Free Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

Paris, formed a network not simply of goods and people but information, from the proper coffeehouse to patronize (Dick's or Will's for Whigs, the Devil tavern or Sam's for Tories), the state of the Baltic market for naval stores, and the most sophisticated houses of prostitution (Mother Wisebourne's establishment off the Strand was a connoisseur's favorite) to the lodes of data that mattered ever more as the city molded the world around it, like the soundings provided by merchant sailors from ports around the world that enabled Isaac Newton to analyze the moon's influence on the tides in the
Principia.
Thus, despite the stench, the sickly living, the fact that there was no place in England where it was worse to be poor, they kept coming, the country-born who overflowed the city's tenements. London's centripetal force, its gravity, was irresistible, and increasing. It was where the action was.

    Chaloner's first weeks and months in the big city were typical for newcomers: bad and worse. His biographer reported that on his arrival he found himself "something at a loss of Acquaintance, and knew not what course to take for a Livelyhood." He faced the hard truth that London lived and traded through an intricate weave of associations that seemed impenetrable. Obviously, court or government patronage—Newton's approach—was beyond the reach of a masterless apprentice, and the nexus of trade and high finance even more so. The crafts were also off limits. Though the guild system was weakening in the late seventeenth century, tight networks of skilled men locked out even capable strangers, much less half-trained runaways. As late as 1742, London hatters beat to death a man who dared shape headgear without having gone through the apprentice system. About twenty-five men controlled the cheese trade between London and the major producing region of Cheshire, forcing the hundreds of smaller cheesemongers to accept whatever price the cartel set. The scientific revolution and the incipient industrial one supported a range of new enterprises—precision instrument makers, for one. Chaloner had real dexterity with metal and some knowledge of tools, but even were he willing to submit to a new master, he lacked the bona fides that would have persuaded an established shop to take him on. And so it went, for him as for any unknown newcomer. Despite the high wages available to some, the great mass of London's immigrants found themselves underemployed, battling each other for minute advantages in the daily struggle for existence.
    Access to the underworld was tightly controlled too. London's criminals organized themselves into ladders of rank and status as rigid as those of the straight world on which they preyed. Highwaymen like Dick Turpin, celebrated as a kind of latter-day Robin Hood, were the aristocrats. They were generally from higher-class origins than their fellow felons, as they had to have learned how to ride. The tally of those hanged for highway robbery includes parsons' sons, impoverished scholars, spendthrift younger scions of respectable houses—gentlemen, broke, bored, or both.
    But if genteel crime was beyond Chaloner, what about the journeyman variety? London in the 1680s and 1690s had no shortage of tempting targets: the cheek-by-jowl jostling between the rich and the ever-renewing crowds of scrabbling poor offered plenty of scope for a little income redistribution. But while the London criminal world was not as organized as it would become early in the next century, it still arrayed itself according to an order a stranger could not simply enter at will. Street thugs evolved specialized techniques for the crush of London's roads. One gang of footpads, led by the marvelously named Obadiah Lemon, taught themselves to use fishing lines and hooks to snag hats and scarves out of moving vehicles. Others preyed on coaches when they slowed at bridges or other obstacles. Pickpockets often started young, practicing on dummies