I recently encountered Milton in the form of a book hidden in the bottom of one of my mother’s cupboards as we clear her flat to sell and help finance her care. I remembered the volume from my childhood. It had been rebound by a neighbour- an elderly bookbinder and is a tome about 4 inches thick and perhaps 15″ x 10″. It came home pristine in its leather cover when I was about 10 years old and we opened it with curiosity only to be terrified by Gustave Doré’s illustrations. I have not explored it since…and hadn’t realised my mother had brought it with her when she downsized the first time twelve years ago.

Your post and Claire Tomalin’s article makes it all so much more accessible but it feels as though it needs a deal of time to venture into its depths….rather like deciding to make a good study of current issues in astrophysics. How and why the book came into our family is another question but I found it with another tome…my great great grandmother’s family’Self-Interpreting’ bible printed in 1830 by the evangelist, Professor John Brown of Edinburgh University. It boasted “2000 explanatory notes, numerous references and readings, with a complete index and dictionary.”

Has such a work been written about Paradise Lost? Even then it seems a daunting task to tackle but what a history, what a man, a monster perhaps but what brilliance.