Milton and the Victorians

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Erik Gray. Milton and the Victorians. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2009.

Milton's influence on the Victorians has hitherto received surprisingly little attention. Many books and articles have been written on Milton and the Romantics, but only two previous critics - James Nelson in The Sublime Puritan (1963) and Anna K Nardo in George Eliot's Dialogue with Milton (2003) - have written books on Milton's reception by the Victorians. It would be easy to infer that Milton's influence abruptly stopped at about the time De Doctrina Christiana was discovered in 1 823. Gray states the problem succinctly: "By general consensus, at least implicit, Milton's sometimes overwhelming influence …