The Rewritten Universe The Century That Wrote Itself

My name is Adam Nicolson.

I'm a writer and ever since I was a teenager,

I have been gripped by the 17th century.

It was Britain's most revolutionary century,

when all the forces of modernity began to stir under the old order,

slugging it out on the great battlegrounds of religion

and politics.

Two civil wars, one king was blown up,

another had his head cut off, a third simply got rid of.

But more important than any of that was the factor which drove

the revolutionary changes in this first truly modern century.

Writing.

Writing was everywhere.

Notebooks, chat books, account books,

business correspondence, letters, diaries, pamphlets, newspapers.

This was the century of the written word.

It was the first great age of self-depiction.

All kinds of people were learning to read and write, and through

their writings, we can know them like never before in history.

A woman sent to prison for her conscience.

A sailor who wanted to share his adventures.

A solitary genius who used his notebooks to unlock

the secrets of the universe.

Reading and writing allowed people to question what they'd been

told, to engage in fierce debate

and to rewrite the rules of politics and self-expression.

This was the beginning of the age we now live in.

The moment we left the Middle Ages behind

and set out on the track to modernity.

And that transformation

is what fascinates me about the 17th century.

In this programme, I'm going to explore the great 17th-century

revolution in our attitudes to the universe and our place within it.

This is when science and religion begin to take their modern form.

Before 1600, only a tiny number of people in England had

accepted the idea that the Earth orbited the sun.

Most were stuck in a mind world that hadn't developed since antiquity.

But that was all about to change.

The new literate century was different from what came before

because it was essentially curious.

It wanted to find out and then write its discoveries down.

What were we made of? What was the world made of?

How did the stars work? How did God work?

How did the 17th century think?

And how did it use writing to do its thinking?

What part did writing play in the greatest intellectual

revolution there has ever been?

The giant shift from the pre-modern to the scientific frame of mind.

By the first half of the 1600s, medieval Christianity,

where people had lived unquestioningly in the embrace

of a deeply hierarchical church, was long gone.

The Reformation 50 or 60 years earlier had changed all that.

Zealous Protestants were now suspicious of the idea

of bishops and priests,

of even making the sign of the cross, of baptisms,

or even kneeling in church.

The Reformation had left the individual naked before God

and although His purpose was revealed in the words

of the Bible, He was everywhere around them too.

And for those Puritans anxiously writing in their diaries, God

was the great headmaster, equipped with a terrifyingly all-seeing eye.

God is watching and there is no escape

from His unforgiving gaze.

The committed Puritan began to describe in painful

detail his every thought and deed.

His diary was the only place where in seclusion from the world,

but in the full presence of God, sin could be washed away.

The first character in this journey across

the 17th century from a passive acceptance of God's will to

an active scientific investigation of the world is the classic Puritan.

Someone who wrote down every minute particular of his agonised life.

A man standing for years at a time in the court of God's judgement.

Ralph Josselin was a clergyman and farmer from Earls Colne in Essex.

But more important than that, he was a Puritan and a diarist.

And his diary,

which covers his life from his birth in 1617 to the last

harvest before his death in 1683, is the account of a particularly

anxious, passionate and questioning man's inner life.

But a man who was living in such a God-soaked universe

that his reality scarcely meshes with ours.

By his own account,

Ralph Josselin seems to be a voice from a pre-modern world.

But why did he write his diary,

nearly a third of a million words, so consistently, so voluminously?

How was his vision of himself, his god

and his life bound up with the act of writing?

Was writing the diary somehow the holiest thing he could do,

the place in which he struggled to encounter the truth of existence?

Was this 17th-century itch to write down your life,

at least in his case, an attempt to still the often devastating

turbulence of everyday life?

In Ralph Josselin's world, God was everywhere.

Nothing that happened to him or his family,

no sign in the weather or in the animals he kept,

no thought that went through his head, no piece of good fortune

or bad luck, did not seem to him to be part of God's detailed design

for the world.

As well as looking after his church, Josselin was a very good

and careful farmer, spending his life building up his stock,

establishing a real estate in the world.

And the diary he wrote is really an attempt to

reconcile his idea of a good and loving god

with his own life, which was one of real pain and suffering.

When the dew fell, it was a sign of God's mercy.

When they had plenty of fuel in the woodshed,

this was because "the Lord was good to us in our health and peace,

"providing warm house wood firing in the cold beyond any former years".

In a world with no insurance policies, he looked

everywhere for signs that this was a goodness-providing cosmos.

"Leaping over the pails, I scratch my face, but God be praised, I had

"no further hurt, though I might if providence had not preserved me.

"And also in our fall,

"when my wife and I, pulling down a tree with a rope,

"with our pulling all fell together, but no hurt, God be praised.

"Such falls my children have many times and yet safe."

"Mary fell out of the parlour window with her face against the bench

"and had no hurt. A strange providence.

"All the wit of the world could not have given such a fall

"and preserved from hurt. To God be the praise."

Josselin had learned to read and write at school as a boy.

He began his diary when he was 27,

giving a summary of his life up until that moment.

And then going on day by day for decades to come.

He called it "A Thankful Observation Of Divine Providence And

"Goodness Towards Mee And A Summary View Of My Life."

He never writes about sex, except once, incredibly obliquely, when he

talks about a wantonness in my heart and private converse with my wife.

But everything else, his despairs, his hopes, his ambitions,

his regrets, his moments of self-congratulation,

of self-loathing, his friends, his family, his neighbours,

his animals, his lands, his house and other buildings,

his money, all of it finds a place in one of the most private

documents to have survived from the 17th century.

And all of it written in this tiny, exceptionally private handwriting.

There's no sense of this being a performance or an advertisement.

This is a man alone with himself and with his creator,

the god who he refers to at one point as "my dear angrie Lorde".

Josselin's diary, with its intense transcribing of daily life,

is almost like an account book of the soul.

Why did he have to write all this down?

Why could he simply not experience the difficulties of living

in a god-dominated world like this? What is it about actual writing?

Well, I think the writing is about forgetting

and an anxiety about forgetting.

He's desperate to remember and therefore log every tiny

little sin or indiscretion in order to come back to it and interpret it.

But why? Why do you need to remember those details?

Because those details, those very apparently minute trivial

details, are the markers, the signs, of God's presence in your life.

It's all the Puritans had... It's one of the sources that the

Puritans had for making sense of God's presence in their life

and if Puritans are constantly trying to discern

whether they're elect or not, whether they're destined for heaven or not,

they can't, like Catholics, rely on good works and move towards salvation in that way.

They have to sit back and read what happens to them in a rather more passive way.

So there's no such thing as luck or chance in a Puritan's life.

Everything is significant.

Everything is significant, from standing in a puddle of water

to falling off your horse to that magnificent moment in the diary

where he gets stung on the nose by a bee

and covers it with honey and is very delighted that seems to have done the trick, in terms of the sting.

But also, he notes the moral of that, which for him is that the Lord

intervenes in the most apparently trivial minute ways in his life.

Do you think you can say that in the 17th century, something

happened to the culture which made people write diaries?

Protestantism and Puritanism is one great catalyst.

The events of the mid-17th century, the Civil War,

and the sense of the world not being the way you always thought it

might be also prompted people to think about their place in that

-world, in a new order.

-What do you mean by that?

-The actual social change meant that people had to think of themselves in different ways?

-Yeah.

If suddenly the monarchy, which seems like an entirely natural,

inevitable, God-given construct, is suddenly abolished,

that must on a very profound level shake your sense of your world

and your community and how you fit into that world.

And also this is a period in which print publication explodes.

There are masses of printed books and lots of short printed books on an unprecedented scale.

People were reading more, literacy rates were rising.

Josselin is reading all the time, we know that from the diary.

And if you're reading books, often books about people's lives,

that's providing you with new models for thinking about your own life.

For Josselin, it was a precarious world, full of unknowns,

with inadequate medicine and lives lived in consistent danger,

at home, at work and on the farm.

"A bullock died almost suddenly.

"Lord, there is nothing sure but thy self."

People fell off their horses so often,

it was as if the entire population were riding dodgy motorbikes.

Your average English family suffered on a daily

and weekly basis in ways few of us now could comprehend.

If things went wrong, and they did, that could only be

because Josselin had done something wrong.

As far as he was concerned, God's punishment was a sign of God's love.

Josselin's diary gives a powerful sense of a life lived under siege.

It's a constant, almost obsessional discussion of pain,

sickness and death.

Most of us now only bury our parents and grandparents.

In the 17th century, a man my age, in his mid-50s,

would on average have buried one in three of his children,

one in two of his own adult siblings and probably his wife.

It was more usual then to bury someone younger than someone

older than you. Ralph Josselin was no exception.

His whole life was surrounded by death.

Before he was ten, his mother died,

two of his sisters. His father died in his teens

and his grandfather and his grandmother.

In his 20s, his father-in-law, followed by an uncle,

a cousin, another uncle,

an aunt. In his 30s, a great uncle,

a son, another son and a daughter.

Nothing in our lives is comparable to this experience.

In his 30s, it went on.

His mother-in-law, two cousins, an uncle, another aunt.

Death was more present in 17th-century England than

anywhere on Earth today.

The figures, far worse than for modern Afghanistan or even

the poorest country in sub-Saharan Africa.

Josselin struggled with these often devastating realities.

How could a good God allow such suffering?

What had he done personally to deserve it?

Could affliction be a sign of divine love...is never clearer than in his

terrible detailed accounts of the lingering deaths of his children.

In February 1648, Jane gave birth to their second son, a little Ralph.

From the beginning, he was going downhill

and his father always refers to him in his diary as "it",

perhaps as a way of keeping any possible grief at bay.

"My wife persuaded herself it would die.

"It was a very sick child indeed.

I took my leave of it at night, not much expecting to see it alive.

"But God continued it to morning.

"And it seemed to me not hopeless, but it's thine, Lord.

"I hand it to thy disposal.

"Only I pray thee, give me and my wife a submitting heart."

A submitting heart, the instruction of a pious man to himself not

to question divine wisdom, but to accept it.

"Ralph is not so tedious to us

"because he does not shriek or cry in his fits, but lieth quietly.

"We gave him breast milk at last and little else."

On February the 21st, Josselin wrote these words -

"This day, my dear babe Ralph quietly fell asleep

"and is at rest with the Lord.

"Oh, Lord, spare the rest of us that are living for thy name's sake,

"we entreat thee.

"We looked on it as a dying child three or four days.

"It died quietly without shrieks or sobs or sad groans.

"It breathed out the soul with nine gasps and died.

"The Lord learn me wisdom and to know His mind in this chastisement."

In the days that followed, he chewed over the agony of his predicament.

What had he done to deserve this? Could God not reveal His purposes?

"And when I had seriously considered my heart and ways,

"and compared them with the affliction

"and sought unto God, my thoughts often fixed on these particulars.

"Whereas I would have given my mind to unseasonable playing at chess,

"now it run in my thoughts, in my illness, as if I had been at chess.

"I shall be very sparing in the use of that recreation."

So that is the reason this Puritan minister

gave for the death of his son.

It wasn't that he was playing at chess or he'd been playing

at chess on a Sunday, but that when he was ill,

he had been thinking of playing at chess.

That is why Ralph was dead

and that is why the rod of chastisement had fallen.

Josselin and people like him lived in an angry

and unforgiving universe,

full of argument, rage and punishment.

In effect, he suffered the world, virtually

impotent in front of it,

but there were many in the 17th century who wanted to substitute

the disputatious Christianity that filled Josselin's diary with

curious investigation, a rational attempt to make sense of the world.

The founding of the Royal Society in London in 1660 is often

seen as marking the birth of science in this country.

But in fact, that gathering of learned gents grew

out of a world of proto-scientists and investigators,

who had been examining, experimenting with

and writing down what they found in the natural world for many decades.

At the end of the 16th century,

what was most people's attitude to nature and the material world?

How did they approach it?

I guess most people had a very literal

understanding of the Bible and so what was written in the Bible

was how they understood the natural world.

Coupled of course with what they saw around them.

But it was very much dependent on authority.

What is the change that happened then during the century?

Francis Bacon, I guess, is the key figure there.

He was a philosopher, an English philosopher,

writing at the beginning of the 17th century and it was really his ideas

about experiment that sparked what we call the Scientific Revolution.

Bacon was suggesting that we could conduct experiments to find

out about the natural world and that meant thinking of an idea

and then going out and testing it, so he was very keen on collecting

a lot of information about all aspects of the natural world.

What was he after in that? What was the point of this new method?

I guess it was the sense that there was more to be

discovered about the world than people knew at the time.

It's easy to think that science is an enemy of religion,

but that isn't really true of this period.

No, it's certainly not true for this period.

And in fact, a lot of the people who were doing what we think of as

science were in fact very devout Christians, many of them

were trained as clergymen as well. So, for example,

someone like Robert Boyle spent his whole time talking about how

science would support Christian ideas, that there was probably

a limit to how much men could understand about the world

-and beyond that limit was God.

-God the great designer.

-Exactly.

So this is a copy of Robert Hooke's Micrographia,

which we've got out of the Royal Society's library here.

On this page, you can see his microscope.

He made some improvements on the microscope himself.

So this is the first illustrated book of microscopy

and I'll just show you the first image here.

It shows the point of a needle, a printed full stop

and the edge of a razor.

And he's chosen those things because to the human eye, they look

perfect, but through the microscope, you can see that they're imperfect.

And his point, I think, was that manmade objects,

the more you looked at them, the less perfect they became

but the natural objects that he looks at in the rest of the book - the closer you look at them,

-the more beautiful and the more perfect they become.

-Fantastic.

And there is his flea. I absolutely love that.

HE LAUGHS

-What a magnificent thing, isn't it?

-Exactly, it is magnificent.

If you can imagine seeing it for the first time,

it's just opening up a whole new world for people

and I think that's what the microscope and the telescope,

which were the two key instruments of the period, did.

They showed people that there was a new world to be seen.

In the rising swell of 17th-century curiosity, the urge to question

inherited wisdom, to look at the world and note down all its oddities

and rarities, there was one man who stood out among his contemporaries.

His name was Sir Thomas Browne.

Thomas Browne, a Norwich doctor, knighted late in life by Charles II,

was a member of a new generation

inspired by the works of Francis Bacon,

who began to look at the world in a different way from the Josselins.

They were going to test it,

not relying on the inherited wisdom of the ancients,

but using their eyes to experiment and investigate,

teasing out the truth of the instruments of likelihood and logic.

They were going to write the world down in a new way.

Browne was completely entranced by the world

in which he was lucky enough to find himself alive.

Everything written and everything on which he chanced,

every creature and plant of sea, river and air,

all came under his voraciously examining eye

and in the human being, the two most valuable qualities

were the ability to encounter the world as it was

and then to apply reason to it.

As he wrote in his notebook,

those were the two great pillars of truth, experience and solid reason.

Restless curiosity was his watchword,

an unending sequence of enquiries into the real world,

gathering its materials around him like a curator of reality.

Throughout his life, he jotted down his thoughts and observations in notebooks.

Nature was there to be read.

God had written in nature the meaning of the universe

in shorthand, like a secretary.

So much was opaque in the world but those who had eyes to see could see.

For Browne, the meaning of the universe was apparent in nature, if you looked for it.

And as he wrote in his notes,

"Not in capital letters yet in stenography,

"in shorthand which, to wiser reason, seem as luminaries in the abyss."

If you looked hard enough at nature, you could see what it meant.

After studying medicine in Europe, Browne returned to England

in the early 1630s, still not 30 years old, and set up as a doctor.

He would marry a Norfolk girl, Dorothy Mileham, in 1641,

and have 11 children with her, six of them surviving till adulthood.

But happy as they were, the focus of Browne's life wasn't domestic bliss.

It was much more the wonders of the world around him.

He and Mrs Browne lived in a house full of dazzling possibilities

and when John Evelyn, the diarist, came to visit them in 1671,

he described their house and garden

being a paradise and cabinet of rarities,

"..especially medals, books, plants, natural things,

"a collection of eggs of all the fowls and birds he could procure.

"Cranes, storks, eagles, et cetera, and a variety of waterfowl."

Basically, anything Thomas Browne could get his hands on.

Browne was intrigued by nature's detail.

For him, it's minutiae were its most compelling ingredients.

He wrote, "ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature;

"whales, elephants, dromedaries and camels.

"These, I confess, are the colossus and majestic pieces of her hand.

"But in these narrow engines, there is more curious mathematics

"and the civility of these little citizens more neatly set forth the wisdom of their maker."

Browne's house was absolutely stuffed with all the odds and ends

he had collected and his working papers are, in a way,

the written equivalent of that.

Open-ended, nearly chaotic but driven by an endless curiosity about the natural world.

His note-taking may have been fragmentary or anarchic

but he became one of the century's great writers.

He published many books which earned him a reputation throughout Europe.

The enterprise of 17th-century science is very often

deliberately fragmentary in its sensibility.

It knows that it's never going to produce a system or a treatise,

it's only going to be able to fill in the odd bit of the jigsaw

and I think that Browne's writing very much illustrates that.

That he will say all that it's possible to say, but no more.

He will occasionally speculate about scientific conclusions,

but not very often.

But when you look at his handwriting in those notes,

it's so fluent, so quick. There is a kind of hunger for the world.

It's rapacious, isn't it?

It's not meticulous like a modern scientist would be.

If you look at the original notebooks,

the ones that are in the order in which he wrote them,

they are a complete jumble of stuff

and there'll be one page that is a letter to his son about ostriches

and the next page will be about church bells or about echoes

or about what you can see from the top of Norwich Cathedral

so it really goes everywhere and he doesn't organise his knowledge,

at least at that level.

It's not that he is actually living in anarchy.

I...

Well, I think there's a certain anarchy of observation

and I think that's part of, that's part of the deal.

That's what you're doing as a 17th-century scientist.

Nobody said, "You can't work on that because it's not quite botany and you're working on botany."

If something interests you because it reminds you of botany, you will go and look at it.

And doesn't that feel so much more exciting

and alive than later cut and dried science

which is so shut within little cabins, confined areas like that.

This is a great, roaming mind.

He's a very untrammelled writer.

That's probably what makes him good.

There's no, there is no structure that he is bound to observe

and so his works probably evolve

in ways that are slightly different from everybody else's because he's unshackled in that way.

Can you tell what sort of man he was from his writing?

I think you get a very strong sense of Browne

as first of all quite modest but also somebody who is sure of the things that he is sure of.

So I think the sense that you get of him as a highly, highly intelligent,

highly learned man who wears his learning very lightly.

-And you love him.

-I love him. HE LAUGHS

-I want to be him.

-I think you are him!

As the new world he was discovering was largely uncharted,

he even found he needed new language to describe and communicate his observations.

He was an incredibly inventive maker of new words,

dragging them into English from Latin and Greek

and adding to the word pile used by other 17th-century writers.

Over 100 of the words now in the Oxford dictionary

were used by him for the first time.

Antediluvian, approximate, aquiline, analogous,

bisect, carnivorous, coexistence, coma, cryptography,

compensate, computer, cylindrical, disruption, electricity,

exhaustion, follicle, generator, gymnastics, hallucination,

herbaceous, insecurity, jocularity, literary, locomotion, medical,

mucous, prostate, protuberant,

polarity, precocious, pubescent,

suicide, ulterior and ultimate.

He was a word-making machine.

This life of curiosity and invention found its most popular outlet

in his bestseller, Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors.

First published in 1646 but reprinted many times,

it was that classic 17th-century thing,

an encyclopaedia of wrong ideas.

People had always said that badgers were lopsided

so that they could run along hillsides better.

But were they? Clearly not.

It was always said that toads and spiders hated each other

but was that true? Browne had to do an experiment.

He put a toad in a jar with several spiders and watched what happened.

This is what he wrote in his notebook,

"having in a glass included a toad with several spiders,

"we beheld the spiders without resistance to sit upon his head

"and pass over all his body."

So obviously, the spiders didn't hate the toad.

"But what, at last, the toad upon advantage,

"he swallowed down."

Toads clearly ate spiders.

"And that in a few hours unto the number of seven."

So toads didn't hate spiders, they had them for lunch.

Perhaps the oddest of all Browne's encounters with the natural world

came when he somehow got hold of an ostrich to study.

The specimen, which arrived in his Norwich garden,

stood over seven feet tall.

It soon ate up all the gilliflowers and the tulip leaves

and everything that was green; lettuce, endives, sorrel.

It would feed on oats and barley,

that's what we've got in this bucket, here.

He spent hours observing these really strange creatures

and by observing their strangeness, almost brought them

within the compass of knowledge that everyone could share.

What do you think?

Browne had a particular fascination with what the ostrich would eat.

He managed to persuade his ostrich to eat an onion

and watched the onion descending, spiral ways,

down the strange gullet of the ostrich.

He tried to make her drink a pint of beer. Have some beer!

I think, with not much success.

Olives, and also iron wrapped in pastry,

which is one of these old myths that ostriches like eating iron

because that's the only reason their feathers were so large

and needless to say, his ostrich only ate the pastry

and left the iron behind so this was another truth proved by experiment.

And that was something that went

into the next edition of Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

Some of the ignorance of the past dispersed

and some of the light of knowledge

brought into the world of the ostrich.

Sir Thomas Browne was friends with many others

who were feeling their way into this new understanding of nature

but for all that, and perhaps because he was busy with his practice as a Norwich doctor,

he was essentially working alone.

But Browne had a contemporary whose life was dedicated

to making connections between the investigating minds around him.

His name was Samuel Hartlib.

Samuel Hartlib, part German, part English,

lived here in London in a house probably a little poorer than this

in Duke's Place, hopelessly improvident and living hand-to-mouth

with his virtually destitute family.

For him, the written word was all.

Letter-writing, information-gathering, spreading knowledge.

Not for personal gain.

In fact, he largely bankrupted himself with his various schemes,

but because he believed that a good society

depended on what he called correspondency.

Linkages, networks.

The most fruitful exchange of information that could be devised.

He grasped the key fact of the century,

that communication lay at the heart of the new civilisation.

To a good Puritan like Hartlib,

this burgeoning world of knowledge was seen as part of God's purpose,

a sign that England, particularly in the 1650s,

as Cromwell's new government began to rid the country

of its old Royalist ways,

was on the brink of a new heaven and a new Earth.

It was time for a communications revolution

and a moment of great optimism.

Hartlib himself wrote,

"Instead of fear, a great door of hope is open to us

"that we shall be firmly and fully settled

"in all abundance of peace and truth."

He would gather knowledge and spread it through letters and printed books.

He would be a kind of knowledge fountain,

improving lives in all kinds of practical ways,

in winemaking, in farming, in gardening

and even in scent distilling, an idea he got from Italy.

He had lots of new inventions too,

a whole scheme for a new kind of ink

which could make multiple copies from a single written sheet.

Another idea, an actual multi-copy writing machine

attached to the pen of a single scribe,

generating several sheets as he wrote.

Even a new kind of seed dressing that he called a philosophical dung,

that would create huge and unheard of miraculous yields,

Hartlib was going to change the world.

He became the great intelligencer of Europe,

working alongside teams of scribes and scholars,

writing to anyone who might have information to offer him

all across England and Ireland, from Transylvania to Germany,

Virginia and the Caribbean,

he felt that communication would make man happy.

As he wrote in 1651,

"It is nothing but the narrowness of our spirits makes us miserable."

The classic product of the Hartlib knowledge factory

was a book called The Reformed Commonwealth Of Bees.

Published in London in 1655,

it was a compendium of all kinds of knowledge and expertise on the keeping of bees.

For Hartlib, it was the perfect subject for his method.

You can see that a 17th-century man looking at this perfect organisation

would think of it as a model of the way people could be.

He could get all kinds of information from England, Europe,

even the other side of the Atlantic,

and bring it all together for the common good.

This was writing by the people for the people.

It's a chaotic ragbag of a book but that's partly the point.

Hartlib didn't believe in singular authority.

Everybody, every bee, should and could be able to contribute.

Mr Carew in Cornwall recommended burying a dead calf

and then exhuming it and collecting the bees that gathered in the rotting corpse.

A Dr Brown was adamant

that if you had his newly-invented multi-storey beehive,

you didn't have to kill your bees to collect your honey.

If you followed this instruction,

the bees would live happy in their own little commonwealth.

Your bees shall always be provided of a sweet dwelling,

large enough for themselves and their increase

and whereby they shall easily be kept together, in all probability,

by God's blessing and your own moderate care,

you shall have multitudes of bees

and consequently, abundance of honey.

The contributors to the new commonwealth of bees

were driven by a new kind of idealistic thinking.

If men could use their senses to get a true grasp of nature

and their reason to understand how the world works

and revelation in the words of the Bible to interpret God's will,

there was a good chance of making a good society here in England

and the way to do that, to tell each other.

To spread the word.

To help build this utopian commonwealth of happy,

well-informed citizens, Hartlib hatched an ambitious plan.

Parliament had triumphed in the Civil War,

imprisoning and executing King Charles I in 1649,

establishing the only Republican government

this country has ever known.

Hartlib felt the time was right

to set up one of the most extraordinary schemes

in 17th-century England, an Office of Address.

It was to be a combination of employment agency,

counselling centre, commodities exchange,

marriage bureau, patent office,

public library and a living, ever-revisable encyclopaedia.

Connection was all.

He wanted, "..a centre and meeting place for advices,

"of proposals, of treaties and all manner of intellectual rarities,

"freely to be given and received to and from,

"by and for all such as may think themselves concerned."

Just like the Royal Exchange,

where English merchants had derived huge material benefit

from being able to trade whatever anyone needed or wanted,

Hartlib's Office of Address

was going to give England exactly what it needed - info.

You could go there and have any questions that you liked answered.

This was his idea. It's like Google, like a search engine, in a way.

-Brilliant idea, isn't it? Kind of crazy.

-It's absolutely crazy.

Well, you know, beautifully idealistic, you could say.

Hartlib was devoted to, if I can put it bluntly,

creating a kind of paradise on Earth.

He believed that before the last judgement would take place,

a universal reformation had to occur

in which humankind can be lifted from its baser instincts

to a more sublime level.

And that's why it was important, at least Hartlib felt it important,

that all his energies should be put in to pursuing this universal Reformation.

He's not unique in that.

All the great 17th-century scientists, if you can call them that,

are people who are deeply involved with the idea

that this is God's world

and that real human understanding of the world

is a route to a sort of godly world.

I think it becomes, however, more latent with these figures

and as the century wears on, as experimental science rises,

there seems to be more of a separation between the two aspects.

Of course you could be, and you probably would be,

deeply interested in millenarian ideas or apocalyptic ideas

if you were a natural philosopher in the 17th century.

But for Hartlib, this was the defining blueprint

towards which all projects had their end

and all innovations had their end.

And I think that's what separates him.

How essential was the written word to his life?

It was absolutely essential. He did a lot of writing.

He spent, in one letter he mentioned spending, you know,

more than his yearly salary on costs of letters

of corresponding with people.

His whole life and project is inconceivable without writing,

without, in fact, the level of literacy

-that was around in the mid-17th century.

-Absolutely. Absolutely.

For him it was about communicating information.

Initially within his networks but ultimately

for communicating it to the public at large.

-Do you think he was just really naive?

-Yeah.

He's almost a tragic figure.

That's how I kind of see him, in a way.

He was thwarted at every turn, almost, in England,

by changes of government and things, frankly, beyond his control.

And I think his persistence really makes him a lovable figure.

But for all his zeal and determination,

Hartlib's big idea was doomed.

One pilot office was set up in Threadneedle Street in London

but on the whole, Hartlib's scheme for a universal information service failed to take off,

and this was because of the completely chaotic conditions in Cromwellian London.

Different factions of the Parliamentary party

at each other's throats, footpads on the roads making travel dangerous,

demobbed soldiers clamouring for the food and money they'd never been given.

A total breakdown of local justice.

It just wasn't the situation to set up a network of sweet, communal idealistic information centres.

After the collapse of the Cromwellian Commonwealth

and the restoration of Charles II in 1660,

the idealism of that Republican moment gave way to the

place-seeking and corruption of the Restoration court.

Samuel Hartlib's time was up.

After 1660, his whole world fell apart.

All his connections with the Cromwellian regime

really meant he was yesterday's story.

The Royalists weren't interested in him.

His eyes were troubling him, his kidneys were hell,

he was drinking sulphuric acid to try and cure the kidney stones.

In the end, they killed him.

But the only thing left of his great monument

was his mound of correspondence.

The final figure in this cavalcade of 17th-century idealists

and dreamers is a deeply isolated man

who was intent on discovering nothing less

than the structure of the universe.

Who pored over four million words in some of the most precious notebooks to have survived in this country.

The jottings and revelations of the century's greatest man.

This wasn't going to be a cabinet of curiosities,

a collection of oddities and rarities in the manner of Thomas Browne,

nor a blind Josselin-style wondering about the mind of God,

but an attempt to understand the underlying principles of the universe.

This notebook was an agenda for revolution.

Newton was exchanging the world of inherited wisdom

for observation and measurement.

He wrote down 45 headings under which he was going to arrange

the truths he was setting out to discover.

The nature of matter and time and place and motion.

The cosmic order, rarity, fluidity, softness, violent motion,

light, colours, vision, sensation.

Every statement in these pages is an implicit experiment

and the notebook was the key instrument.

Only there would experiments be described, theories tested,

hypotheses proved.

The notebook is where Newton's life was going to come to fruition.

And it was here in 1666, at his yeoman farmer family home at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire,

on the run from the plague in Cambridge,

that he conducted his most famous optics and light experiments.

For Newton, it was vitally important first

to know how he saw what he saw, and so,

armed with his trusty notebook, he started to explore his own vision.

He was incredibly reckless with his own experiments.

He took a bodkin, a sort of blunt darning needle

and as he wrote about it in his notebook, put it,

"..betwixt my eye and the bone,

"as near to the back side of my eye as I could

"and pressing my eye with the end of it..."

That is with the bodkin inside the eye!

"..there appeared several white, dark and coloured circles."

And his drawing here shows this great lump of a steel thing

shoved into the eye and then these concentric circles

that this distortion of the eyeball made him see.

How he didn't go blind I just don't know.

But the thing he wanted to prove most

was his intuition about the nature of light itself.

Ah, so this is the great experiment room. Newton's light laboratory.

Before Newton, they thought that white light was the real thing.

-That light was essentially white.

-Yes.

People thought that white light was pure,

homogeneous and God-given

and that it was being somehow mixed up, it was being dyed or coloured.

So this is a page from Newton's own notebook

that he kept at the time, experiments with prism.

And number seven, "Taking a prism into a dark room..."

which we do indeed have here, "..into which the sun shone through only one little round hole

"and laying it close to the hole in such a manner that the rays,

"being equally refracted, cast colours on the opposite wall."

-And now we are illuminating something there.

-There it is! There it is!

We've got the spectrum over there. Quite nice.

-That is exactly what Newton would have seen.

-Yes, pretty well.

But then that didn't prove anything really,

-because people believed what the prism was doing was actually colouring the light.

-Right.

The critical thing was the next bit, the second part of the experiment.

To test his theory is that the prism itself was not somehow

adding colours to white light, Newton brought in a second prism.

-Now we've got it. Now we've got it.

-Ay, ay, ay!

And what we're doing here

is if we can just introduce the prism into the red light

and the red light is here, you can see where my finger's touching it,

we've only got red light going into the prism now

so we're getting red light because we're only intercepting red light.

So what it has shown is that light is,

the colours in the light are of their own nature.

They are essentially homogeneous,

whereas a white light is heterogeneous, or mixed.

And this, this is the great,

-this is the experiment he called the crucial experiment.

-Yes.

This is the crucial experiment which had never been done by anybody else before.

So it completely changes the way in which people look at light.

That white light is no longer the original,

regal source from the sun.

Because of this you can know that white light

-is a muddle of coloured lights.

-Exactly.

This is like truth appearing in a dark room in Lincolnshire, isn't it?

-Yes, yes, yes. That's very well put.

-Beautiful.

-Yes.

Always accompanying Newton's experiments were copious notes.

Can we read anything of him, of the man, from what you see in this page?

They seem to indicate that he had this phenomenally penetrating desire

to understand, and everything he did was to try and penetrate

more deeply into his subject.

He had an intellect which was almost vicious.

Once he got hold of a problem, he would concentrate on it

to such an extent that in the end, it would yield to him.

It really reflects his intensity of intellect.

He said of himself that he didn't look upon himself

as having genius but what he could do was concentrate

and it's the concentration that you see in everything he ever did,

particularly his writing.

And it's difficult to see how one person writing 24 hours a day

could produce this vast amount of written work.

But it doesn't seem to be anything

that wants to communicate with anyone else.

-This is him talking to himself.

-Yeah, I think that's probably right.

When you look, for instance, with the problem with colour,

he found that when he did try and communicate,

people were so opposed to his ideas

that he said he would give up trying to publish

and he would just get on and find out for himself.

One of the major things that he was interested in

was finding out where God intervened.

He was obsessed about trying to find out exactly what part God

was playing in the physical universe.

So the notebook is really a correspondence

-between him and truth, or him and his god.

-Yes, yes, yes.

I don't think that it was for public consumption

until people discovered what he had done

and then he was certainly flushed out of his study.

Newton had arrived at a kind of reality

and the whole modern history of radiation flows from that moment.

And in this notebook too,

Newton's writing had arrived at a new maturity

so the notebook is not just a vessel for observation

but an instrument for understanding.

Where Browne used writing to report on the details of the world,

an essential Baconian task, and not think about it much beyond that,

and Hartlib used writing to promote a good society,

Newton used it to think about the nature of the world

and, using mathematics, to tease out its underlying structure.

By 1700, England was beginning to realise

that Newton had described, with arithmetical precision,

the workings of the universe.

God was no longer a capricious deity

who taunted people with his cruelties.

His rationality was now evident in a universe

that was observable and measurable through telescope

and microscope, barometer and thermometer.

The 17th century is such an exciting time.

Partly for its strangeness, its muddle of maths and magic,

its fierce beliefs and high idealism,

its long and intricate struggle to understand the material world.

But also because its people are so knowable through what they wrote.

Their journals, diaries, letters and notebooks.

It's the first great age of self depiction.

In the next programme,

I'll explore how the literacy revolution of the 17th century

spread its energies and ambitions out across the Atlantic Ocean,

allowing people to experience an expanding world.

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