The Life of the Author: John Milton. Richard Bradford

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Introduction

      Milton is unique for two reasons.

He was the most politically involved literary writer in the history of English literature. His closest competitor was George Orwell, who spent much of his time during the 1940s producing outspoken journalism on the progress of the war, on the competing evils of fascism and communism, and on the future of Britain after 1945. His two best-known novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were taken by most as reflections of his opinions and fears regarding the Soviet Union. But while he favoured the objectives of the post-war Labour government he was never its unreserved advocate or official spokesman. Milton was effectively a propagandist and a civil servant for a regime, run by Cromwell, that created across Europe gasps of astonishment and often revulsion. The overthrow and execution of Charles I was the prototype for what would happen in France at the end of the eighteenth century and Russia in the early years of the twentieth. The question of how Milton’s involvement in this moment of political trauma affected, even informed, his poems, notably Paradise Lost, has troubled commentators for more than three centuries and it is here that Orwell shifts back into focus. As a journalist during the war years and up to his death in 1950 he was unerringly transparent regarding his perceptions of ideological naivete and political injustice and intolerance – he never allowed any affiliation to a particular party or cause to cloud his sense of what was right or wrong – and while his two dystopian novels are to a large extent a depiction of how idealism could lead to totalitarianism, specifically in the Stalinist regime, each also causes us to wonder if there is something flawed in all humans, irrespective of their political beliefs. Equally, Paradise Lost, while ostensibly based on the Old Testament account of the origins of the human condition, has caused dozens of critics and biographers to wonder if Milton was carrying into it his feelings about more recent events, about a Protestant republican ‘Paradise’ destined to failure just as assuredly as the one occupied by Adam and Eve. No other writers have been so closely attached to two different vocations, political writing and literature, and none therefore has epitomised the differences between and the defining particulars of each.

      Next, Milton is the first author in English about whom we know so much as an individual. Word-for-word his political tracts, most written when he was an employee of the Cromwellian government, outnumber his literary works enormously. Bringing together empirical evidence on where he lived, to whom he was married and so on, along with the impression left by his ideas and uncertainties in his verse and political prose, we have the first fully delineated portrait of an author in English writing. We know hardly anything for certain about Milton’s esteemed predecessor, Shakespeare, and thus we are left to surmise a great deal from his writings. Milton is therefore a magnet for biographers and biographical critics, particularly those who feel that his involvement in a revolution, social, political and religious, accords with their own sympathies.

      His biographers tend to treat him as barristers would deal with a client in court, never quite distorting the truth but claiming the relevant parts of it for their case. More interesting are those who are not, strictly speaking, biographers but rather literary critics who in truth create portraits of Milton based on their readings of his work and more often their partial notion of who he really was – often attempting to disguise or hide their biases.

      Hence the two-part structure of this book. The first is my account of how Milton’s life informed his work, and the second follows the history of how commentators and critics have over the past three and a half centuries made him their own, reshaping him according to their contrasting opinions on who he ought to be, and more recently annihilating him as a real individual.

      Read the first part, see what you think of him as a man and a writer; then read the second and compare your impressions of him as a living man and writer with the ways in which what we know of him has, over the past three centuries been distorted and manipulated. Feminists, for example, have seen his treatment of Eve as symptomatic of the governing patriarchal ideology of his time and as a projection into his work of his own unsettled relationships with his wives. Marxists have regarded him as the foreseer both of revolution and bourgeois complacency.

      Compare the first and second parts of this book, read the poems and the prose, and decide for yourself.