Raising Milton's Ghost

Front matter

THE WISH LIST

John Milton and the Sublime of Terror in the Early Romantic Period

Joseph Crawford

Contents

Abbreviations for Works Cited

The Haunting Introduction 1 Milton’s Legacy 2 Milton’s Ghost 3 Milton and the Sublime of Terror 4 Milton’s Heirs 5 ‘Urania I Shall Need Thy Guidance’:

The Case of William Wordsworth

Index

212 220 239

Abbreviations for Works Cited

C Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Complete Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 volumes (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969—2001).

DNB H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 volumes (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).

DQ Thomas De Quincey, Complete Works, ed. Grevel Lindop,

21 volumes (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000—2003).

E William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David Erdman, revised edition (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988).

EB Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, ed. Paul Langford, 9 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981—2000).

HMW Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France, 2 volumes (New York: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975).

M John Milton, Poetical Works, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Oxford UP, 1958).

MP John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe,

8 volumes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1953-1982).

MW Mary Wollstonecraft, Works, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 volumes (London: Pickering, 1989).

P William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 volumes (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991).

TW John Milton, Poems on Several Occasions, ed. Thomas Warton (London, 1785).

XI

The Haunting

‘Milton speaks of a spiritual companion that visited his slumbers nightly, and after the same manner Milton came and told me that this book of mine should be immortal.’

— Samuel Johnson, Court and Country, 1780

‘The report of [Milton’s] death was so industriously circulated that the credulity of the public swallowed the bait prepared for them ... a figure of him, as large and as heavy as the life, was actually formed, and laid out, and put into the coffin ...’

— The Times, Wednesday, 6 August 1788

‘One of the Parish Officers of Cripplegate, who violated the bones of Milton, has since been deranged in his intellects, and supposes himself to have been grasped by a cold hand ...’

— St James’s Chronicle, 31 August 1791

‘The names of Milton, of Locke, and of Hampden, re-echoed through the hall, where it was proposed that their busts should also in short time be placed.’

— Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France,

describing a scene at the Jacobins Club, Paris, 1792

‘My first thought was wonder, where [Milton] could have been concealed so many years; my second, a transport of joy to find him still alive ...’ — William Cowper, Letter to William Hayley, 1793

‘[Milton’s] attachment to truth was as sincere and fervent as that of the honest Montaigne, who says: “I would come again with all my heart from the other world to give any one the lie, who should report me as other than I was...”’

— William Hayley, Life of Milton, 1794

‘Sages and patriots that being dead do yet speak to us, spirits of Milton, Locke, Sidney, Harrington! That still wander through your native country, giving wisdom and inspiring zeal! The cauldron of persecution is bubbling against you — the spells of despotism are being muttered! Blest spirits! Assist us, lest hell exorcise earth of all that is heavenly!’

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Plot Discovered, 1795

XII THE HAUNTING

‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee ...’

— William Wordsworth, ‘London, 1802’

‘But Milton entering my Foot; I saw in the nether Regions of the Imagination; also all men on Earth, And all in Heaven, saw in the nether regions of the Imagination In Ulro beneath Beulah, the vast breach of Miltons descent.’ — William Blake, Milton, 1802-4

Yea, our blind Poet, who, in his later day, Stood almost single, uttering odious truth, Darkness before and danger’s voice behind; Soul awful! if the earth hath ever lodg’d An awful Soul, I seem’d to see him here Familiarly, and in his Scholar’s dress ...

— William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805

‘Think’st thou, could he, the blind Old Man, arise

Like Samuel from the grave, to freeze once more The blood of monarchs with his prophecies,

Or be alive again — again all hoar With time and trials, and those helpless eyes

And heartless daughters, worn, and pale, and poor, Would he adore a sultan? he obey The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh?’

— Lord Byron, Don Juan, 1819

‘I dreamed that Milton’s spirit rose, and took From life’s green tree his Uranian lute; And from his touch sweet thunder flowed, and shook All human things built in contempt of man ...’

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1820

‘Milton’s spirit came to me, and warned me to beware of being misled by Paradise Lost.‘ — William Blake, in conversation with Henry Crabb Robinson, 1825

XIII

Introduction

This is a ghost story.

Like many ghost stories, it features a missing will, a violated grave, a disputed inheritance, sinister paintings and mysterious dreams. In the best Gothic tradition, it takes place against a backdrop of violence and upheaval, with a supporting cast of scholars, poets, madmen and revolutionaries. The ghost is that of John Milton, whose haunting commenced in the 1780s, and began in earnest in about 1791. When it ended — if it ended — is far harder to discern.

This story has not been told before. Many of the events it describes have been noticed by other scholars, but individually they were no more than historical curios, anecdotes with which to enliven passages of literary history; it is only when they are brought together that they become something more. It has never been adequately observed how thoroughly the 1790s were haunted by Milton’s ghost; how often his name and works were invoked, how many forms his revival took or how frequently the trope of his return or resurrection was deployed by the writers of the time. The aim of this book is to bring together this mass of previously unconnected material in order to chronicle the last and strangest chapter in the history of the eighteenth-century Milton cult, and to discern why, in the 1790s, Milton appeared to be having such trouble remaining at rest.

Was it a mere historical accident that the decade which began with the violation of Milton’s grave ended with the exhibition of Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, a monument to Fuseli’s obsession with Milton, from whose works he had derived the subject matter for more than forty gigantic canvasses? Was it simply coincidence that the same decade saw the publication of an unprecedented number of editions of Paradise Lost? Was it by chance that, within a year of the French erecting a bust of Milton at the Jacobin’s Club, the British had another sculpted for his previously monument-less grave? Was it only blind luck that a dozen different writers chose the figure of Milton’s Samson to symbolise the French Revolution, or that Cowper, Coleridge, Hayley, Blake, Wordsworth, Godwin, Byron and Shelley all dreamed of, imagined or longed for Milton’s resurrection or return?

I would argue that it was not, any more than it was a coincidence that in the 1780s Jefferson turned to Milton’s prose works for guidance in legislating for religious freedom in Virginia, Mirabeau translated them into French,

XIV INTRODUCTION

Gibbon called for their suppression and Thomas Warton spent years searching in archives for Milton’s missing will. All these events were symptoms of a wider phenomenon, a phenomenon that this book sets out to explore and, if possible, explain. ‘The dead brood over Europe’, wrote Blake in 1790, and among the army of ghosts watching over this pivotal moment of European history, Milton’s appears to have been among the most prominent. The question, then, must be: why wouldn’t John Milton stay dead?

The Purpose of This Book This book aims to fill a gap in the scholarship on Milton and the Romantics, by describing the historical context within which the encounter between Milton and his Romantic heirs took place. It appears to have hitherto largely escaped the notice of scholars that in the very years when Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth were reading, writing and dreaming about Milton, his cultural status was in an unprecedented state of flux. It was not only poets who had to renegotiate their relationships with their illustrious predecessor; at this moment of national stress, their entire culture had to find new ways to think about and live with Milton’s spirit and Milton’s legacy. The anxiety about Milton’s influence was not just personal, experienced only by poets; it was national, and expressed itself in a variety of ways. Blake was not the only man in those years to encounter Milton’s ghost; Wordsworth was not the only one who wished Milton was living at that hour; Coleridge was not alone in feeling that the time had come for some new poet or prophet to write a modern version of Paradise Lost. The importance of Milton to the major Romantics has been chronicled extensively; what has almost never been shown was what he meant to their contemporaries. It is this that my book sets out to explore, with the aim of re-examining the relationships of the major Romantics with Milton in the light of the knowledge thus acquired. This book is not intended to replace any existing works on Milton and Romanticism; instead, it is meant to complement them, providing historical context for the literary relationships they describe. In particular, I hope it can form a companion volume to Lucy Newlyn’s important work, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader. Newlyn gives an excellent account of the ways in which Wordsworth, Blake and Coleridge read Milton, but her book is limited chiefly by its scope, its examinations of everything other than the works of the major Romantics being extremely brief. My book concerns itself with some of those late eighteenth-century readers of Paradise Lost who happened not

INTRODUCTION XV to be major Romantic poets, as well as a few who were; not only because the ways in which such people read Milton are important in their own right, but also because once they are known, the readings of Milton by the major Romantics can be better understood.

This book is divided into three parts, each of two chapters. The first deals with Milton’s cultural status in the late eighteenth century, and the ways in which it was affected by the American and French Revolutions: Chapter One follows this story to 1790, and Chapter Two takes it from 1790 to 1800. The second examines certain aspects of the Milton cult in more detail: Chapter Three explores Milton’s importance to the discourse of the sublime, while Chapter Four deals with the many minor poets who attempted to establish themselves as Milton’s successors. The third and final part examines, in the light of what has gone before, the works of two major Romantics, William Wordsworth and William Blake, placing their engagements with Milton in the context of their times, and comparing their attempts to write Miltonic epics and their uses of the Miltonic sublime to those of their literary contemporaries: Chapter Five deals with Wordsworth; Chapter Six with Blake. Finally, the Epilogue looks forward to De Quincey and the nineteenth century, suggesting that the events discussed in this book may have had long-term consequences extending far beyond the political and poetical controversies that created them; that the very concept of the literary may have been shaped by the curious case of Milton’s coffin, and the ensuing struggle to ensure that John Milton stayed dead.

Chapter One I

John Milton died on the night of 9 November 1674. No longer a living presence, a blind old man still labouring away at his poems and polemics until a few months before his death, he remained at least for a few days more as a visible, tangible object, a pale corpse lying on a bed in his house on Artillery Walk; then, on the twelfth, he was buried beside his father in the church of St Giles’ Cripplegate, in London.’ In 1790, his remains would be most rudely disinterred: but between his burial and his exhumation lay a century in which Milton remained present only in books, memories and legends.

For a dead man, his presence remained considerable. His poems were endlessly reprinted, with one edition after another absorbed by an increasingly book-hungry public; while from the 1690s onwards a stream of critics and commentators devoted themselves to writing about his works, ensuring that his literary reputation remained very much alive. But the Milton whose cultural presence was sustained and strengthened throughout the eighteenth century was, inevitably, not quite the same as the Milton who had breathed his last in 1674. In the place of the turbulent polemicist who, while he lived, had flung himself into the thick of every political crisis and controversy within reach, the critics, editors and publishers of the eighteenth century constructed a new version of Milton, one they felt would be more acceptable to their readers: not a man of politics but a man of God, a saintly author of sacred poetry, untroubled by petty and divisive temporal concerns. This version of Milton, whilst unquestionably a force to be reckoned with within eighteenth-century culture, was also — crucially — present within it only at a distance: a reverend figure seated afar off in glory, in some pantheon of Great English Poets, Whig worthies or Protestant saints. He was read, admired and even worshipped, but none of his admirers or worshippers doubted for a moment that he was dead and in heaven, rather than alive and active in Hanoverian England.

It is not hard to understand why this transformation took place; as a republican defender of regicide in politics, and a freethinking dissenter in religion, Milton could hardly have been accepted without major modifications by the Anglican constitutional monarchists who came to dominate British political life after the revolution of 1688. His acknowledged poetic greatness made it desirable to annex his name to the new (and, at least initially, still highly unstable) political and religious order; but if he were to be posthumously taken into the fold, it could only be on the condition that his politics were reduced to a vague belief in ‘liberty’ and his religion to a generic form of Protestantism.? Milton had to be rendered safe, reinterpreted so as to pose no threat to the established order. ‘The Milton that had been adulated by earlier generations of the eighteenth century’, writes Stephen Prickett, ‘was a carefully sanitised version; Milton the religious heretic, the social, political, and sexual rebel had been tacitly allowed to drop from sight. What was left was simply the lover of liberty and great “religious poet”, the author of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained’ 3

The way in which this reinterpretation was accomplished requires closer examination than it has hitherto received. First and foremost, if any account is to be given of the forms which Milton’s presence took in the eighteenth century, some basic questions must be posed: questions so basic that it seems astonishing that, after eight book-length studies of Milton’s eighteenth-century influence, they seem never even to have been seriously asked, let alone answered. Who read Milton’s poems? Who read his prose? How well known were they? Did the average late eighteenth-century working man even know who Milton was? If he could read, was he likely to have read him? If he did, what did he make of him? The limitations of the surviving sources prevent these questions from being answered with any great precision; but enough evidence exists to at least make a more meaningful attempt to solve them than has been attempted hitherto.

As R. D. Havens points out, ‘between 1705 and 1800 Paradise Lost was published over a hundred times’, compared to fifty editions of Shakespeare’s plays, and just seven of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.* These editions became more rather than less frequent as the century went on, especially after 1774, when the end of perpetual copyright led to a boom in the publication of classic English authors such as Shakespeare and Milton. The Tonson family, which owned the copyright on Paradise Lost until 1767, became extremely rich on the proceeds, and when their involvement in the book trade ended they sold the copyright for the immense sum of £900.° It was clearly amonumentally popular poem; indeed, based on the simple number of editions that booksellers were able to sell of it, it seems uncontentious to say that it must have been one of the most popular poems of the eighteenth century.

Furthermore, there is ample evidence of the extraordinarily high cultural status that Milton enjoyed among the educated classes in eighteenth-century Britain and America. Paradise Lost was compulsory reading for anyone with any pretence to culture or education: as Dr Johnson grumpily remarked, Addison had ‘made Milton an universal favourite, with whom readers of every class think it necessary to be pleased’.’? Of England, Havens states: ‘it is hardly an exaggeration to say that from Pope’s day to Wordsworth’s Milton occupied a place ... which no poet has held since and none is likely to hold again’. Of America in the same period, Sensabaugh writes that ‘Milton commanded an authority rarely granted any person, in any country, at any time’, and that many Americans ‘saw Milton as the supreme author of all time’.2 Any number of contemporary statements could be quoted to back them up. Paradise Lost was routinely compared not only with the works of Shakespeare, Virgil and Homer (which were usually judged to be either equally great or slightly inferior to it), but to the Bible itself.*° Thomas Newton declared in 1749 that ‘Whoever has any true taste and genius, we are confident, will esteem this poem the best of modern productions, and the scriptures the best of all ancient ones’.” John Wesley wrote in 1763 that ‘Of all the Poems which have hitherto appeared in the World, in whatever Age or Nation, the Preference has generally been given, by impartial Judges, to Milton’s Paradise Lost’.’? Mrs Grant of New England recalled that in the 1770s there had been in her household ‘not the smallest doubt of [Milton’s] being as much inspired as ever Isaiah was’, while George Gregory, looking back in 1808, remarked that ‘our grandsires, and even perhaps many grave Doctors of Divinity, would exclaim against the impiety of that man who would dare to question a syllable of the authenticity of all that [Milton] had related, of the war in heaven, of the rebellious spirits, &c, &c’.’8 For these people, as for many others, Paradise Lost was clearly very nearly holy writ.

One of the most frequently reprinted and highly regarded poems of the century: granted. But who actually read it? That Milton’s poetry was regularly inflicted on schoolboys, at least in small doses, is clear from the frequency with which sections of it appeared in the poetry anthologies frequently used in schools, such as Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts, William Enfield’s The Speaker and Exercises in Elocution, and Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry and British Parnassus." But does it follow from this that one could walk into any mid-eighteenth-century English village, say the words ‘Milton’s Paradise Lost’, and expect the villagers to know whereof one spoke, perhaps even to have read the poem themselves? According to Havens, the answer was yes, and a man of the eighteenth century who wished to avoid either the poet or the epic would have had a very difficult time of it:

No village was free from the contagion; and if he sought peace in the country, he came upon Il Penseroso alcoves, upon travellers reading Paradise Lost by the roadside, ploughboys with copies of it in their pockets, and shepherds, real shepherds, ‘poring upon it in the fields’. Even among the poor and the uneducated it was the same: not only ploughboys and shepherds, but threshers, cotters, cobblers, and milkwomen read and imitated the poet who expected his audience to be ‘few’."5

This is an extraordinary claim; but closer reading of Havens shows it to be based on very slender foundations. We know of one milkwoman — the poet Ann Yearsley — who read Paradise Lost, and that one man once saw a shepherd reading — or, perhaps more likely, attempting to read — a copy in the fields.*° The ploughboy with Paradise Lost in his pocket can only be Robert Burns, sometimes known during his lifetime as the ‘heaven-taught ploughman’; but he was tenant farmer, as was his father, who paid for him to have an education such as no common farm labourer would have been able to afford, making him stand out sharply from his rural contemporaries.” As for the ‘threshers, cotters, [and] cobblers’, they appear to be pure fantasy, as Havens cites no sources to verify their existence. Yet, giving only these cases as his evidence, Havens blithely claims: ‘These facts almost make one accept at their face value such [eighteenth-century] assertions as “Paradise Lost ... is read with Pleasure and Admiration, by Persons of every Degree and Condition”.”®

In a similar vein, Wittreich has claimed that ‘Milton was first and foremost the property of the popular culture’. His main proof of this is the number of Milton editions published, but his evidence that any considerable number of them found their way out of the hands of the educated classes is slight. He suggests that lower-class children may have learned about Milton in schools, stating in support that ‘her first editor reports of Susanna Blamire, who attended only the village school, “We have clear proof ... that she was conversant ... [at a very early period of life] with the writings of Milton”’.?°

But Blamire was the daughter of a wealthy squire, not a farm labourer, and she shared her house with a bookish aunt of literary tastes: it seems much more likely that she gained her familiarity with Milton and the rest of the English classics from books borrowed from her aunt than from the village school, especially as her editor reports that ‘the amount of information obtained [at the school] was small’. She was also familiar from childhood on with Collins, Prior and Gray, yet Wittreich does not thus assume that these, too, were known to every English child with a village school education. Newlyn, in Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, makes no explicit claims for the popularity of Paradise Lost with the lower classes, but she still writes that ‘along with The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Bible, [Paradise Lost] was the most widely read book of the century’.”* If true, this would make it very widely read indeed; the Bible was read by everyone who was even semi-literate, and there is ample evidence of the vast popularity of Pilgrim’s Progress with readers at every level of society. But there are strong grounds for thinking that Paradise Lost never attained this level of ubiquity, or even that of slightly less widely read but still massively popular works such as Robinson Crusoe, and that its readership was substantially smaller than Havens, Wittreich and Newlyn have claimed.

First, it is worth asking whether Haven’s ‘threshers, cotters, and cobblers’ could have obtained a copy of Paradise Lost even if they had wanted one. The English Short Title Catalogue lists 125 separate eighteenth-century editions of Paradise Lost, which is certainly an impressive figure: but a closer examination shows that many of them were luxury publications, aimed at a small and wealthy audience, and probably printed in small numbers at high prices. Paradise Lost is long for a poem, but not for a book; printed in small but perfectly legible type, it could easily be fitted into a few hundred duodecimo pages. Yet of these 125 editions of the poem, only half were single-volume duodecimos or smaller: the rest were folios, quartos or octavos, often sprawling across multiple volumes, lavishly illustrated with plates and buttressed with biographies, critical essays and voluminous notes. Even the duodecimos often contained plates or illustrations, a fact that would have substantially increased their prices. A relatively prosperous London tradesman, such as William Blake’s father, could have bought one without much difficulty, especially if he purchased it from one of the capital’s many second-hand bookstalls rather than a bookshop. But in a period when a provincial tradesman might easily have to support a family on just 14s a week, and a farm labourer on even less, 3s 6d for an illustrated duodecimo edition of Paradise Lost would have represented a significant luxury purchase.

Another way of gauging the popularity of Paradise Lost is to compare it to three works that are known to have been truly popular in the broadest possible sense: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Paine’s Rights of Man. The English Short Title Catalogue lists 190 eighteenth-century editions of Defoe’s novel, with a further ten editions of the second part published separately, and 196 editions of Bunyan’s work over the same period, not counting the many separate reprints of the spurious ‘third part’ added to it in 1693. Part I of Rights of Man went through forty-five editions in just ten years, from 1791 to 1800, and Part II went through thirty editions between 1792 and 1800, despite the fact that from 1792 booksellers could be prosecuted for seditious libel for selling either of them; to emphasise just how popular it had become, Benjamin Vaughan remarked in 1792 that ‘[Rights of Man] is now made as much a Standard book in this Country as Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim’s Progress’.?3 In The Englishman and His Books in the Early Nineteenth Century, Amy Cruse quotes Mrs Gaskell as saying that Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained were among the books to be found ‘in nearly every house’ among the small farmers of Cumberland and Westmorland, but comments immediately afterwards that:

The two books of which [the village peddler] sold the most copies were The Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. These two books were read by almost everybody who read at all, from the working man to the prince. The pedlar had copies that he would sell for a few pence, and those who bought nothing else bought these.”4

In her case studies of ‘working-men readers’ in the period, most had read Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, but only John Clare read Paradise Lost. Furthermore, as Pat Rogers has shown, both Defoe and Bunyan’s works were repeatedly adapted into chapbooks for the very poor — a sure sign of the breadth of their appeal.” (Chapbooks called Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained did exist, but rather than abridged adaptations of Milton’s works, they contained ballads on the same subjects; in any case, only one edition is known of each.)?° We must also be aware that eighteenth-century print runs could vary wildly in size, from 500 for a work by a hitherto unknown novelist to 4,000 or 5,000 or more for best-selling novels or pamphlets at the height of their popularity.” Unlike Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress and Rights of Man were all overwhelmingly published in large, cheap editions, so the disparity in their numbers may be many times greater than a simple count of their editions would suggest. A single cheap duodecimo run of Robinson Crusoe might represent as much as eight times as many actual books as a luxury edition of Paradise Lost.

Such figures serve to put Milton’s popularity into perspective. It must certainly have been widespread, comparable to that of Thomson, Young and other best-selling poets of the eighteenth century, but it was clearly far from the ubiquity enjoyed by writers like Bunyan.?° Nor is it necessary to seek far for a reason. In 1762, William Dodd observed:

While all read and admire Milton, it is confessed that few understand him; few, at least, of the common Readers; More learned ones frequently find themselves at a Loss, so unbounded is he in his knowledge ...?°

The following year, John Wesley stated the problem even more plainly:

This inimitable Work [i.e. Paradise Lost], amidst all its beauties, is unintelligible to abundance of Readers: the immense learning which [Milton] has every where crowded together, making it quite obscure to persons of a common Education.°°

Given his tireless travelling and preaching amongst the rural poor, Wesley should surely have had some idea of what the common people were or were not reading, and his objection seems a reasonable one: how many lower-class readers, tolerably literate but lacking any literary education, would have been able to make their way through 10,000 lines of Latinate verse, crammed with learned and classical allusions? Earlier in the century, Addison had made the same point more obliquely, writing in The Spectator that ‘Homer, Virgil, or Milton, so far as the language of their poems is understood, will please a reader of plain common sense’: implicitly placing Milton alongside Homer and Virgil as a writer whose story was potentially comprehensible to anyone, but whose language required a specialised education to understand.*! The fact that George Green’s prose version of Paradise Lost — an English translation of Dupré de St Maur’s French version, which had translated the poem into French prose — was reprinted at least twelve times between 1745 and 1784 suggests that a good number of readers were attracted by Milton’s subject matter, but put off by the difficulty of his poetry. Some struggled through regardless: lower-class poets such as John Clare, Anne Yearsley and Steven Duck all read Paradise Lost, and were profoundly influenced by it. But they read it precisely because it was a talisman of the literary culture that they aspired to join, not because it was already part of the popular culture into which they had been born. Duck’s case is instructive:

Stephen [Duck] read it over twice or thrice with a Dictionary, before he could understand the Language of it thoroughly .... He studied Paradise Lost, as others do the Classics.°?

Far from growing up with Milton, Duck did not discover him until his twenties; and when he did it was not by chance, but because he was making a deliberate effort to educate himself. He struggled through it despite finding it almost incomprehensible at first, in the same way and for the same reasons as upper-class men of the same era struggled through Homer and Virgil: because by doing so they were able to make a claim to be literary men, with all the cultural prestige that implied. Duck lived near the beginning of the century, but the situation does not seem to have been very different at its end. Seventy years later, John Clare worked his way through Paradise Lost, although he could only obtain a ‘shattered’ second-hand copy; but his semi-literate father — presumably a more typical representative of the English labouring classes than his prodigiously gifted son — read nothing but fairy tales and broadside ballads.33 John Wesley attempted to introduce Milton’s poetry to the common people, printing an abridged version of Paradise Lost in 1763 and making it compulsory reading for Methodist preachers.*4 But despite having Wesley’s publishing and distributing machine behind it, and a massive potential audience of literate, self-improving, working-class Methodist readers, it did not sell well: its price was lowered from 2s 6d to 1s 6d in 1777, and no new edition was called for until 1791.35 The Methodists, like the literate lower classes in general, evidently preferred their poems to be substantially shorter.