2 - The Solitary Scholar

Summary

NEWTON SET OUT FOR CAMBRIDGE early in June 1661. There was no greater watershed in his life. Although he would return to Woolsthorpe infrequently during the next eighteen years, with two extended visits during the plague, spiritually he now left it, and what a later commentator has called the idiocy of rural life, once and for all. Three short years would put him beyond any possibility of return, though three more years, perhaps somewhat longer, had to pass before a permanent stay in Cambridge was assured. His accounts show that he stopped at Sewstern, presumably to check on his property there; and after spending a second night at Stilton as he skirted the Great Fens, he arrived at Cambridge on the fourth of June and presented himself at Trinity College the following day. If the procedures set forth in the statutes were followed, the senior dean and the head lecturer of the college examined him to determine if he was fit to hear lectures. He was admitted – although there is no record whatever of anything but the verdict, one feels constrained to add – “forthwith.” He purchased a lock for his desk, a quart bottle and ink to fill it, a notebook, a pound of candles, and a chamber pot and was ready for whatever Cambridge might offer.