Paradise Lost and the Youthful Reader

Paradise Lost is not usually considered a children's book today; indeed it often poses problems for modern college students—if they read it at all. And though there is much talk of children and offspring in the poem, no child actually appears as a character. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in fact not many years after the first publication of Paradise Lost in 1667, it was being recommended to young people, edited for them, and, most important, read by them. Young people's editions proliferated in both England and America, and a school text of Paradise Lost was even published in Calcutta in 1844. Not only were editions prepared for the young, but excerpts were included in anthologies, and the poem was cited in grammar and rhetoric texts.

The reasons for this widespread desire to introduce children to Paradise Lost were both religious and aesthetic. As William Sloane reports, in 1710 Joseph Downing included Milton in The Young Christian's Library, a reading list that suggested devotional and didactic reading and just one other poet, George Herbert. Edmund Burke and Richard Baron both recommended Milton to young people, Baron saying, "MILTON in particular ought to be read and studied by all our young Gentlemen as an Oracle" (Havens, p. 27). In America, Benjamin Franklin included Milton among "the best English authors" to be studied in the Sixth class at the Philadelphia Academy (Sensabaugh, p. 36). Several eighteenth-century editions of Milton's work were intended for young people, among them a "Collection of Poems from our most Celebrated English Poets, designed for the Use of Young Gentlemen and Ladies, at Schools" (1717), which "included eighteen selections from the epic," and The Beauties of Milton, Thomson, and Young (1783), for "the rising youth of both sexes" (Havens, p. 25, 26). And Dr. Dodd's Familiar Explanation of the Poetical Works of Milton (1761) appealed "especially to Parents, and those who have the Care of Youth; if they are desirous that their Children and Trusts should be acquainted with the Graces of the British Homer . . . . The fair Sex in particular will receive great Advantages from it" (Havens, p. 25).

School editions of Milton's poetry, and specifically Paradise Lost, continued to be published in the nineteenth century. Stevens' Reference Guide to Milton lists at least twelve nineteenth-century editions of Paradise Lost or selected books of Paradise Lost that are explicitly marked as school texts. Published in England, America, and India, they bear such labels as "For the Use of Schools," "Especially Adapted for Elementary Schools," and "The National School Series." Further, many other editions not so plainly earmarked would clearly have been appropriate for use in schools. As James Buchanan said in 1773 of an edition of the First Six Books of Paradise Lost, rendered into Grammatical Construction,

as it exhibits a view of every thing great in the whole circle of Being, it would (besides greatly improving them [schoolboys] in their own language) wonderfully open the capacity, improve the judgment, elevate the ideas, refine the imagination, and, finally, infuse a just and noble relish for all that is beautiful and great in the Aeneid and Iliad.

(Havens, p. 27)

The implication is that a study of Paradise Lost in English would then lead naturally to the classical epics which preceded it.

Rendering Paradise Lost into grammatical construction seems to have been a favorite use for the poem in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. George F. Sensabaugh says that by the Revolutionary period popular textbooks in America "presented Milton as an authority on the correct and effective use of the English language," thus bringing his work "before a large captive audience" (p. 99). Sensabaugh mentions Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in Philadelphia in 1775, which quotes Milton, and Ralph Harrison's Rudiments of English Grammar (1777; Wilmington, 1788), which draws on Paradise Lost to illustrate the ways poetry and prose differ. And Raymond Dexter Havens comments in a footnote to his discussion of Milton's popularity that "Many Americans now [1922] living learned grammar by parsing Paradise Lost" (p. 26...