John Leonard. Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970

John Leonard. Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xviii + 853 pp. + 6 illus. $299.00. Review by ELIZABETH SKERPAN-WHEELER, TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY. At the beginning of his massive undertaking, John Leonard quotes Milton, who declared in The Reason of Church Government his ambition to leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die. In this engaging study, Leonard constructs a deep acknowledgement of the readers, scholars, and critics who kept Paradise Lost alive for its first 303 years. As he explains at the outset, his aim has been to write a book where readers can trace specific arguments from beginning to end without being sidetracked (viii). In pursuit of this goal, Leonard presents extended bibliographical essay, covering nine critical debates in eleven chapters (and two volumes). Limiting himself to prose works of literary criticism written in English (ix), he presents each debate with a critical eye, providing his own perspective and comment along the way. The result is a persuasive demonstration of the reasons why the industry, as the historian Christopher Hill once called it, was and continues to be highly productive. The nine debates focus on epic style (in three chapters), the genre of epic, epic similes, Satan, God, innocence, the Fall, sex and the sexes, and Milton's universe. Each chapter includes prefatory remarks and chronologically presented subsections, divided by dominant theme. Chapters 4 through 11 also have formal conclusions. Through these chapters, Leonard marks the origins of some of the major moments in Milton scholarship, from the first comparison of Milton's style to organ music (editor Daniel Webb in 1762) to the Controversy of the first half of the twentieth century, which Leonard refigures as a rebellion against Victorian interpretations of Paradise Lost. Leonard also devotes serious attention to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women readers of Milton, and identifies several breakthroughs in interpretation, such as C. S. Lewis's distinction between primary and secondary epic (1942) and James Whaler's introduction of the term homologation (1931) to describe the character of Milton's similes, a perception that inaugurated the understanding of Paradise Lost as an astonishingly coherent poem (354). Of all of these well-presented chapters, the eleventh--The Universe--stands out. It tells the story of a major false trail in Milton scholarship and its consequences up to the present day for our understanding of Milton's intellect and knowledge. As Leonard demonstrates, from Thomas Newton's edition of Paradise Lost in 1749 to the Modern Library edition in 2007, most writers on the subject have assumed that Milton's universe was Ptolemaic. Many have reproduced David Masson's 1874 diagrams derived from a 1610 edition of the thirteenth-century De Sphaera of Sacrobosco, giving powerful visual sanction to the idea. The assumption rests on only three lines of the poem: lines 481-83 of Book 3. These are the ones that describe persons who became friars on their deathbeds passing through the spheres. Noting that in 1734 the Jonathan Richardsons, father and son, read the lines as part of extended satire, Leonard explains his overall intent in the chapter: Much of my effort will be devoted to stripping away the encrustation of three centuries of scholarship to recover Milton's true universe from under all the layers of commentary (707). …