Elizabeth Carter's Translation of Algarotti

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chapter 5 Science for Ladies? Elizabeth Carter’s Translation of Algarotti and “popular” Newtonianism in the Eighteenth Century

Sarah Hutton

An important aspect of the reception of Newtonianism was its dissemination to non-specialist audiences of various kinds. If popularity is measured in terms of translations and reprints, one of the most popular epitomes of Newtonian science to be published in the eighteenth century was Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianismo per le dame [Newtonianism for the ladies] (1737), which saw some thirty editions and was translated into several European languages, in- cluding Swedish, English and, apparently, Portuguese.1 Furthermore, unlike most popularisations of Newtonianism, Algarotti’s book intersects several as- pects of the European Newton reception – Italy, France and England. In this paper I shall examine what Algarotti’s text reveals about the non-specialist reception of Newton in the eighteenth-century by focusing on the English translation by Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), which was published as Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies in 1739.2 I shall set her translation in the context of the wider diffusion of Newtonianism in eighteenth century England, and discuss the circumstances of her involvement in order to discover whether we can learn anything about women’s knowledge of science in the period.

1 Peter and Ruth Wallis, Newton and Newtoniana, 1672–1975. A Bibliography (London: Unwin, 1977), 134–136. 2 Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies. In Six dialogues on Light and Colours (London: Edward Cave, 1739). Carter’s translation is available on the Newton Project website: http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk. For Carter’s other writings, see Judith Haw- ley (ed.), Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking circle, 1738–1785, vol. 4, Elizabeth Carter (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999). On Carter, see Sarah Hutton, “Virtue, God and Stoicism in the Thought of Elizabeth Carter and Catharine Macaulay” in Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green (eds), Virtue, Liberty and Toleration (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 137–148.

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Popular Newtonianism

Of Newton’s own writings, his Opticks was the most accessible to non special- ists.3 By contrast, Newton’s Principia mathematica was a forbiddingly technical text, even for contemporary mathematicians and natural philosophers.4 This gave scope for expositions to those not sufficiently mathematically literate to tackle it. As Larry Stewart has pointed out, there was a veritable natural- philosophy industry in popular expositions of Newtonianism.5 There is considerable variety among the non-specialist media that make up this wider diffusion of Newtonianism which constitutes “popular Newtonianism”. The means of dissemination included both summaries and recensions of New- tonian physics, journals, public lectures, and even sermons and a children’s primer. Many of them can be described as “Newton-without-numbers”, and the audiences for Newton-made-easy included gentlemen, students, bourgeois citizens, and even women and children. The celebration of Newton in verse contributed to the creation of a wider, receptive public for Newtonian natural philosophy. Arguably the most important text for disseminating Newtonianism to a wider audience was Newton’s Opticks, which was by far the most widely known of his works in the eighteenth century, and of key importance for explaining experimental method.6 Opticks, was reprinted six times in English between 1704 and 1721, and twice in Latin translation (Optice: sive de reflexionibus, re- fractionibus, inflexionibus & coloribus lucis, libri tres) (1706 and 1719), which included six additional queries (17–23). Prior to Algarotti’s Newtonianismo, one of the only expositions published in England was Desaguliers’ System of Experimental Philosophy, printed at London in 1719, and reissued with addi- tions as Lectures of Experimental Philosophy in the same year. Another treatise on optics published just prior to Carter’s translation of Algarotti was Robert Smith’s, A Compleat System of Opticks in four books (Cambridge and London, 1738). Practical knowledge of optics could also be found in Benjamin Martin’s The Philosophical Grammar, being a view of the present state of Experimented

3 Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks: or, a treatise of the reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light. Also two treatises of the species and magnitude of curvilinear figures (London: Sam Smith and Benjamin Walford, 1704). 4 Sir Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica (London: Joseph Streater and Sam Smith, 1687). 5 Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science. Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in New- tonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 119. 6 A.R. Hall, All was Light. An Introduction to Newton’s “Opticks” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).