Gunpowder and Geometry Page 15
We hear nothing more about the project for several years. Although Hutton would later say he worked on the book solidly for a decade, he was doing many other things as well, including, still, his teaching job at Woolwich. As work on the book progressed, though, Hutton witnessed from afar the demise of French enlightened culture as he had known it, and the transformation of France into (again) a declared enemy state. French literary and intellectual models became less acceptable in Britain, and the Encyclopédie could no longer be an acknowledged inspiration.
It also became obvious during that decade that Hutton could not possibly complete a mathematical encyclopedia on the scale he might have liked. He put it about that the article on algebra, which contained one of the most comprehensive and detailed histories of the subject yet written, had cost him two years of reading and writing. That is borne out by surviving manuscripts, which show Hutton making detailed notes and synopses of every old algebra book on which he could lay his hands, as well as translating in extenso contents pages, prefaces and even in one case a book-length section from the sixteenth-century Italian of Niccolò Tartaglia. A dictionary or encyclopedia conceived on such a scale would not have been completed in a lifetime.
So the project became, perhaps for a combination of reasons, less like an encyclopedia and more like the ‘dictionary’ of mathematics and science envisaged in the original agreement: in a sense somewhat like that of Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary. Hutton wrote a large number of succinct dictionary-style definitions covering terms and concepts from mathematics and science, and also ranging across astrology, music and military theory. He took what amounted to the contents of a decent primer on arithmetic and chopped it into medium-length articles for insertion into the dictionary. He did the same for geometry, mensuration, astronomy and military mathematics. He added biographies of ancient and modern mathematicians, based on the one hand on their works or secondary sources, and on the other on Hutton’s personal knowledge gained through correspondence and as editor of The Ladies’ Diary.
Just how much of this was Hutton’s own personal work is not certain. A letter from Nevil Maskelyne to Hutton survives from this period in which Maskelyne suggested some text for the article on Parisian astronomer Jérôme Lalande. Direct acknowledgement in the published text was rare, but Hutton mentioned for instance Abram Robertson, of Christ Church, Oxford and Dr Damen, Professor of Mathematics at Leiden as sources of information; surely there were many more. John Playfair was involved with sending Hutton information about the mathematical family of Gregory from Edinburgh, although not much of it found its way into the dictionary; Edward Waring of Oxford supplied ten pages on algebra.
Citations within the Dictionary as published make it clear that Hutton’s main sources were printed, however. A list of them would amount to little less than a catalogue of Hutton’s mathematical library, which contemporaries acknowledged was the best in the country. He possessed quite a number of early mathematical books: the algebra texts mentioned above, but also early editions of Greek geometrical works. He also had a wealth of British and continental material from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: hundreds of volumes in four or five languages. If Newton and Newtonians were conspicuously well represented, it was also made quite clear in the Dictionary that the author was a man who kept up to date with such publications as the Proceedings and Memoirs issuing from Paris and Petersburg: the output of ‘Learned Societies throughout Europe’, as he emphasised in the preface. The names of Leonhard Euler, Jérôme Lalande and Alexis Clairaut were frequent in the Dictionary, and Hutton took every opportunity to display the breadth of his mathematical gaze.
In a letter of 19 December 1793 Hutton informed Maskelyne that he had ‘just got to the end of the Alphabet with my Dictionary’, and that he had begun to send sheets to the press. The manuscript, he stated, was written mostly in his own hand, although teenage Charlotte did ‘some copying’. Hutton was weary of the project, thanking God in this letter that it was ‘out of my hands’. In a letter to Robert Harrison in Newcastle in 1794 he referred to it as ‘an immense task’; in the preface to ‘great labour and reading’. It took me a good thirty hours just to leaf through the Dictionary; the thought of fair-copying it using quill and ink is quite a horrible one.
The dictionary was indeed much larger than Hutton’s agreement with Johnson had anticipated; all told, the manuscript filled more than fifteen hundred sides of folio paper. We do not know whether Hutton had discussed this burgeoning with Johnson, or how the publisher felt about the matter. He insisted on using a very small typeface for the book, over Hutton’s objections, but even so the printed Dictionary filled around twice the number of sheets the contract had stipulated.
The reasons for the large size of the Dictionary were various. The long articles were in some cases very long, and they ranged across Hutton’s personal enthusiasms from algebra to hot air balloons. The medium-sized articles amounted to four or five short books in themselves. The biographies were bulked in many cases by comprehensive lists of the subjects’ works, and Hutton’s interest in the history of his subject lengthened many of the other articles too, as did a tendency to give both sides of every disputed question. And the short definition-style articles were legion, covering a much wider range than might reasonably have been expected. The contract and the eventual title page both specified a ‘mathematical and philosophical dictionary’ and the preface pointed to a desire for greater comprehensiveness than had been achieved in any predecessor, for inclusiveness rather than its opposite in cases of doubt. But few readers would really have turned to a dictionary of mathematics in order to find out about balconies and balustrades, still less about barricades, bastions or batteries.
More than a year passed between Hutton sending the first sheets of the Dictionary to the press and the first parts going on sale. It was, like Hutton’s previous large works the Mensuration and the Miscellany, initially issued in separate numbers, the first appearing on 31 January 1795. There were numerous advertisements in the press, and a single-leaf puff for the Dictionary also circulated, Hutton himself sending copies to some of his correspondents.
The separate numbers were gathered into four ‘parts’ and bound in two volumes, the whole going on sale in February 1796, three months later than the advertisements had promised. Something seems to have gone wrong with the preface, where Hutton might have expected to justify the size and shape of the book in some detail: it merely repeated text from one of the advertisements, and in some copies of the Dictionary it was bound not at the beginning of Part 1 but at the beginning of Part 4, in the middle of the second volume. The result was an oddly austere appearance for the first volume, which went straight from title page to the entries under A beginning with abacus, with no explanation of who was meant to use the dictionary, how or for what. There were also three dozen additional entries under the general title of ‘addenda et corrigenda’ at the end of Part 4; evidently the ‘finished’ product of late 1793 had already been the subject of Hutton’s second thoughts during the subsequent months, and again the result was difficulty for the reader, who had no reason to expect that (parts of) the entries for achromatic, Bernoulli or canal would be found far out of their alphabetical sequence.
The Dictionary had generated a good deal of anticipation among Hutton’s friends. John Playfair, in Edinburgh, had been asking after its progress since August 1792; among the Greenwich Observatory circle it was expected to be a ‘capital performance’, and several members of that group declared themselves purchasers shortly after the first parts went on sale, despite the fairly high price: a shilling a number, or two pounds fourteen shillings for the whole thing. In a letter of about 1795, before the second volume was published, Hutton referred to ‘the very favourable manner’ in which the Dictionary had been ‘received by the public’. Another Scottish friend, John Leslie, had professed himself in October that year ‘much entertained’ by the early parts. Several reviewers – including, surely, some of Hutton’s personal f
riends – judged the Dictionary learned, masterly and useful: ‘a performance of immense erudition, and by which the fame of its author is fully established’.
But there were, not surprisingly, those who disagreed. For those determined to be hostile it was quite possible to see the Dictionary’s diversity of material, of styles of writing, as catastrophic unevenness. To see its range of subject matter as bewildering, to carp at its size, price, and the personal idiosyncrasy of many of its choices. More than one commentator disapproved of the whole project. One argued that a compilation of this kind was of use only to ‘smatterers and would-be scholars’, to ‘dilettanti and vain pretenders to philosophical reputation’. Another went so far as to charge Hutton with the ‘prostitution of the best abilities and deepest knowledge’ to the commercial book trade.
It didn’t help that in the preface/advertisement Hutton boldly claimed that the Dictionary was ‘of an equal and uniform nature and construction throughout’: it was most certainly not. Under some headings it contained far more information than might have been expected, under others rather less; it contained much that no one would have expected it to contain at all. It was hard to predict whether any particular term would be included or not, or whether it would be treated briefly or extensively. Hutton also claimed the book was of ‘moderate size and price’ but in fact it was expensive and bulky by almost any standard.
For all that, the Dictionary was certainly a success rather than a failure. The balance of reviews was positive. A second edition appeared in due course, and imitations and derived works followed. Quotation from it and reference to it became a regular feature of English writing about the subjects it covered. As a monument to British mathematics it appears to have achieved all Hutton had hoped.
His mind, however, had been on other things since the completion of the Dictionary; while it was going through the press he was struck from a direction he could never have expected, and with a severity from which he could never wholly recover. Late in 1794 his beloved youngest daughter Charlotte, quite suddenly and with little or no hint of earlier illness, ruptured a vessel in her lungs. She died on 24 September. She was sixteen.
Life and duty carried on, but Charles and Margaret were for a long period beyond consolation. Hutton’s letters of this period show a man desolate almost beyond words, speaking of what was left of his life as a ‘gloomy remainder’. Of all his children it was Charlotte who had most seemed to bear his intellectual gifts, to whom he was closest, on whom he most doted and in whom he most hoped. ‘Never did I think it possible I could feel such severe affliction’, he wrote to a friend. Five years later, in 1799, a printed account of Hutton’s life mentioned that ‘he has never ceased to lament the loss … [has] never quite recovered his wonted spirits and liveliness.’
There was a curious coda to Charlotte’s death. Just a few days earlier she had been awake before the rest of the family, and when they found her in the parlour she told them a remarkable dream she had had. Her written account of it was printed with the notice of her death in The Gentleman’s Magazine, and so it is that we have a few lines of prose from a young woman whose voice would otherwise be silent.
I dreamt that I was dead, and that my soul had ascended into one of the stars; there I found several persons whom I had formerly known, and among them some of the nuns whom I was particularly attached to when in France. They told me, when they received me, that they were glad to see me, but hoped I should not stay with them long, the place being a kind of purgatory, and that all the stars were for the reception of different people’s souls, a different star being allotted for every kind of bad temper and vice; all the sharp tempers went to one star, the sulky to another, the peevish to another, and so on. Every body in each star being of the same temper, no one would give up to another, and there was nothing but dissension and quarrels among them. Some of those who received me, taking offence at the information my friends were giving to me a child, it made a quarrel, which at length became so rude and noisy, that it awaked me.
And as their grief was losing its keenest edge, the Huttons were struck again.
Camilla had lodged in Barbados while the British took Martinique, St Louis and Guadeloupe from the French in 1794. But those early gains were followed by an outbreak of yellow fever that cost far more lives than the fighting. Thousands perished among the British forces, and in the winter of 1794–5 – just a few months after Charlotte’s death – Hutton learned that Camilla and her husband and child had perished with them at Guadeloupe.
The life of a soldier’s wife had its perils, but this second loss was no less hard for all that. Hutton received initially only rather confused reports, which said in addition that his son Henry, now a captain in the Royal Artillery and also on the West Indian station, had lost an eye and was a prisoner of war in Martinique. Hutton had long had some sympathy with radical causes and some distaste for the Pitt and Pittite ministries; little wonder that in February one of the assistants at the Greenwich Observatory, David Kinnebrook, found him ‘very severe upon Mr. Pitt & Administration in general; for carrying on the War’. Kinnebrook added dryly that Hutton ‘has reason to complain’.
Fate had another surprise in store, however. More than six months later, in early August 1795, Henry Hutton arrived at Woolwich. How much warning he gave we don’t know; he had indeed lost an eye, and he was indeed a prisoner on parole from the French. He was accompanied, in a scene worthy of grand opera, by an Irish nursemaid and a two-year-old boy.
Closer to the scene of the action than his father, Henry had heard the truer word; infant Charles Vignoles had not died with his mother and father. Henry received permission from his commanding officer to go to Guadeloupe, now held by the French again, intending to cross the lines under a flag of truce. When he got there he found the remaining English garrison in such a desperate state he felt compelled to join them, and in the subsequent fighting he was wounded and taken prisoner. The French commander gave him permission, nevertheless, to continue his mission of rescue, and he was able to locate Charles Blacker Vignoles in the home of a French merchant named Courtois who had taken in, and buried, his parents. Henry returned home on parole with the child and his nurse.
It was a story that would have strained belief, had young Vignoles not been accompanied by a piece of paper on which his dying mother had scrawled the names and addresses of his uncle and grandfather. Courtois’s own letter, written on the same sheet, told an agonising tale. Charles and Camilla had been reunited at Pointe-à-Pitre on Guadeloupe during 1794, but as the English succumbed to fever the French retook the island and the town was besieged. During the chaos Charles took fever and died in his lodgings on 8 June, followed two days later by his exhausted wife. ‘I had them given a decent burial’. The child, too, was infected, but he survived; Camilla had wished her own family to take him in, and he was entrusted to his uncle Henry two months later.
Camilla’s dying scrawl.
Charles Hutton was fifty-eight, and the addition of a two-year-old child to his household was hardly an event he would have countenanced in less extraordinary circumstances. But Camilla’s dying scrawl, and Courtois’s letter which spoke most painfully of her regrets, left him little choice. So the Cube House once again acquired a nursery and schoolroom, and Hutton added to his roles that of Vignoles’s guardian, and to his worries his education and upbringing.
It was in this context, remarkably, that Hutton systematised his mathematical syllabus in full and in writing. He had continued to refine his presentation of mathematical topics to students, of course, through his long years of teaching at the Royal Military Academy. His Guide was now in its twelfth edition, the Mensuration and Measurer each in their third. More and more he found it frustrating to teach the cadets from a range of different books, using a section here and a section there as their training required, and he determined – as a number of his colleagues and predecessors at Woolwich had done – to write his own comprehensive textbook, so that everything he needed would b
e in one place, with no extraneous matter and nothing in the wrong order. It would also be the culminating, most complete demonstration of his skills as a pedagogue.
Hutton’s Course of Mathematics was at first a manuscript compilation, as the Conics had once been, though the scope and duration of the Woolwich mathematics course meant that it filled two fat volumes totalling 750 pages. It was a work of synthesis, drawing together teaching material that Hutton found in the textbooks of his various predecessors and the mass of mathematics books produced in Georgian Britain, as well as mining his own earlier works for suitable material. In a way it was little more than a scissors-and-paste exercise, with a presentation of arithmetic rewritten on the model of the Guide and a presentation of geometry and practical geometry rewritten from the Mensuration, the Measurer and the Conics. Scientific matters such as hydrostatics had already appeared in the second half of the Conics and were in part taken over from there. But there was also much that was new; arithmetic was followed by a presentation of algebra, something Hutton had never written about in his earlier textbooks, and the basics of geometry were handled, newly for Hutton, in the theorem-and-proof style of his Conics. Calculus was included, as it was not in his earlier, more elementary works. In fact there was hardly a section longer than a paragraph copied from Hutton’s other books without some modification.