes were not a picture that would have sprung to Hutton’s mind a few years before. An admirer remarked much later that Hutton �was soon conscious of his great abilities, and claimed that rank in society to which they entitled him’. That was a polite gloss on the fact that material success gave him the means to act, dress, and for all practical purposes be middle-class. He was now indisputably the butterfly, not the caterpillar.

Still, he could not altogether avoid criticism. Some remembered �a very modest, shy man’ at this period; but we also hear of him knocking a boy down in the street while he was surveying Newcastle. In this or another incident someone taxed him with being only a pit boy, and Hutton retorted that if he – the critic – had been a pit boy he would be there still. Memories of the cap and gown lingered; two different witnesses, seventy years later, independently recalled the red cap.

There were three more children: Isabella, Camilla and Eleanor (known to her family as Ellen). They were baptised in the nonconformist chapel at Hanover Square.

At the time of writing Hanover Square is a demolition site tucked away near the line of the old town walls. Trains rattle past over the nearby viaduct, and it’s hard to get a sense of what was once Newcastle’s only open square. The chapel there was established in 1727; from 1767 it had a school, and by 1810, after some modification, it was large enough to hold an organ and six hundred people. Its congregation included prominent local poets, newspaper proprietors and politicians.

Hutton had remained a zealous Methodist for some time after his childhood conversion: one report says he wrote sermons and preached them, though if this is true they have – sadly – not survived. His connection with Hanover Square may mean he had now left behind a movement which at this date still aimed to reform the Church of England from within, not from without.

In fact the Hanover Square chapel would later acquire a reputation for Unitarianism, and Hutton’s presence there likely signals that he and his wife had come to be interested in more radical kinds of Protestant nonconformity, mixing in circles which questioned even such traditionally core doctrines as the Trinity, the atonement, and the divinity of Jesus. His private commitments are nowhere recorded, but a wider circle of Unitarians and those with radical sympathies – religious and political – would shape Hutton’s professional development long after he left Newcastle.

This could have had serious practical consequences. Probate courts, marriage, schools and universities all potentially discriminated against non-Anglicans, and the ill-named Toleration Act of 1688 specifically excluded deniers of the Trinity (as well as Catholics) from its provisions. Meanwhile the Blasphemy Act of 1698 threatened them with up to three years’ imprisonment and loss of civil rights. Enforcement was patchy, but the risk of penalties was real, as was that of the loss of friends. Hutton’s clerical benefactor Ivison is conspicuous by his absence from Hutton’s life after his move to Newcastle.






Work continued, and at a remarkable pace. Materially, Hutton was certainly prospering. His trajectory culminated for the moment with a final move to Westgate Street, one of Newcastle’s wealthier residential spots. He met the recurring problem of inadequate premises by acquiring a plot of land and building his own house and school. It was quite the elegant Georgian pile, with cellars and other conveniences. The Huttons could now avail themselves of all that the prosperous, growing city had to offer.

The old town walls (they had started to come down in 1763) enclosed an area of less than 200 acres, but those acres held the north of England’s capital and a good proportion of the northern counties’ population. There were tall elegant buildings and wide open spaces by the several churches. By the early 1770s the town had three hundred street lamps and a well-organised night watch. If the lower town tended to be smoky from house fires, and if the riverside was dominated by busy warehouses and the bustle of shipping on the Tyne (not to mention a growing concentration of poor tenements near the Black Gate), there were open fields just a little further up the hill, some under conversion into elegant pleasure gardens.






Newcastle in 1745.

The town offered the full range of mid-Georgian amenities. Subscription concerts, both at the assembly rooms and outdoors in the summer. Visits from famous musicians en route from London to Edinburgh, who would often stop and give a performance or two to offset the costs of travel. Charles Avison, Newcastle’s own resident composer and concert promoter, a man who enjoyed national fame. A literary club; theatres. Scientific lectures: Newcastle was the first provincial town to have them, with both local talents and the nationally famous visiting on tour. A popular press: for most of the century there were two weekly papers. Newcastle had local histories and local poets and balladeers. There were shops, inns, clubs, societies; fashion, food, wine.

Ultimately it all rested on coal; you could hardly forget that, if you lived anywhere near either the river or the coalfields, and Charles Hutton was never likely to forget it either. The sale of coal was so lucrative, contemporaries reckoned, that despite all the goods it imported Newcastle made a net gain every year, and had more money per head than anywhere else in the kingdom.

Mathematically, too, Newcastle and its environs were a rich world. There was William Emerson, a nationally famous mathematician who lived in nearby Hurworth. His studied eccentricity of manner and dress (home-made linen, big floppy hats and shapeless old jackets) earned him a local reputation as a wizard. Hutton corresponded with him and they became acquainted, though unsociable Emerson and ambitious Hutton did not really hit it off. There was John Fryer, who assisted Hutton with his surveying work; he was also Hutton’s teaching assistant at Westgate Street.

The school had its own separate entrance. Advertisements, briefer and more sober now, stated that there �Youth are qualified for the Army, Navy, Counting-house’; they could also be �compleatly instructed in the Theory and Practice of Land Surveying, with the use of the necessary Instruments’. Newcastle Grammar School took to sending its students to Hutton for specialist mathematics teaching. Not an altogether unusual arrangement – everyone knew that private academies did mathematics and science better than the grammar schools – but a gratifying endorsement of Hutton and his work.

His new-found middle-class status also meant that Hutton could work as a private tutor to the local gentry. As one biographer put it, Hutton’s �manners, as well as his talents’, now �rendered him acceptable’ in this role. Robert Shaftoe was one such patron, his home at Benwell Hall one of the more impressive local mansions (the Bobby Shaftoe of the popular song was a relative). Hutton’s tuition of his children impressed Shaftoe so much that he took to attending the lessons himself, revising the mathematics he had perhaps learnt at college. And he gave the young man the run of his impressive library. Newcastle had at least a couple of subscription libraries, and no shortage of booksellers, but access to a large, private book collection was a boon for Hutton, who remorselessly continued to improve himself. Over the years he added a reading knowledge of French, Italian and German to his early-acquired Latin. By 1772 he had read enough on geography to offer public lectures in the subject (to �gentlemen and ladies’) at half a guinea for the course. How many takers he found is not recorded.

Indeed, Hutton’s school was becoming something of a centre for learning. During the Christmas vacation of 1766–7 Hutton taught mathematics to other schoolteachers there, and at about the same time external lecturers began to use it as a venue. Caleb Rotherham covered geography, astronomy and other scientific subjects; likewise the popular James Ferguson. Ferguson was a house guest, and gave private performances to Hutton’s friends and family in the evenings, though Hutton was shocked when he discovered how little geometry the man knew. Hutton’s school was in a way a forerunner for the Literary and Philosophical Society that would be founded in Newcastle thirty years later, its first paid lecturer the same Caleb Rotherham.

His arrangement with Newcastle Grammar School brought Hutton himself two of his most celebrated pupils, and certainly his most colourful. John Scott was the son of a coal merchant; Bessie Surtees a wealthy banker’s daughter. Both went to Hutton for their mathematics lessons, but it was presumably not under his eye that their youthful romance blossomed. Scott went up to Cambridge in 1772, but the calls of love proved stronger and in November he came back and eloped (ladder, first-floor window) with Bessie. The scandal – or the romantic adventure, depending on your perspective – ran and ran through the nineteenth century, and Bessie Surtees merchandise is still to be had in her Newcastle home town.




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