
Do Historians Have No Such Boxes? (2017) - benbreen
https://s-usih.org/2017/09/do-historians-have-no-such-boxes-guest-post-by-anthony-chaney/
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Jun8
"One thinks of the big wooden box, locked, in Isaac Newton’s rooms in Trinity
College. In this box he kept alchemistic manuscripts, deistic tracts and other
occult materials."

Interesting thing is, most of the contents of this box was later bought by
Keynes, he has a great lecture on Newton being the last magician, i.e. pre-
Newtonian: [http://www-groups.dcs.st-
and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Keynes_New...](http://www-groups.dcs.st-
and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html)

What became of the box?

"They remained in the box to shock profoundly any eighteenth- or nineteenth-
century prying eyes. They became the possession of Catharine Barton and then
of her daughter, the Countess of Portsmouth. So Newton's chest, with many
hundreds of thousands of words of his unpublished writings, came to contain
the 'Portsmouth Papers'.

In 1888 the mathematical portion was given to the University Library at
Cambridge. They have been indexed, but they have never been edited. The rest,
a very large collection, were dispersed in the auction room in 1936 by
Catharine Barton's descendant, the present Lord Lymington. Disturbed by this
impiety, I managed gradually to reassemble about half of them, including
nearly the whole of the biographical portion, that is, the 'Conduitt Papers',
in order to bring them to Cambridge which I hope they will never leave. The
greater part of the rest were snatched out of my reach by a syndicate which
hoped to sell them at a high price, probably in America, on the occasion of
the recent tercentenary."

For more info, see this Newton Project page:
[http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/history-of-newtons-
papers/...](http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/history-of-newtons-
papers/newton-related-papers-of-john-maynard-keynes)

