A Young Gentleman of Prompt Parts

Abstract

The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were closed to Dissenters; but the latter, anxious to ensure the continuity of their ministry, had already begun to improvise their own establishments for higher education. By the middle 1670s there were no fewer than four within a few miles of London; and it was to one of these, that kept by Charles Morton at Newington Green, that Defoe was sent towards the end of 1676, soon after his sixteenth birthday.¹ Morton had been a scholar of Wadham College, Oxford, where he had shown a special aptitude for mathematics, coming under the influence of John Wilkins, later Bishop of Chester, best known for his part in the foundation of the Royal Society. Morton too was interested in the development of science, though his only known contributions to scientific knowledge are a paper which he communicated to the Royal Society, on the use of sea sand in Cornwall to improve the soil, and a small book to expound his theory that swallows winter on the moon. Ejected from his living of Blisland in Cornwall in 1662, he eventually settled near London, and in 1672 had been licensed to preach at his own house at Kennington in Surrey. He can hardly have established his Academy at Newington Green before 1673, some three years before Defoe went there.²