I’m finishing up my last few reviews from my first classics club list and this was my project read in 2019! I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get around to writing about it since my friend Liz and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it together. Like all good books it led to some brilliant discussions and to our reading Frankenstein, which I think is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Born in 1608 to a prosperous family John Milton was educated in Paris and Cambridge and was fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew as well as French and Italian. He visited Galileo in Florence in 1638 and saw the moon through his telescope and was a staunch supporter of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians during the English civil war. But his life was marred by sorrow. In 1652 he became completely blind and his wife and daughter died followed by his son. He married again but another daughter died followed in 1658 by his second wife Katherine and Oliver Cromwell, which led to the disintegration of the republic. In 1660, when the crown was restored to Charles II Milton was imprisoned for treason.

In Paradise Lost Milton draws on all this experience. When he began writing in 1658 he was in deep mourning so that when he begins by saying that he’s going to ‘justify the ways of God to men.’ I think he must be trying to justify the ways of God to himself. Having to dictate the poem to his daughters and friends, he invokes the classic Greek tradition of conjuring the spirit of blind prophets Tiresias and Phineus and calls on Urania, muse of astronomy to inspire him. His epic poem is fabulously visual in its descriptions and language but also in its imagination, of Paradise and Pandaemonium and also at the wonders of space; ‘every star perhaps a world of destined habitation.’

At the end of the 18th century Robert Walton is a young man inspired to travel by reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and writes home to tell his sister about his adventures. But on July 31st a strange thing happens when they become stranded by ice and fog and see a man of gigantic stature on a sledge guided by dogs. The next day they find another sledge being driven by an emaciated man and take him on board. Over the following days as his health improves Victor Frankenstein tells Robert the story of his life so far.

This prosaic structure is so wonderfully everyday and sets the story so firmly on home ground that it adds a chilling factor to an already frightening and exciting tale that at its heart is about abandonment and loneliness.