36 - BERNARD SHAW AND ISAAC NEWTON

Summary

Newton's life falls into two parts, and his habit of life was remarkably different in the one from what it was in the other. The dividing line came somewhere about 1692 when he was fifty years of age. G.B.S. has placed In Good King Charles's Golden Days in the year 1680. With wild departure from the known facts he describes Newton as he certainly was not in that year. But with prophetic insight into the possibilities of his nature he gives us a picture which would not have been very unplausible thirty years later—‘In Dull King George's Golden (much more golden) Days’. May I here praise G.B.S. by illustrating the proleptic quality of his anachronisms?

To begin with a small detail, the setting of the play is, unaccountably, in a house of Isaac Newton somewhere, apparently, in the town of Cambridge. Newton never had such a house. All his years in Cambridge he dwelt in Trinity, in rooms which are still there to see, between the Great Gate and Chapel. But G.B.S. speaks correctly of ‘an iron balcony outside with an iron staircase down to the garden level’, though these are now removed; for Newton had as his garden what is now the patch of grass between the buildings and the street, and in this garden was his laboratory. Thirty years later Newton had, indeed, such a house as is described in St Martin's Street off Leicester Square.