One name on the subscribers’ list caught Hutton’s particular attention. John Scott, the Newcastle grammar school boy who had eloped with his sweetheart in 1772, had enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the law and was now, improbably enough, the Lord Chancellor of England. As Lord Eldon, his name headed the list, as befitted his rank, and Hutton wrote to thank him for subscribing. He recalled Scott and his wife, who had both been his pupils long ago, and said he remembered them ‘with a sort of parental affection’.
The marble bust of Charles Hutton.
There was one last, most gratifying mark of respect to come. In November of the same year – 1822 – the Council slate at the Royal Society included a name last seen there more than four decades before. Charles Hutton was once more elected an ordinary member of Council. No one could have missed the point of Hutton’s rehabilitation; like the presentation of the bust, it was widely reported in the newspapers. It was a generous compliment to the grand old man of British mathematics, and a clear sign of Davy’s intention to reconcile British mathematics and British science.
Hutton never attended a meeting of Council in the 1822–3 season. It’s uncertain, indeed, whether he attended meetings of the Royal Society at all during this period, though it’s appealing to think he went along for the reading of his paper on the density of the earth in 1821. His health was poor. Respiratory disease, whatever its ultimate source, had dogged him since the 1780s. The winters of 1815 and 1816 were particularly hard on him; he spoke of feeling ‘quite the old man’ in the winter of 1815. From 1817 he had difficulty writing, and one day in January 1819 he was embarrassed to find he had confused the order of pages in writing a letter to Catherine. He suffered cold after cold; he was housebound for long periods.
Yet there were times when he seemed much better. Catherine remarked on the continuing vivacity of his letters, their freedom from any taint of old age. He remained mentally sharp, answering correspondents punctiliously. From later in 1819, indeed, his health improved and he felt better than he had for years. In 1822 alone he saw through the press new editions of the Guide, the Measurer and the Tables: twelve hundred pages in total, dense with mathematics and numbers; a volume of work that would have exhausted men a third his age.
Charles Hutton in old age.
If social life was becoming less frenetic, he was no recluse, and the flow of visitors to Bedford Row showed no sign of drying up. One visitor in the spring of 1822 reported in some detail on Hutton’s preoccupations and his manner. He seemed hale and in remarkably good spirits, telling the old tale of his relationship to Isaac Newton with some relish. He could read without spectacles (he claimed), though he was a little deaf. He called 1822 the happiest year of his life.
But Hutton was frail. In the winter of 1822 he caught a cold that brought back his lung complaint. Conversations with Gregory turned on his approaching death, and he took steps to put his affairs in order. Letters and manuscripts were labelled; some items were given to Gregory or set aside to be given to him. In January he made his will.
On Friday 24 January he received a letter from the Corporation of London, asking once again for an opinion about London Bridge, the curves that should be adopted for the arches in the new structure. Would it work, would it hold? Gregory visited the same day for a detailed conversation about the subject. The eighty-five-year-old ‘expatiated with his usual perspicuity and accuracy upon the theory of arcuation, the relative advantages and disadvantages of different curves selected for the intrados, the most judicious construction of contering, &c …’ He dictated a letter, and when he was tired Gregory agreed to visit again in a week.
Over Saturday and Sunday Hutton weakened, though he retained his mental faculties almost to the very end. By Sunday evening he was unconscious, and around four on Monday morning, 27 January 1823, he died.
He was buried the next day, in the churchyard at Charlton near Woolwich, where lay his daughter, his grandson and his wife. The churchyard faced open country; from it you could see down the long slope to the river, and beyond it towards the north.
Epilogue
‘Dr. Hutton is gone where, we trust, all the labyrinths of the universe will be revealed to him; leaving, to mathematicians, a name seldom equalled for science, for utility, never; and, to his friends, the memory of a character adding to that science an unwearied fund of knowledge and conversation, a cheerful and kind disposition, and the simplicity of a child.’
– John MacCulloch, 1824
Charles Hutton’s was a long journey, in more ways than one, and he had known triumph and despair in more than common measure. The eighteenth century was an era of significant social mobility; it was also an era of significant change, social, intellectual and cultural. Hutton lived from the age of Alexander Pope to that of Walter Scott and Ann Radcliffe; through the entire lifetimes of Jane Austen and Percy Shelley.
He saw American independence, the French Revolution, and much of what has come to be called the industrial revolution. Yet even when all that is taken into account, he himself had been on a long and a spectacular journey. By the time of his retirement and even more so by the time of his death he was a national celebrity. His death was reported in almost every London newspaper, and his son received condolences from both the Duke of Wellington and the Lord Chancellor. People named their sons after him: Charles Hutton Potts (soldier), Charles Hutton Lear (artist), Charles Hutton Dowling (mathematician). The pages of The Ladies’ Diary flowed with poetic tributes:
This country shall entwine
Th’immortal wreath his matchless toils have won;
And Science breathe in other lays than mine.
A requiem o’er her lost – her darling son!
The Morning Post called him ‘one of the most successful promoters of useful science perhaps in any age or country’, the Literary Chronicle a ‘great man … dear to science, whose memory will long be revered’. Humphrey Davy reckoned him ‘one of the most able mathematicians of his country and his age’. The Quarterly Review judged that his popularity ‘promises to be as permanent as it is extensive’. Such has not, in fact, proved to be the case.
In the first instance Hutton’s memory and his reputation were guarded by his family. Henry Hutton retired to Ireland where he died just four years after his father, in June 1827. Since the 1780s, his interest in antiquities had grown into an obsession, and his handsome pension from the Royal Artillery gave him leisure to indulge in the collection of material – notably on the architecture of Scottish church buildings – that he showed no real sign of arranging for publication. He left a mass of papers, and despite the efforts of Catherine Hutton and, at her instigation, Walter Scott, publication was not attempted; they languish today in – mostly – the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh: twelve unpublished and unpublishable volumes of notes, drawings and lists.
Isabella lived quietly on in London until her death in 1839. She eventually moved out of the house in Bedford Row to a smaller establishment, and kept in touch with the circle of her relations and friends and to some degree the friends of her father. Her correspondence with Catherine Hutton was a lively one, and there was even a small item in the newspapers about the enduring friendship of these ersatz cousins – who knew perfectly well that they were not related. Eleanor was widowed again and married for a third time, to a George Children; her later life is obscure, and she died in March 1850.
Margaret had once hoped that no grandchild of Charles Hutton would live out his life ‘a meer ordinary being’, and it is one of the great surprises of Hutton’s story that of all the members of the next generation – that of his grandchildren – it was Charles Blacker Vignoles who most lived up to that challenge.
Vignoles, still in America, heard of his grandfather’s death through the newspapers at the end of March. He felt a moment of indecision, or rather of determination to remain where he was. ‘I do not expect this will cause any material change in my destiny, and not having at any time calculated upon any advantage, the circ
umstance is a matter of much regret, as I have wished to have met him in an independent state before he died.’ But he quickly changed his mind and sailed home, leaving both his debtors and his creditors behind him.
Henry Hutton would never entirely forgive Vignoles for the way he had behaved, and his descendants preserved a memory of Vignoles’s ‘ingratitude’ towards his uncle for generations (there was a letter to the press on the subject as late as 1889). But Isabella had always had a soft spot for the young man, and it took her a matter of hours to admit him back into his old room in Bedford Row. Both were quite eager to persuade themselves that the long rift had been merely a terrible misunderstanding.
Things could still be difficult; at first Isabella did not want to see Vignoles’s wife and children, and there was something of a scene when they moved back to London and she received the impression they were going to come and install themselves in Bedford Row at once. In fact Isabella relented on that matter too, and in just a few weeks she allowed Mary and the children to move in with her. She was sixty, and abhorred both noise and unnecessary expense, but she seems to have reconciled herself to the presence of the young family and its demands (five-year-old Camilla was wont to practise the piano) for a time, before they moved on to an establishment of their own. Vignoles would name his fourth child Hutton ‘in memory of my Grandfather & in respect to my Aunt Hutton’; another was called Isabella. This was all the reconciliation there would ever be with Charles Hutton, but there is perhaps at least a hint here that Vignoles had come to feel he, too, had behaved badly.
Vignoles’s career took flight now he was out of the shadow of his famous grandfather. On the strength of his surveying work in America and his publications there, he established himself as a civil engineer. Olinthus Gregory helped, as did Thomas Leybourn, and the link with Charles Hutton did no harm; more than once Vignoles traded on the fact that he had learned mathematics with the great man. He worked on canals, bridges and – during the mania of the 1840s – railways; he built bridges and railways in Russia and Switzerland, Spain and Brazil, and more British lines than Brunel. The flat-bottomed shape of most railway rails – the ‘Vignoles rail’ – is his most enduring legacy. In 1841 he was the first Professor in Civil Engineering at University College London; in 1855 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
His domestic life was unhappy. The necessarily mobile life of a civil engineer was hard on his family, and the years of separation had already taken their toll on him and Mary. For many years Vignoles acted for the best according to his notions, in circumstances often very difficult and seldom entirely of his own making. But accusations of neglect and cruelty grew steadily wilder on both sides, and eventually Mary’s language and behaviour became so erratic that she was placed in the care of a nurse. Her letters from this final period make pitiful reading; she died in 1834 of ‘dropsy in the chest’.
Vignoles’s own daughter Camilla seemed to threaten a repetition of a sorry pattern when she contracted a clandestine marriage to a Mr Croudace, for whom her father felt no enthusiasm (‘amiable blockhead’ was the phrase he used in a letter to Isabella).
A generation later Charles Hutton passed out of living memory. Eleanor’s children have so far proved untraceable; Vignoles died in 1875 and his cousin, Henry’s second son, in 1863, after a life in the church. The line of Charles Hutton’s descendants continued on the one hand with Vignoles’s children (five reached adulthood) and on the other with another Henry: Colonel Henry Francis Hutton. On the Vignoles side the line continues to this day.
Thus Hutton’s family. What of his rumoured wealth? Hutton owned about forty-five thousand pounds at his death. Not an immense fortune, but close to a hundred times his annual pension, and undoubtedly a good deal for a pit lad. His will, written on 7 January 1823 when he had just three weeks to live, left the marble bust of himself to the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle, where it still stands, looking benevolently across a pleasantly bustling reading room. It left everything else to his unmarried daughter Isabella. She had been a constant and faithful companion to her father for something like fifty years, and she had no means of support beside the income from her inheritance.
Nevertheless, some in the family resented the one-sided arrangement. Vignoles wrote bitterly about the matter to his wife, and it was rumoured as far away as Newcastle that Henry Hutton planned to dispute the will in Chancery, even that Isabella had offered to give up the principal in exchange for a modest annuity. It never came to that, but a trust was set up and in the first instance Isabella agreed that it would pay annuities to her brother and sister. She reckoned the remaining income was still twice what she needed, and it was understood that the surplus would be allowed to accumulate. In later years payments were also made to Henry’s son. The trust’s finances became rather complex; it invested in mortgages, and one large holder defaulted and was declared bankrupt, but the details are desperately obscure. Payments continued to be made, but Vignoles would state in 1839 that the trust now had barely enough value to be able to continue.
Vignoles was, it appears, the last surviving trustee, and my understanding is that he ultimately became the sole owner of the remaining capital and property, whatever they were worth. At this stage he passed on the Vanderbank portrait of Newton to the Royal Society; some other portraits, including one of Hutton and another of Isabella and Camilla, stayed in the Vignoles family. So did Vignoles’s own voluminous diaries and correspondence, which eventually went to public libraries in Portsmouth and London.
One of the enduring mysteries about Charles Hutton – and it bears on the survival or otherwise of his reputation – is the destiny of his own papers. At a very conservative estimate Hutton must have written or received a letter a day from the mid-1760s to the mid-1810s. Even if he kept only the most interesting 10 per cent, that would still have made a collection of well over a thousand letters, including material from many of the biggest scientific names in Britain and Europe. And at one time, presumably, the letters were kept together in some sort of sequence: Hutton was a notoriously methodical man, and for some the secret of his success lay partly in the order with which he kept his private notes. As well as letters there were certainly some scientific manuscripts. There was even a diary, which Gregory had in his hands for part of 1823, ‘and memoirs of his life and writings’.
The diary and memoirs are gone; of Hutton’s letters only about 130 have turned up, and they are scattered, today, across more than thirty locations. His scientific papers are similarly scattered, and similarly few in number. What happened?
To begin with, neither the military installation at Woolwich nor its parent the Board of Ordnance, based at the Tower of London, was a conducive environment to the safekeeping of manuscripts and artefacts. Hutton’s novel eprouvette was certainly destroyed in a fire at the Woolwich Repository in 1802, and there were further fires at Woolwich in 1873 and at the Tower in 1841, which would have affected any of his papers that remained there. His manuscript lectures on natural philosophy were said by Gregory to have been lost ‘in a very extraordinary manner’ around 1813, which sounds like a spectacular accident at Woolwich. His contract with the Stationers’ Company obliged him to return to the company his almanac-related manuscripts when his work for them ended, and there is no sign that the company preserved them. Hutton himself is unlikely, I think, to have retained personal papers and letters that bore even obliquely on the failure of his first marriage or the illegitimacy of his youngest daughter.
On the other hand, Hutton certainly sorted and labelled at least some of his scientific manuscripts and some of his letters, and there is no doubt that he passed certain of them to Gregory during the 1810s, including writings on ballistics that were useful to Gregory in his own work on the subject. By the time Gregory was writing a long obituary of Hutton in early 1823 he had possession of several more scientific items, including the translation from Tartaglia and the notes on the history of algebra and on the ancient geometers Archimedes
and Pappus, along with Hutton’s collection of memorabilia from the 1784 affair, as well as at least a few letters, printed books, and even a pendulum. Some of this had been presented to him after Hutton’s death, but our evidence fails to make it clear how much.
Gregory had the notion of working on some of the topics represented in the papers he received, particularly including ancient geometry, but in the event he did not, nor did he edit any of Hutton’s work for posthumous publication. He also expected that Hutton’s diary would appear in print, but it never did, despite some public comment on the matter. Gregory died in February 1841, and his books and papers were sold at auction. A few mathematicians, including the great Victorian mathematician Augustus De Morgan, made a point of attending and acquiring Hutton-related material, with the result that there are Hutton manuscripts in University College London and Trinity College Cambridge today. But the diary vanished without trace.
As for anything that didn’t go to Gregory – including, I imagine, the bulk of Hutton’s personal correspondence – the trail is still colder. A few items turned up in the hands of private collectors during the 1830s, but it’s hard to say how they got there and harder to guess where they may have ended up in later decades. During his time in Bedford Row, Vignoles helped his aunt to dispose of some of the remaining books, and there are references in his journal to ‘arranging papers’, which could be those of Hutton; he would later state that he himself received only a ‘few scraps’ from Hutton’s manuscripts. Elsewhere he elaborated that ‘accident’ had ‘destroyed many’ (he corrected himself to ‘some’) of his family’s papers. I can believe in the few scraps, but my belief wavers as to the accident, which left Vignoles’s as the only voice to be heard in the row between him and his grandfather. Whether by accident or design, then, it seems that the majority of Hutton’s correspondence as well as his autobiographical writings – possibly together with a residue of scientific material – were probably destroyed in the decade or two after 1823. The material that passed through Gregory’s sale is virtually all that is known today, apart from a hundred-odd letters to or from Hutton, very scattered.
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