It’s demolished now, the former mansion of Sir Robert Stotte; only the gateposts and gatehouse survive. But photos show an imposing house. It looked over the small valley of Jesmond Dene and you can still retrace Hutton’s walk of a quarter of an hour or so from one village to the other. First a very gentle rise through what was then open farmland; then down the hill and across a steepish valley of never-farmed woodland. Sloping paths and views away through the trees. It was already a walk into a very different world from that of the colliery, and infinitely removed from the coalface in the Rose Pit.
And yet for many, schoolteaching was a despised profession, a mark of failure for a man of education. ‘School’, indeed, is a grand term for what was no more than a room provided by someone’s goodwill and in which Hutton collected pennies for teaching young children to read and write, to add up and remember a few Bible stories. Chemist and religious controversialist Joseph Priestley was typical: ‘Like most other young men of a liberal education, I had conceived a great aversion to the business of a schoolmaster, and had often said that I would have recourse to anything else for a maintenance in preference to it.’ Elementary teaching in particular was widely seen as work for old women, widows, or the humblest members of society. Nor did it bring any very great material rewards for its long, demanding hours: pay only slightly above that of a labourer; no such thing as promotion; no such thing as a pension.
There was no teacher training. Giftless graduates stumbled into teaching and stumbled through it; impecunious clergymen practised it with a savage resentment that they took out physically on the children in their charge (it was the boast of Dr Parr of Harrow that he never flogged a boy twice in the same lesson). A typical contemporary observation is contemptuous of what went on in small ragged schools like Hutton’s:
Poor Reuben Dixon has the noisiest School
Of ragged Lads, who ever bow’d to Rule;
Low in his Price – the Men who heave our Coals
And clean our Causeways, send him Boys in Shoals.
Indeed, teaching unruly boys just a few years younger than himself demanded more natural authority than Charles Hutton yet possessed. He would be remembered ominously as having ‘kept up the most rigid order’ as a teacher, and sometimes having carried ‘his severity too far’. One student from these early days recalled that he ‘assumed a degree of importance’ in the classroom: pomposity might have been a blunter word. For a while he affected a large academic gown and, to complete the effect, a scarlet cap. Even his best friends were embarrassed. He turned up to a parish election in this finery, and ‘his friends, who would have supported him in the state of a Caterpillar, were so disgusted when they saw him transformed into a Butterfly, that they did not support him and he lost his election’.
Hutton was very young, and the phase passed. The excellence of his teaching continued. He quickly determined that the schoolroom at Stote’s Hall would not be the end of his journey. With the ferocious energy and the self-discipline that would attract comment again and again, he set himself to improve still further. He read all he could: not chapbooks of romantic stories now, but the hardest and the newest mathematical books he could lay hands on. Newton’s works and the works of his contemporaries and disciples: Christiaan Huygens, Roger Cotes. Descartes and his followers. Textbooks of gauging and surveying, and the works of Hutton’s own contemporaries in Britain and beyond.
On top of his teaching and his reading, he went down the hill to Newcastle in the evenings and attended classes given by a Mr Hugh James, who specialised in mathematics. It was a conspicuously demanding regime, and his mother feared for his health. But Hutton could see where his future lay, and he had determined to pursue it as hard as he could, whatever the cost.
In fact it was his mother that died, in March 1760. She was buried near her first husband in St Andrew’s, Newcastle, on the seventeenth of that month.
Hutton was twenty-two. We don’t know just how relations stood between him and his mother when she died, or even whether he had already moved out of the family home. We do know that less than three weeks later he returned to St Andrew’s to be married. His bride, Isabella, was four years his senior; she had trained as a dressmaker. The marriage licence gives her maiden name as Hutton, so she may have been a relative. The scarcely decent haste hints at a family drama now lost from view: a match on which the enamoured couple were keener than were their families, perhaps. Soon there was a son, Henry, known to his parents as Harry.
They moved into rooms in Newcastle itself, just off the Flesh Market: central, bustling, but rich in shrieks and stink. And just a week after his marriage Hutton advertised a new school in the Newcastle papers.
On Monday, April 14th, 1760, at the Head of the Flesh Market, down the Entry formerly known by the name of the Salutation Entry, Newcastle, A Writing and Mathematical School, where persons may be fully and expeditiously qualified for business, and where such as intend to go through a regular course of Arts and Sciences, may be compleatly grounded therein at large.
He promised to teach writing, arithmetic and shorthand, as well as a long list of mathematical subjects: accounts, algebra, geometry, mensuration, trigonometry, conic sections, mechanics, statics, hydrostatics, calculus. Any youths not satisfied by these would also be shown their applications to practical life: navigation, surveying, gunnery, dial-making, measuring, geography, astronomy.
The tree of mathematical knowledge.
It all seems premature, precocious, absurdly risky. Hutton was just four years out of the coal pits; he was quite unknown, his fees were twice those asked by his rivals and his list of subjects promised an impossible range of expertise, including any number of practical subjects in which the twenty-two-year-old had no practical experience. He was aiming very high, hoping to become a different class of teacher: a specialist in mathematical training, no longer bound to the drudgery of teaching the very young to read and write. Friends advised him to promise less, and ask for less money. He didn’t listen, and the result was a struggle, the high prices keeping some away during years when Hutton’s family was growing.
But there was real demand for this sort of thing: specialist mathematics teaching for boys up to fourteen or even older. In a period when a quarter of the country was unable to read, northern parents had a reputation for being keen to educate their children, for sending able, well-educated boys to London to work in counting houses and trade. Trade was increasing during the eighteenth century, and the demand for those boys multiplied; they became bookkeepers,