The Philosophical Breakfast Club (4 page)

Before he “went up” to Cambridge to stay in the fall of 1812, William was tutored in mathematics by Mr. Gough, the blind mathematician of Kendal, made famous a few years later by Wordsworth’s lines about him in
The Excursion:

In May, William wrote his father to update him on his progress: “I attend Mr. Gough at the hours I named to you, and hope I am making tolerable progress. I have reviewed algebra, trigonometry, and other branches … and am now reading conic sections, fluxions, and mechanics.”
¹⁹
He would be well prepared for Cambridge. After veering so radically from its intended course, William Whewell’s life now ran smoothly, onward, to Cambridge, and to the future, just as the Lancaster Canal, veering from its path at Glasson, reached into the sea.

I
N
1841 W
HEWELL, NEWLY APPOINTED
M
ASTER OF
T
RINITY
C
OLLEGE
, opened a letter that brought him back to his university days, when he and his closest friends decided they would change the world. “We have all made some advances in mere
physical
science,” Thomas Forster reminded him, “but in
metaphysics
, as far at least as I am concerned, I am not conscious of having advanced one single step, since the period when you and I and Herschel and Babbage used to meet at our Sunday morning’s philosophical breakfasts.”
¹

Meeting Herschel, Babbage, and another member of the breakfast club, Richard Jones, had been a turning point in Whewell’s life. When he first arrived at Cambridge, Whewell could not have anticipated how much these friendships would change his life, or how much he and his friends would transform the practice of science.

He found a university made up of separate colleges, each with its own set of turreted buildings and its own unique history, situated within a small, medieval town over which the university ruled like a feudal master. Proctors and their subordinates called “bulldogs” roamed the narrow and winding alleys of the town, seeking out students who were about to miss the nighttime curfew, who were not wearing proper academic dress, or who were being entertained by “Cyprians,” as the town’s prostitutes were called.
²
Ever since Elizabethan times the university proctors had the right to enter private homes if they suspected a prostitute was within the walls, and the further permission to arrest and imprison her. Prostitutes were known to haunt the areas of the town called Castle End and Barnwell, and to these spots the proctors often went to seek their young charges.

Students, in their black robes and square tasseled caps, if they were scholarship students or regular “pensioners,” or in their togas with
elaborate golden embroidery and hats if they were “noblemen” or noble-born “fellow-commoners,” also roamed the town, especially at night: meeting the Cyprians, “making love” to the local girls (often in the sequestered spot near Queen’s Gate, where they risked having slops thrown on them by the students in the rooms above), drinking at the public houses, or going to dinner parties hosted by students living in lodgings outside the college walls. Wine flowed freely at these parties. One night during Whewell’s time, a student staggering drunkenly back from a dinner party in Bridge Street fell into a ditch at the side of the road; he was found the next day, dead of exposure. This episode led to a series of pamphlets calling for the university to crack down on student drinking, which it tried unsuccessfully to do, in part by requiring prior notification of all dinner and supper parties, and by insisting that local wine merchants submit their bills directly to a student’s tutor.
³

Not much could be done on this front: drinking was one of the major pastimes of students, especially those who were not spending their days studying hard for the honors exam (called the “Tripos,” perhaps from the three-legged stools on which candidates used to sit). It was a popular prank for students to try to make each other drunk before the mandatory evening chapel service; one Trinity College man at the time described the scene in the chapel as being “effervescent,” filled with drunk and giggling men. The dons could not exert too much moral suasion, as they were often drunk themselves; Whewell’s friend John Romilly later recorded that at one dinner party of “13 select” fellows, fourteen bottles of champagne were consumed.

Even the college curfew could be avoided. Gates closed at 10:00 p.m., but students could enter before midnight by paying a small fine. After midnight it was, as one student said, better to stay out all night and bribe the bedmaker the next morning “not to peach.”
⁴

Whewell’s college, Trinity, had been founded in the last year of the reign of Henry VIII. In 1546 a crisis threatened the existing colleges: Peterhouse, Clare, Pembroke, Gonville, Trinity Hall, Corpus Christi, Kings’, Queens’, St. Catherine’s, Jesus, St. John’s, Christ’s, and Magdalene. Greedy courtiers were urging the king to dissolve the colleges and appropriate their wealth, as he had already done to the Catholic monasteries in England, Wales, and Ireland. Before taking such a step, the king commissioned an investigation of the colleges; the report turned out to be so favorable that Henry declared that “he had not in his realm so many
persons so honestly maintained in living by so little land and rent.” Henry’s sixth (and last) wife, Catherine Parr, persuaded her husband not only to spare the colleges, but to found a new, more magnificent one. Henry brought together two older colleges, King’s Hall and Michaelhouse, and added land and tithes (taxes paid to clergy) recently taken from the monks. Trinity College was to fly the royal standard, and unlike any of the other colleges, its master was to be appointed by the crown.
⁵

By the time Whewell entered, Trinity was the most powerful of the colleges, as well as the richest, renowned for the excellence of its food and ale as much as for its scholarship. Past members included Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon. Recently, Lord Byron, the rising poetical and political star (he had just given a well-received speech on reform at the House of Lords), had studied at Trinity. Because students were forbidden to keep dogs as pets in college, Byron had famously kept a bear on a leash; he periodically threatened to have “Bruin” sit for the fellowship examination, predicting the bear would do as well as any recent graduate.
⁶

When Whewell first entered the Great Gate at the entrance to Trinity, he would have marveled at the row of medieval buildings to the north, originally built for King’s Hall in 1337. The square Great Court was formed by connecting this row to three newer sides constructed in the late sixteenth century. A massive stone fountain, where students had once washed, stood in the center of the lawn. To the right was the college chapel, where Whewell and the fellows and undergraduates would be summoned each morning at seven to matins, and again in the evenings. Roubiliac’s famous statue of Newton reigned in the antechapel. Little could Whewell imagine that one day his likeness would face a statue of Francis Bacon under the watchful eye of Roubiliac’s Newton. Straight ahead was the Master’s Lodge, with its Gothic bay windows and ivy-covered walls, which he would one day call home. Next to the Master’s Lodge, Whewell would see the Hall’s rooftop lantern and its imposing polygonal oriel windows, projecting from an upper floor and supported from below with corbels, or brackets.

From the inside, the Hall was even more intimidating. Built to hold four hundred to five hundred men, the Hall had east and west oriel windows facing the two courts (the Great Court on one side, and Neville’s Court on the other), tiers of arches decorating the rafters, elaborate woodwork on the Minstrel’s Gallery, and paneling above the dais at the north end. On this paneling hung huge, life-sized portraits of Newton,
Bacon, and Isaac Barrow, the scientific luminaries of the college. Under those portraits sat the dons and the noblemen and fellow-commoners (wealthy undergraduates who paid extra to dine with the fellows) at a long table known as the High Table. Along the left-hand wall was another long table for the B.A. gentlemen (those who had already gained their undergraduate degrees) and one for the scholarship students. In the middle was a table for the pensioners, the students from non-noble families who were not on scholarships. A student from this class of men complained that all tables except for that of the pensioners were well provided for; the scholarship students ate better than the pensioners, he grumbled. On feast days, though, he conceded, even the pensioners ate well: cod, bullock, pies, puddings, jellies, blancmange, and trifle, “excellently well … whipped,” and pints and pints of the best ale.
⁷

Passing the Hall, Whewell found the elegant Italianate cloister known as Neville’s Court, formed by porticos under the buildings on two sides, and the seventeenth-century library designed by Sir Christopher Wren on the third (the east side is bounded by the Hall). From the back gate an avenue of lime trees extended down to the river; this lovely shaded path was immortalized years later by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his
In Memoriam
, commemorating his student days at Trinity with his beloved friend A. H. Hallam (“Up that long walk of limes I past / to see the rooms in which he dwelt”). Whewell would later have rooms overlooking the lime tree avenue, rooms that he boasted had the most beautiful view of all the college accommodations.

The Wren library itself was, and still is, an architectural jewel. From the outside the building appears to be two stories of equal height. But because the floor of the library rests halfway down the lower story, the interior soars. The architect himself designed the tall bookshelves that traverse both sides of the library, framing the checkerboard pattern of the black-and-white marble floor. Busts of Trinity men, including Newton and Bacon, sit on pedestals at head height, while busts of great classical and modern authors line the tops of the shelves, forming a dual parade of luminaries. At the far end is a stained-glass window, added in the 1770s, representing a half-naked lady (said to be Britannica) anachronistically introducing the long-dead Newton to George III, while Bacon even more anachronistically sits nearby. Later, as vice-chancellor of the university, Whewell would cover up the stained glass with a curtain, whether for reasons of offended modesty or offended historical sensibility no one knows for sure.

Whewell entered Trinity as a “sub-sizar.” These men, in exchange for reduced college fees, had to serve the other men dinner in the Hall, and ate the leavings of the High Table. (At least he was spared the more menial tasks given to sub-sizars the century before, including emptying the chamber pots of the wealthier students!) Others recognized Whewell’s humble origins. Even when he died in the Master’s Lodge nearly fifty-four years later, he would be remembered as having entered Cambridge as “a tall, ungainly youth, with grey worsted stockings and country-made shoes.”
⁸
Another obituary writer could not resist recounting how, one day in Whewell’s first year, “lounging at the College gate, he saw a herd of swine driven by, and soliloquized as follows, ‘they’re a hard thing to drive—very—when there’s many of them—is a pig.’ ”
⁹
A proud and strong-willed boy, Whewell felt the sting in his position. But he worked hard, studying with his tutor Mr. Hudson—the same Hudson who had examined him at the Bridge Inn two years earlier. Whewell was preparing for a scholarship examination, which would lift him up in stature and provide him with some extra income, as well as qualify him to sit for a fellowship examination after his graduation. Lectures filled some of the time. He wrote his father, “We attend lectures on algebra, Euclid, and trigonometry from nine o’clock till ten, and from ten to eleven we are lectured in an oration of Demosthenes. From twelve to one I attend lectures in divinity on three days in the week.”
¹⁰

Like most first-year Trinity men, he lived in lodgings in the town, as the college did not have room to accommodate everyone (only about one hundred out of 354 fellows, graduates studying for fellowship examinations, and undergraduates could be housed in college). Whewell spent much of his time in his bedroom and sitting room over a millinery shop, where he was the only lodger and took all his meals “entirely by himself,” except for dinner, which he ate in the college Hall.
¹¹
Dinner was at two thirty, and both dons and students were expected to dress for it in knee breeches and stockings under their robes or togas.
¹²

At first Whewell did not love Cambridge the way he later came to do. He told his aunt how much he missed Lancaster’s hills and rivers, complaining that “the ground about Cambridge is so flat and dull that it is quite disagreeable. Not one pleasant walk is here up-hill or down-hill, no water but the narrow dirty Cam.” He admitted “the splendour and elegance of the buildings,” but growled that “these soon grow tiresome, and their sameness but ill compensates for the want of beauties of nature.”
¹³

He worried about money, reporting all his expenses to his father, explaining why each was necessary. “It will not be until I have taken my degree that I shall be able to alleviate the great expenses which you now sustain,” he admitted. “But I shall at least endeavour to have as few superfluous expenses as possible.”
¹⁴
Later he justified the high cost of Newton’s
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
, a required book for the Tripos exams, by saying that “I should unavoidably have to get [it] sooner or later.”
¹⁵
To his father the £9 must have seemed a princely sum.