The political afterlife of Paradise Lost

Orlando Reade shows how Milton ’s great epic has been dug up and dismembered.

He shows how its pieces have been repurposed in often contradictory ways.

To William Blake , Milton celebrated prelapsarian innocence.

To Max Weber he was describing the origins of capitalism.

To Virginia Woolf , he was the epitome of high seriousness.

Reade traces Milton ’s influence on subsequent canonical authors, but this book is not primarily about literary history.

He notes that Milton introduces the theme early, when Beelzebub asks why God hasn’t killed all the rebel angels, and concludes it is so that they can “do him mightier service as his thralls” The angels-turned-devils are slaves, doing God's “errands in the gloomy deep”.

Orlando Reade was a volunteer teacher on a programme for incarcerated students working towards a BA .

The password to Paradise Lost was one Milton announces in his very first line.

He was nervous, afraid of his students’ contempt and afraid of failing them.