Milton in the grave
Milton died shortly after completing his revision of “Paradise Lost,” in 1674, and was buried in the church of St. Giles Cripplegate, in London. In 1790, during a renovation of the church, the grave was dug up, because church elders wanted to pinpoint the exact burial spot so they could erect a monument. The coffin was located and left lying deep in the ground. The next day, a group of curious local men, including a churchwarden, a publican, and a pawnbroker, after a “merry-meeting,” hauled it out of the ground. They prized back the leaden lid, and, carried away by ghoulish irreverent devotion, or simple greed, knocked out Milton’s teeth for souvenirs. They grabbed hanks of his hair, which he had worn down to his shoulders, like Adam, and which came away easily, and snatched what bones they could from under the shroud.
The next day, a gravedigger named Elizabeth Grant, with the aid of workmen who kept the church doors barred to all but those willing to pay the price of a pot of beer, put the remains on display. Order was eventually restored, but the news shocked the country—the poet Cowper wrote a poem about the desecration. Milton was reburied, but, like the torn figure of Osiris in “Areopagitica,” he was incomplete. Still, a man named Philip Neve, who wrote an account of what happened after interviewing the participants, managed to buy up whatever “relics” he could and return them to the coffin before reinterment. Most hauntingly, perhaps, he had managed to recover a rib.
[here]
6 months ago