In 1790, 126 years after John Milton was buried beneath the floor of St Giles’s, Cripplegate, his coffin was broken open by builders renovating the

The political afterlife of Paradise Lost

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2024-11-19 23:00:06

In 1790, 126 years after John Milton was buried beneath the floor of St Giles’s, Cripplegate, his coffin was broken open by builders renovating the church. The verger, drinking in a local hostelry, boasted about the find. A crowd gathered. Soon the poet’s remains were being torn to pieces. A publican tugged at the teeth. When they didn’t come away easily somebody knocked them out with a stone. A pawnbroker got hold of the jaw. People were clamouring to get into the church. The gravedigger started charging sixpence for entrance. To dodge payment people climbed in through the windows. Ribs, hair, scraps of skin, were carried off. Within a few days several thousand people had each been sold what they believed to be one of the true teeth of the author of Paradise Lost.

As with his body, so with his poem. In his clever, wide-ranging book, Orlando Reade shows how Milton’s great epic has been dug up and dismembered, its pieces repurposed in often mutually contradictory ways by a succession of ideologues, activists and devout admirers projecting their own preoccupations on to his narrative.