LONDON, 1696. England is engaged in a ruinous war with France. Its currency, debased by counterfeiters and the “clippers” who shave silver from its poorly minted coins, is increasingly worthless. The radical solution: recalling all money in circulation to be melted down by the Royal Mint and reminted. Under the mint’s indolent master, Thomas Neale, the plan rapidly descends into farce. Soon there is no money left to pay taxes and rents or to buy the daily bread. It’s economic meltdown.
Not the ideal circumstances for an unworldly Cambridge academic to take up the post of Warden of the Mint. But this was not any old academic; it was Isaac Newton, the greatest natural philosopher of his age. Within months of assuming office, he had subjected the sclerotic processes of the mint to the same rapier intellect that had dissected the workings of the natural world. The coinage crisis was soon overcome.
Newton and the Counterfeiter views Newton’s second, often overlooked, public career through the prism of his extraordinary hounding of William Chaloner, a charismatic forger who for years lent the counterfeiting business a raffish appeal. Newton was dogged in his pursuit, if not immediately successful, but Chaloner was eventually tried for high treason and hanged in March 1699.
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Chaloner had inhabited the sewage-infested underbelly of a London then approaching the unprecedented mark of a million inhabitants – most of them hideously poor and desperate for any crust they could earn. Levenson’s account of this world of criminality, collusion and denunciation is meticulously researched and highly readable, yet it never quite manages to dispel the impression that Chaloner’s downfall owed as much to the city’s machinations as it did to Newton’s detective nous.
The result is a book that somewhere loses its internal logic. The first half is a potted history of Newton’s well-documented scientific career, the second a detective story that does not quite live up to its billing. Attempts to thread the two together – such as suggesting that Newton was so tenacious in pursuing Chaloner because he saw his counterfeiting as perverting alchemy, a quasi-sacred pursuit to Newton – have a smack of desperation.
Still, the tale of Newton the economist is one worth telling. His influence has been enduring: his musings on the value of currency led, almost incidentally, to Britain adopting the gold standard in 1717, a policy that remained more on than off until 1931.
Newton’s success was not unqualified. When the South Sea bubble burst in 1720, it took a substantial proportion of his invested savings with it. Then as now, the dismal science seemed able to get the better of even the best brains.
Houghton Mifflin (published in the UK in August by Faber)