Notes — Rina Repina

“Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night…”
— William Blake, The Tyger (1794)

What do Isaac Newton and tigers have in common?

Among many possible answers (let’s leave “mammals” aside), they both lived in the Tower. The royal menagerie was not removed from the castle until the nineteenth century – by order of my friend the Duke of Wellington, but that is a story for another time – so an overlap is at least plausible. In 1696 Newton was appointed Warden of the Royal Mint, then housed in the Tower. He lodged right on the street where the guided tour (for now) begins, and if you ask a beefeater, they will happily point out his windows.

If, during Newton’s residence, the Tower still had tigers (and possibly elephants, porcupines, lions, bears – I have not checked the precise inventory), one is tempted to wonder how he slept. Was he trying to find a shelter under his pillow at night while, a hundred metres away or so, large and not especially contented animals made all sorts of sounds?

Let us leave Newton’s earplugs as a mental image. Just like Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei, he is more famous for his encounters with flora, not fauna.

William Blake is a favourite among the English: a visionary poet and artist of the Romantic era, whose unrestrained handling of religious symbolism can, to some tastes, verge on the heretical, if not the unhinged. His poem The Tyger is second in popularity only to Jerusalem – which later became England’s unofficial anthem, so this “silver medal” is a respectable one.

(A mildly amusing but unnecessary detail: William Blake is also my neighbour, in the sense that he bears the same name. Both are admirable.)

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Blake, who lived just across the Thames, crossed the river to see the Tower tigers – and produced a poem he also illustrated.

William Blake, The Tyger, from: Songs of Experience (detail).
Printed by William Blake, hand-coloured (watercolour) by William or Catherine Blake (his wife). Sold for £228,600 at Christie’s in London on 3 December 2025 (my birthday, could have been a nice gift).

Further reading