Cloth binding. Black lettering with gilt title on front cover.

In 1667 John Milton published Paradise Lost, perhaps the greatest long poem in the English language. It was recognised as an extraordinary achievement shortly after it appeared, and has, in the three hundred and fifty years that people have been reading and thinking about it, provoked a great deal of critical debate. Despite its current canonical status, a favourable reception for Paradise Lost in the late seventeenth century was no foregone conclusion, and its reputation has fluctuated surprisingly ever since.

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Milton was out in the cold: as a staunch republican, a supporter of Cromwell and an apologist for the regicide, he was lucky to escape execution for treason. His unorthodox views on various sensitive subjects, including divorce (he was in favour) were well known: Milton was an active writer of political pamphlets as well as a poet, and he had many influential enemies. England in 1667 was reeling from the events of the previous year, when plague and fire had swept the capital, causing a devastation many people thought was divinely inspired; a biblical epic from a blind, grim old controversialist was by no means certain of being sympathetically received, as the poet’s wish that his poem might ‘fit audience find, though few’ (VII.31) perhaps recognises. In spite of this unwelcoming climate, when Paradise Lost appeared, it was hailed as a work of genius, even by Milton’s political opponents. The audience was not few, but was it fit?

From the start, this epic poem attracted a number of disobedient readers. One of the first major responses was an adaptation for the stage by John Dryden, The State of Innocence (1671). He sought and received Milton’s permission to put Paradise Lost into rhyme (unconvinced, presumably, by the comments on the ‘troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’ in the note on the verse), and his version outsold the original until the end of the seventeenth century. Dryden’s political affiliation (he was a royalist) prompted him to play on a crux in Milton’s poem: Satan, who disdains servitude and tries to overturn his monarch, becomes in Dryden’s rewriting an unmistakeable portrait of Oliver Cromwell, the king-killer. He also believed that the fallen angel, and not Adam, was the hero (in the sense of his structural position as the protagonist of the epic), and weighted his adaptation accordingly.

This was not an isolated instance of wishful interpretation. Contemporary readers who thought there was a whiff of sulphur about the unrepentant republican poet were not surprised to find these sentiments in the mouth of the arch-fiend; and there were those who believed that Milton was in fact disowning his previous stance by associating it with Satan. Neither reading does justice to the complexity of Paradise Lost, but this does identify what was to become a recurrent theme in later responses to the poem: the contested interpretation of Satan, its eloquent anti-hero.

Milton’s epic achieved classical status in the last years of the seventeenth century, when it was published with explanatory notes – the first poem in English to be so presented. Twenty years later, its position was consolidated by an influential series of articles written by Joseph Addison in the Spectator (a daily paper). This, however, did not protect the poem from interference: in 1732, Richard Bentley (one of the earliest textual critics in England) produced an ’emended’ edition, in which he argued that the blind poet had employed an incompetent amanuensis, and that as a result many errors of wording and logic had crept into the published version. Bentley’s unjustified and insensitive revisions attracted widespread ridicule – not least from Alexander Pope, who pilloried him in the Dunciad (a satire against dull poets). These revisions reflected, however, a feeling that Paradise Lost, though a national classic, was somehow unorthodox in its theological and philosophical outlook. Pope’s poem, and indeed his earlier work Rape of the Lock, show another kind of response to Milton. They are ‘mock-epics’, and re-deploy elements of Milton’s style (and, of course, that of his classical antecedents) to comic ends. Milton’s achievement was felt to be so great that no contemporary poet could rival or match it: writing a serious epic would be out of the question.

Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. He was the eldest son of The Reverend Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine. His simple prose style marked the end of the mannerisms and conventional classical images of the 17th century.

  It is as an essayist that Addison is remembered today. He began writing essays quite casually. In April 1709, his childhood friend Richard Steele started the Tatler. Addison contributed 42 essays to the Tatler, while Steele wrote 188. Regarding Addison’s help, Steele remarked, “when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him”. The Tatler was discontinued on 2 January 1711. The Spectator began publication on 1 March of that year, and it continued – being issued daily, and achieving great popularity – until 6 December 1712. It exercised an influence over the reading public of the time, and Addison soon became the leading partner in it, contributing 274 essays out of a total of 635; Steele wrote 236. Addison also assisted Steele with The Guardian, which began in 1713. Addison is the originator of the quote, “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body”. The quote can be found in Issue 147 of the Tatler.

The breezy, conversational style of the essays later prompted Bishop Richard Hurd to reprove Addison for what he called an “Addisonian Termination”, or preposition stranding, a grammatical construction that ends a sentence with a preposition.

He wrote an essay entitled Dialogues on Medals which was translated to the French by eighteenth-century priest and journalist Simon-Jérôme Bourlet de Vauxcelles (1733–1802). His essay “Adventures of a Shilling” (1710) is a brief, early example of an it-narrative or object narrative, a genre that would become more common later in the century. He also left an incomplete work, Of the Christian Religion.