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.
Milton, The Manuscript of Paradise Lost, Book One. Edited by Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931)
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.
Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Ten Books (Printed by S. Simmons, and are to be sold by T. Helder at the Angel in Little Brittain, 1669)
Milton's Paradise Lost appeared first in 1667, and it was reissued in the following year with a polemical "Note on the Verse," which was written in response to readers who demanded to know why the epic was written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). The printer, Samuel Simmons, son of the printer who had printed his radical polemical tracts, was unable to sell all the copies of the original print run, so he repackaged the epic with an explanatory note.
Inscription to William Wordsworth, Paradise Lost (1669)
This copy of Paradise Lost seems to have been owned by the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Like many Romantics, Wordsworth was profoundly influenced by Milton. He began his epic experiment The Prelude (final version, 1850) using the words at the end of Paradise Lost.
Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, revised and augmented by the same author (Printed by S. Simmons next door to the Golden Lion in Aldersgate-street, 1674)
For the second edition of Paradise Lost Milton divided the ten books to make twelve, in part to mirror the structure of Virgil's Aeneid. The octavo version appeared in July 1674, and Milton died in November.