Type: Exhibition catalog

Name: John Milton and the Cultures of Print: An Exhibition of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Artifacts

Detail: Published by Rutgers University Libraries in conjunction with the exhibition opening.

Type: Exhibition section

Name: IX. The Restoration: Censorship and Paradise Lost

Detail: THE RESTORATION -- CENSORSHIP AND PARADISE LOST: Paradise Lost (1667) was Milton’s first venture into print after the Royal Proclamation, his arrest, and the public burning of his works in 1660. In order to reenter the public world of print, Milton returned to a family business that had published several political tracts – including Eikonoklastes, one of the banned books. Still, as one early biographer relates, censorship threatened to suppress publication: “we had like to be eternally depriv’d of this Treasure by the Ignorance or Malace of the Licenser, who, among other frivolous Exceptions, would needs suppress the whole Poem for imaginary Treason in the following lines: As when the Sun new ris’n / Looks through the Horizontal misty Air / Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon / In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds / On half the Nations, and with fear of change / Perplexes Monarchs.” (Paradise Lost, I, 594-9) We do not know what other “Exceptions” were taken or allowed, but Milton’s manuscripts continued to be challenged by licenser.

Type: Exhibition caption

Name: Milton, The Manuscript of Paradise Lost, Book One. Edited by Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931)

Detail: Milton sold the manuscript for Paradise Lost, probably this very fair copy now at the Morgan Library in New York, for £5 to Samuel Simmons. He was promised another £5 if the first edition of 1300 to 1500 copies sold out. The printer probably preserved the first book to prove to any inquiring authorities that it had an imprimatur. It is the only surviving manuscript of Paradise Lost, and it is not the manuscript that was produced by dictation. A great deal of care obviously went into producing this copy for the printer, as five recognizably different hands made small corrections. Even so, the 798 lines of manuscript differ from the printed text in over a thousand places, suggesting that the printer may have made further changes, or that Milton and his team of assistants intervened at the printing stage as well.