"Dream not of other worlds": Paradise Lost and the Child Reader

With very many [children] the easy neatness or pompous sounds of verse [in] Paradise Lost, have an ineffable charm. . . . We need hardly remind those concerned in [children's] welfare, that Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Addison, are enjoyable and appreciable from a very early age, and that the child's store of such reading is one of the richest legacies the adult can inherit.

—Elizabeth Rigby

Milton's importance to adult readers of the nineteenth century is unquestioned,¹ even as his role in the education of their children has been ignored by twentieth-century critics.² Milton's work was seen as significant enough in the nineteenth century to justify not only the inclusion of his poetry in schoolbooks but also the publication of two versions of Paradise Lost intended especially for children. In particular, Eliza Weaver Bradburn's 1828 retelling, The Story of Paradise Lost, For Children, allows us to examine Milton's role as an educator of nineteenth-century children.³ This text reinforces the belief that Paradise Lost was an essential component of a child's education, but it also suggests the ways in which adults of that time were unsettled by the poem. Written in the context of the Romantic fascination with Milton, Bradburn's text demonstrates Milton's complex roles for these readers as cultural icon, educator, and heretic. The Story of Paradise Lost, For Children reflects two nineteenth-century perspectives: the epic as good medicine that needs only to be made palatable for young minds, and the epic as a dangerously tempting drug that requires the mediation of adult explication.

The first perspective relies on the nineteenth-century commonplace that Paradise Lost is a literary text of central importance and a source of pleasure and a treasure trove for children. As Thomas De Quincey wrote in 1839, John Milton "is not an author amongst authors, not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers; and the 'Paradise Lost' is not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces" (777). Thomas Keightley focused on the child's interaction with this cultural icon with his comment that "the reading of Paradise Lost for the first time forms or should form, an era in the life of every one possessed of taste and poetic feeling. . . . [Since childhood] the poetry of Milton has formed my constant study,—a source of delight in prosperity, of strength and consolation in adversity" (Nelson 3-4). Writers including Thomas Cooper and Sara Coleridge emphasized the importance of their childhood readings of Paradise Lost (Nelson 5; Cruse 11). Emily Shore listed hearing the first installment of Paradise Lost as a reason to feel "very much pleased" with her governess (Cockshut 384).

The renowned actress Sarah Siddons claimed that at the age of ten "she used to pore over 'Paradise Lost' for hours together" (Campbell 20). After her retirement from the theater she continued giving readings from Milton both in public and in her home, and her lifelong interest in Milton's poetry culminated with the publication, in 1822, of An Abridgement of Paradise Lost. The preface to Siddons's abridgment reveals that she was motivated to produce this volume not simply by her own pleasure in Milton's text but also by the educational potential Paradise Lost offered the interested young reader. She wrote, "A taste for the sublime and beautiful is an approach to virtue; and I was naturally desirous that [children's] minds should be inspired with an early admiration of Milton. The perfection of his immortal Poem is seldom appreciated by the young; and its perusal is, perhaps, very generally regarded rather as a duty than a pleasure. This has been attributed by Dr. Johnson to the want of human interest" (iii, emphasis in original). Her solution was to select the passages "which relate to the fate of our first parents" and to remove "every thing, however exquisite in its kind, which did not immediately bear upon their affecting and important story" (iii-iv). In keeping with the ideals of Romanticism, Siddons linked "sublimity" with...