Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Johnson and Milton
- PART I JOHNSON THE READER/WRITER: APPROPRIATING MILTON'S TEXTS
- PART II JOHNSON THE CRITIC: ASSESSING MILTON'S ACHIEVEMENT
- PART III JOHNSON THE BIOGRAPHER: CONSTRUCTING MILTON'S CHARACTER
- 8 ‘An acrimonious and surly republican’: Milton as political subject
- 9 ‘Domestick privacies’: Milton as private subject
- 10 Conclusion: ‘what other author ever soared so high?’
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
9 - ‘Domestick privacies’: Milton as private subject
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Johnson and Milton
- PART I JOHNSON THE READER/WRITER: APPROPRIATING MILTON'S TEXTS
- PART II JOHNSON THE CRITIC: ASSESSING MILTON'S ACHIEVEMENT
- PART III JOHNSON THE BIOGRAPHER: CONSTRUCTING MILTON'S CHARACTER
- 8 ‘An acrimonious and surly republican’: Milton as political subject
- 9 ‘Domestick privacies’: Milton as private subject
- 10 Conclusion: ‘what other author ever soared so high?’
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
If Johnson is usually pilloried for misrepresenting Milton as a political subject, he has also been held responsible for caricaturing the private man, and, through the ‘Life of Milton’, transmitting that caricature down the centuries. Eighteenth-century caricatures of Johnson himself, such as James Gillray's portrayal of him wearing a dunce's cap, the apex of which bears Milton's name, turn the tables with the most graphic of insults. At a later date, Byron was to add his quota of tongue-in-cheek satire in Don Juan:
Milton's the prince of poets – so we say;
A little heavy, but no less divine:
An independent being in his day –
Learn'd, pious, temperate in love and wine;
But, his life, falling into Johnson's way,
We're told this great high priest of all the Nine
Was whipt at college – a harsh sire – odd spouse,
For the first Mrs. Milton left his house.
III. 91. lines 817–24Byron's stanza divides neatly in half, swinging round the venerated Milton icon to display its humiliating obverse portrait. By including such ‘entertaining facts’ in this and other lives of the great and good, biographers claim to serve truth; but, though ‘most essential to their hero's story/ They do not much contribute to his glory’ (III. 92. lines 831–2). Johnson's own impression of the earlier lives of Milton is that they err in the opposite direction of excessive veneration, and that the balance needs to be redressed.
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- Johnson's Milton , pp. 211 - 239Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010