This reviews the third volume of the Baroque Cycle. To begin reviewing, go to the review of the first volume, Quicksilver.

Neal Stephenson. The System of the World. Morrow, 2004. The Baroque Cycle.

“On the contrary, my lord,” Dappa said, “there is nothing quite so civilized as to be recognized in public places as the author of books no one has read.” (161-162)

I completed the Baroque Cycle. Let me begin by saying that it was worth it. It is a very entertaining story with some profound observations on science, economics, and politics, as we have already seen.

The System of the World actually gets its title from the third part of Newton’s Principia Mathematica which has the same title. Newton, of course, was describing how the gravity of the sun held the planets and comets in their orbits and how the gravity of the planets kept their moons in their orbits. That is part of the story here as Newton does publish part three, but we see that in Stephenson’s volume, it refers to the way things work economically and politically in our world as well as the way they do physically.

Volume II, The Confusion, suggested that there might be something special to the gold that Jack Shaftoe and his Cabal stole. Here we discover that it indeed is denser than normal gold. The gold was mined by the Spanish from the Solomon Islands. Those islands were first discovered and claimed by Spain. An unknown cartographer named them after Solomon because he thought they were the Biblical Ophir where Solomon was to have imported gold from (see II Chronicles 8:18). Tie that in with the strange isotope and alchemical lore, suddenly Isaac Newton and many others were out to locate and claim the stolen gold. Perhaps the extra mass included the Essential Quicksilver or what Hawthorne called the Elixir of Life.

Like Volume I of the Baroque Cycle, Stephenson divided The System of the World into three stories or novels: “Solomon’s Gold,” “Currency,” and “The System of the World.” In this case, the stories are sequential and mostly set in England, so Volume III reads more like a single story. We continue to follow the lives of our three main protagonists, Jack Shaftoe, the “L’Emmerdeur”; Eliza, the double duchess; and Daniel Waterhouse, the intellectual lapsed Puritan. However, there is a shift in emphasis.

Waterhouse is clearly the main character here. He is the one who connects Jack, Eliza, and many of the other characters like Isaac Newton. Unlike the other two volumes which cover decades, The System of the World takes place entirely in the year of 1714. George I, the first Hanoverian monarch, would take the throne of England, and it seems much of the other events in some way or another emphasize the changes taking place in England and the Western World.

Waterhouse has returned from Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he has attempted to begin the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technical Arts, an ultimately failing precursor to M.I.T., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He meets up with Thomas Newcomen who is looking for backers for his latest project, what we know today at the Newcomen engine. Using Hooke’s “internal combustion” steam engine, he has designed a device that he hopes will pump water out of the bottom of coal mines in Cornwall and Devon, so the mines will continue to be productive.

Waterhouse has also teamed with Leibniz, who has come to England with Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, to work on a kind of early binary computer. Using the on/off one/zero base two, he hopes to develop a language-based, hand-cranked device to do calculations. His plan is to include Wilkins’ linguistic ideas so that it can handle language, not just numbers. He imagines it using punch cards such as weavers use for patterns. Oh, and the best punch cards are made out of the heavy gold, something everyone wants.

Peter the Great contrasts significantly with the British monarchs and Louis XIV who also appear in the Cycle. He is a pure tyrant. He gets what he wants without question. He also is very large and can physically fight mano a mano if he has to. He sees a lot of potential in what Leibniz is proposing, but it seems he will mostly use it to try to consolidate power. This came out nearly twenty years ago, but Peter the Great in this story certainly sounds a lot like the current ruler of Russia.

Clearly, we know historically that such a device as Stephenson imagines Leibniz assembling would become the basis of the computer, but the first crude punch-card calculator was not developed until the nineteenth century. Binary computer languages, of course, would typify the twentieth century and continue to the present, though we no longer use punch cards very often. Stephenson is having fun with technology. I should note that he also mentions the Longitude Act of 1714 offering a prize for the inventor of a system that finds longitude. That prize would eventually be claimed after many challenging trials, but that goes twenty-one years past 1714.

There are also hints of other things in the future. At one point there is a conversation about whether words have meanings. This sounds like a discussion of postmodernism, though we can note that Shakespeare villains sometimes excuse their evil by saying words are mere puffs of air and have no significance.

Still, the events of the time period covered in the Cycle “swept away not merely Governments but whole Systems of Thought, like Khans of the Mind” (376). Fascinating indeed.

There are some other plot lines. Jack Shaftoe has returned to England, now King of the Vagabonds, and Waterhouse has obtained the Solomonic gold from him for Liebniz’s project. Part of the story tells the convoluted plot that gets the gold plates for the calculating machine out of England so Leibniz can work on his machine in Russia. Part of the story also intersects Jack with Newton.

Until the end of this volume, Jack is not observed. Everyone knows he is in town, but he is a kind of MacHeath or Scarlet Pimpernel. He does things, does not get caught, but everyone knows who is behind these things. He confesses that he is doing it for the love of Eliza, who vowed to have nothing more to do with him when they parted in Volume I.

There is a potential monetary crisis in England. Newton is now in charge of the mint. Unlike previous Wardens of the Royal Mint, he takes his job seriously. His random tests show that about twenty percent of the silver coins in circulation are counterfeits. He blames Jack for much of that. After all, Jack had learned about coining and precious metals during his world-ranging adventures. Jack’s new street handle is Jack the Coiner. Newton is determined to catch him. Counterfeiting is high treason, so that means quartering, not just hanging.

Newton, like most Puritans, is a Whig. The Whigs seem to have the upper hand with the new king but not with the old queen. The Tories want to make the Whigs and Newton look bad, so when the queen dies, they call for a Trial of the Pyx. The Pyx is a casket that contains the legal weights, measures, and samples of the coins of the realm. If the Pyx has been tampered with, it could cause a monetary crisis.

Now the Pyx is kept inside a room with six locks on its door in the Tower of London. People suspect that somehow Jack the Coiner has broken into the Pyx and replaced some of the coins and weights used as standards with counterfeits. The Tories see an opportunity to make Newton and the Whigs look bad and start a scandal that will make them popular with both the new king and the voting public.

Jack’s brother Bob also has a part in this volume. He is now a sergeant in John Churchill’s army. Thanks to his military victories on the Continent, Churchill is now the Duke of Marlborough. As most armies at this time are led by noblemen, some armies lean Whig, some lean Tory. Protestant Marlborough leans Whig, and they have a part to play in the transition of the monarchy.

Meanwhile, Eliza has befriended Dappa, a black sailor from the crew of the ship that Waterhouse sailed on. Dappa is arrested and jailed because he is an escaped slave. His putative owner is one Mr. White. Eliza, of course, was a slave herself and promotes abolition. She encourages Dappa to write broadsides. He is arrested for theft. He escaped; therefore, he possesses stolen property. Obviously, he makes fun of that logic. How can he steal himself? And, more succinctly, how can a man be someone else’s property?

Queen Anne dies, King George is crowned. The coronation ceremony is so long that the boys’ choir grew beards (760 ;-0). But the focus and climax of the tale will be October 29, 1714. Jack has finally been arrested and sentenced to hang on that day. The same day has been set aside for the Trial of the Pyx. To say much more would be a spoiler. It is enough to say that there is a lot of action.

There are horse chases and coach chases. There is a intrigue in the literal underground: cellars, sewers, and tunnels. Those parts are reminiscent of From Russia with Love. The land and sea adventures and political intrigues may remind readers of Evangeline or I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). The System of the World is both clever and believable.

It also shows us new ways of thinking about things. Newton and Leibniz’s “System of the World” has become the way we see things in the physical world—with some recent modification, of course, by relativity and subatomic observations. Stephenson presents Leibniz as more of a deist. The Creator is the great watchmaker. Newton is the Puritan (though a suspected Arian). He says, “Think not of him as a watchmaker but as a king.” God did not merely wind things up and let them run down, but he actively rules and oversees his work. If God were merely a watchmaker, “he could be removed without any diminution” (677).

Leibniz also represents the old way of doing things. He joined the court of Hanover and later the court of the Tsar. He is looking for “some prince” to finance his plans. The new way of doing things is different. Newcomen looked for investors. When his engine worked, the mines produced and more of his engines were made. The investors, the miners, the inventor, the mine owners, and the public all benefited.

The new banking system also made things safer from government confiscation. Instead of stashes of precious metals, banks deal with contracts and loans and promises. The middle class is growing. Indeed, the one real villain of the story, the Inquisitor De Gex, hates the new system. He looks nostalgically on the system of nobility-clergy-peasantry as the way things ought to be done. In doing so, he is paraphrasing Marx as much as Machiavelli.

There is a very satisfying epilogue. It is not giving too much away by saying we see how things in 1714 are in France, in Russia, in England, in the Carolinas, and in New England. We can easily see seeds of what would happen in the following centuries in those places. We can still learn and get direction from those things today.

Stephenson is not only telling us a very entertaining tale and suggesting where we would be headed, he is also showing us where we came from. These things are the foundation of modern civilization and science. We should consider ending where we began:

Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations…may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be. (Quicksilver 1)

The Baroque Cycle is a romance, truly, but it is something much more as well. It does reflect the system of the world as we know it.