John Milton

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Standard Name: Milton, John

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Birth Anne Grant
As a girl she wished for a little sister whom she could teach to enjoy Milton .
Grant, Anne. Memoirs of an American Lady. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808.
2: 153
Cultural formation Lucy Hutton
She was born into the English professional class: its upper ranks, if the motto on her published title-page is a family one. As befitting her marriage to a clergyman, she was a strong member of...
Cultural formation Ephelia
If this was Ephelia, she grew up in an extremely wealthy, noble family and an incomparably privileged environment, with King James I her honorary grandfather as well as her godfather, and with fine literature produced...
Cultural formation Frances Arabella Rowden
FAR came from the English middle class. She was an Anglican in religion. Mary Russell Mitford represents her as a young teacher taking a relaxed attitude to religious ideas in literary contexts (her students were...
Dedications Hannah Cowley
One early performance drew bigger crowds than Drury Lane, although the rival theatre that night featured Sarah Siddons on stage and the king and queen in the audience. More Ways Than One was published on...
Education Sheila Kaye-Smith
Sheila was educated at Hastings, at St Leonard's Ladies' College (almost next-door to her home), from 1896 to 1905. Like many large private schools of the time, this one educated its pupils to eighteen...
Education Janet Hamilton
She attributed her power of language and ability for composition to reading the works of good authors,
Hamilton, Janet. Poems, Essays, and Sketches. James Maclehose, 1870.
viii
and modelling her style on theirs. She remembered reading the Bible and children's half-penny books before she...
Education Maria Riddell
The future MR was in all probability privately educated. At sixteen she wrote a poem to commemorate the pleasure of reading with a friend the works of Milton , Pope , Spenser , Shakespeare ...
Education Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore
As a girl, Mary Eleanor Bowes received an excellent education and could speak several languages, reading French and Italian authors in the original. It was said that she did not learn Latin, but also that...
Education Anne Marsh
At probably four years old AM read Anna Letitia Barbauld 's Lessons for Children (a composite title for her various books for the very young). With her reader Anne Caldwell, Barbauld achieved her aim of...
Education Lydia Maria Child
At fifteen she read Paradise Lost (with her brother's encouragement) and was delighted with its grandeur and sublimity, but was bold enough to criticise Milton for assert[ing] the superiority of his own sex in rather...
Education Anne Ridler
She lived in a King's College hostel in Queensborough Terrace near Hyde Park,London. The course included lectures on history and literature. The distinguished scholar Jack Isaacs lectured on Shakespeare , Donne , and Milton
Education Anna Swanwick
At home her mother had read to her daughters, while they sewed, Greek and Roman history, and writers like Pope , and Cowper . At four Anna could recite long passages from Milton 's L'Allegro...
Education Anne Grant
Of her childhood, AG wrote that she developed early powers of imagination and memory, but received little attention: no one fondled or caressed me . . . I did not till the sixth year of...
Education Elizabeth Inchbald
In the early 1780s she was reading such challenging authors as Milton , Plato , Plutarch , and Aristotle .
Manvell, Roger. Elizabeth Inchbald: England’s Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent Woman of Letters in 18th Century London. University Press of America, 1987.
29

Timeline

8 November 1623
Shakespeare 's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, collected (with one or two omissions) and posthumously published this year in a handsome large-format edition (the First Folio) were registered with the Stationers' Company .
Christmas Day 1629
John Milton finished his odeOn the morning of Christ's Nativity. It was his first religious poem in English.
29 September 1634
Milton 's masque later known as Comus was performed at Ludlow Castle with music by Henry Lawes , to mark the installation of Lord Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales.
Late 1638
Milton 's pastoralelegyLycidas appeared in a volume of Cambridge poems published in memory of Edward King , who had died by drowning.
By 31 May 1641
Milton entered (anonymously) the ideological battle surrounding episcopacy (government of the Church of England by bishops) with the first of his five anti-prelatical pamphlets, Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England.
1 August 1643
Milton published The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, a pamphlet arguing that divorce ought to be easier (for a husband).
23 November 1644
John Milton published Areopagitica, which has become one of his most famous prose tracts because of its subject-matter: a condemnation of censorship, or (stretching its original position slightly) even a defence of freedom of speech.
2 January 1646
According to collector George Thomason , this was the publication date of Poems of Mr. John Milton , both English and Latin. Compos'd at several times, which was dated 1645. It included the paired...
13 February 1649
Following the king 's execution, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, a pamphlet designed to enforce the general point that a tyrant may be lawfully got rid of.
3 March 1660
Milton published The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, a pamphlet designed to sway public opinion against the restoration either of the monarchy or of rule by any single individual.
October 1667
John Milton published his epicpoemParadise Lost, which he had begun dictating before the Restoration and entered in the Stationers' Register in August.
May 1671
John Milton published, together, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes: a small-scale religious epic and a blank-verse tragedy.
November 1681
John Dryden published his political satireAbsalom and Achitophel, at Charles II 's personal suggestion, just a week before the first Earl of Shaftesbury 's trial for treason.
By late 1697
John Dryden published by subscription his versetranslation of Virgil 's Works; it was the first time a literary work by a living author had been published by this means.
20 May 1707
Jacob Tonson the elder signed the first of two copyright agreements giving him sole right in Shakespeare 's plays.

Texts

Campbell, Gordon, and John Milton. “Introduction and Notes”. The Complete Poems, edited by Bernard Arker Wright and Bernard Arker Wright, New Edition, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1980, p. xv - xxix, passim.
Milton, John. Lament for Damon. Translator Waddell, Helen, Privately printed, 1943.
Milton, John. “Paradise Lost (1667)”. University of Virginia Library: Electronic Text Center, Scolar Press.
Milton, John. Poems. Editor Wright, Bernard Arker, J. M. Dent; E. P. Dutton, 1959.