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The Disinterment of Milton's Remains
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In 1790 a gruesome incident occurred in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, which incidentally affords evidence as to the reputation of Milton in the late eighteenth century. A body, thought to be that of the poet, was disinterred and for two days despoiled outrageously by souvenir-hunters. The question whether the body was or was not that of Milton was much disputed at the time and has remained unsettled ever since. Masson does not so much as allude to the affair and its discreditable and distasteful character has resulted in a glozing suppression of truth.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1930
References
1 Even in his inviting section “Posthumous Miltoniana”; The Life of John Milton. ..., London, 1859–1880, VI, 733–840.
2 A narrative of the disinterment of Milton's coffin, in the Parish-Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, on Wednesday, 4th of August, 1790; and of the treatment of the corpse, during that, and the following day, London, Printed for T. and J. Egerton, Whitehall, 1790. Signed on p. 34, Philip Neve. Furnival's Inn, 14th of August, 1790. Sold for one shilling. A second edition soon appeared with a postscript, making 50 pages in all, dated 8th of September, 1790. This pamphlet, kindly called to my attention by my colleague Professor Bergen Evans, was the starting-point of this paper.
3 Cursory Remarks on Some of the Ancient English Poets, particularly Milton, anonymous, London, 1789, 146 pp.; two hundred copies privately printed for distribution to friends; favorably reviewed; quotation from p. 141.
4 Sept. 2 to Sept. 4, 1790, “MILTON. Reasons why it is improbable that the Coffin lately dug up in the Parish Church of St. Giles Cripplegate, should contain the Reliques of Milton.” A column and a third on the front page.
5 The English Chronicle and Universal Evening Post, Sept. 2 to Sept. 4, 1790, p. 4b.
6 Ibid., Sept. 4 to Sept. 7, 1790, p. 3c. Another item on the pawning of Milton's teeth is in ibid., p. 2d.
7 St. James's Chronicle, Sept. 7 to Sept. 9, 1790, p. 4c. Reprinted in The Public Advertiser, Sept. 10, 1790, p. 3a.
8 Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 & 1696, ed. Clark, Oxford, 1898, II, 66, 67.
9 Comedian of the Royalty Theatre, who also was seen to “take a rib-bone, and carry it away in a paper under his coat,” recovered by Neve. He was “a very ingenious worker-in-hair” and went back a second time, unrewarded, to get more.
10 The argument about color of hair is further vitiated by an item like this, which appeared in The English Chronicle and Universal Evening Post, Sept. 7 to Sept. 9, 1790, p. 3d: “There is scarce a Jew pedlar that has not some of poor Milton's hair for sale. The head of the poet must have vegetated a great variety of hair, and of various colours, as the Public are alternately presented in the street, with grey, black, red, and auburn hair; each of which they are solemnly assured, is real and genuine.”
11 Two locks have gone to America, according to Dr. G. C. Williamson, The Outlook, April 15, 1922, p. 299, as quoted by Heinrich Mutschmann, “The secret of John Milton,” p. 13, Acta et commentationes Universitatis Dorpatensis, B VIII 2, Dorpat, 1925. Of the one sold at Sotheby's, the catalog description reads (sale of 1st-8th May, 1913, lot no. 1370): “A silver shell-shaped Reliquary, with centry double-glazed case, containing a Lock of John Milton's Hair, and a Lock of Hair of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and engraved inscriptions: Milton's Hair the gift of Leigh Hunt in a Reliquary given by K. de K. Bronson to Robert Browning on one side, and on the other E. B. B. to R. B. Nov. 29, 1845; with silk ribbon attached.”
12 Edmund Blunden, Leigh Hunt. A Biography, London, 1930, pp. 368–373.
13 “The Wishing-Cap, No. 1,” in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, II (Jan. 1833), 439, 440.
14 A variant account, in a more uncertain tone, was written by Leigh Hunt years later in a letter to Robert Browning, begun Dec. 31, 1856, with the relevant part in the postscript, written Jan. 10, 1857. The letter was for a long time misplaced, but when it came to light Browning had it printed in The Athenœum, July 7, 1883, pp. 15–18. It seems out of character for Dr. Johnson to have cherished a lock of Milton's hair, and Hunt's attitude is shown in the sentence (p. 18): “I accepted it, as I think you will do, with a trusting as well as a willing faith.”
15 Keats refers to the lock which he saw at Leigh Hunt's, as he says in the letter to Bailey dated Jan. 23, 1818, in which the poem first appears: “I was at Hunt's the other day, and he surprised me with a real authenticated lock of Milton's hair.” H. Buxton Forman in his edition The Complete Works of John Keats, 1901, IV 61, note, says that the pedigree of the lock is “not sufficiently authoritative to satisfy a rigid regard for the ordinary laws of evidence,” although it was enough for “the faith of the imaginative Keats.”
16 The English Chronicle and Universal Evening Post, August 24 to August 26, 1790, p. 3a; heading, “Milton. Mr Editor.”
17 Note that this hair was not found in the coffin, but was “recovered”—any hair, that is, which the men wished to bring back.
18 XVIII (Sept., 1790), 205–207.
19 Ellis, the player, had (p. 22) “a small quantity of hair, with which was a piece of the shroud, and, adhering to the hair, a bit of the skin of the skull, of about the size of a shilling.”
20 Dated Sept. 4th, 1790, to Bishop Thomas Percy, printed by J. B. Nichols, Illustrations of the Lit. Hist. of the XVIIIth Cent., London, 1848, VII, 516, 517.
21 LX, part 2, No. 195 (Sept. 1790), p. 837. Vide also the notices in The Critical Review: or Annals of Literature, LXX (Sept., 1790), 343, and in The Monthly Review or Literary Journal, enlarged, 2nd Ser., III (Nov., 1790), 350.
22 The editor makes a point that the hair was six inches long; but since the usual portrayal is that Milton wore his hair short around his forehead and long at the back, falling over his shoulders, a lock of his hair could be of any length, depending on the place from which it was taken.
23 Sept. 4 to 7, 1790, p. 4c, a third of a column, perhaps also by Stevens, who at one time owned a share in St. James's Chronicle. A résumé of the arguments by Neve himself appeared in The Public Advertiser, Sept. 3, 1790, p. 3ab.
24 A barefaced deception perpetrated by Steevens, in which he faked a gravestone of Canute and allowed Samuel Pegge to read a paper on it before the Antiquarians' Society.
25 The English Chronicle and Universal Evening Post, Aug. 5 to 7, 1790, p. 2a. Idem in The London Chronicle, Aug. 5 to 7, 1790, p. 130b. A similar item, the one that attracted Neve's attention, appeared in The Public Advertiser, Aug. 7, 1790, p. 3b.
26 The English Chronicle ..., Sept. 18 to 21, 1790, p. 4b.
27 The Town and Country Magazine, or Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment, XXII, (Oct., 1790) 467, 468; entitled “Milton and his Remains”; signed “A Whig.”
28 Written in August, 1790; first published by Hayley in 1803; and found in all his collected works. For the relationship of Cowper to Milton, see Raymond D. Havens, The influence of Milton on English Poetry, Cambridge, 1922, pp. 160–176, which has the phrase, “the supposed disinterment of Milton's body” (p. 163).
29 They quote from one another that Neve's pamphlet is “an account of what appeared on opening his coffin.” Note, however, the edition by Robert Bell, 1854 (III, 160): “The disgraceful outrage alluded to took place on the 3rd and 4th of August, 1790, during the progress of some repairs in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate .... Mr. Philip Neve, of Furnival's Inn, who published an account of the transaction, was strongly convinced that the body was that of Milton, although the hair and other circumstances favored the opinion that it was the body of a woman.”
30 The Public Advertizer, Sept. 16, 1790, p. 1cd. Reprinted in J. Debrett, Asylum for Fugitive Pieces, 1795, IV, 123–125, as quoted (in full) by John Walter Good, Studies in the Milton Tradition, Univ. of Illinois studies in language and literature, I, Nos. 3 and 4 (1915), 101, 102. Cf. pp. 275, 276.
31 Paradise Lost. A poem in twelve books. The author John Milton .... [Edition] by Capei Lofft, Bury St. Edmund's, 1792, p. xxx. Only the first book published.
32 Henry John Todd, Some Account of the Life and Writings of John Milton, 1801, 2nd ed. (used by me), 1809, pp. 139, 140. (In ed. of 1826, pp. 218–220.)
33 These notes were written in, or accompanied, a copy of Neve's pamphlet, as shown by Lowndes' Manual, III, 1661: “Bindley, pt. iv, 260, G. Steevens's copy, with MS. notes, clearly proving it was not Milton's coffin.” Lowndes remarks about Neve's Narrative itself: “This narrative was immediately and ably answered in the St. James's Chronicle.” This James Bindley, the noted antiquarian (1737–1818), supplied much fresh information to Charles Symmons (see next paragraph) for his second edition of the Prose Works of Milton, yet no fresh information on the disinterment; therefore Steevens' notes must have been mere repetitions of the assertions in the St. James's Chronicle.
34 Charles Symmons, The Prose Works of John Milton; with a Life of the Author .... in seven volumes, London, 1806, VII, 503, footnote sic. Idem in second ed., 1810, pp. 569–570. Cf. the direct admission by church officials (see note 16 above) that their surgeon declared the body to be that of a male.
35 The Works of John Milton, ed. J. Mitford, London, 1851, I, cxxv, note 8.
36 Corrie Leonard Thompson, “John Milton's Bones,” 7th series, IX, 361–354 (May 10, 1890), with slight comments in later numbers which led me to the references in this paragraph. No mention is made of the incident in the official history of the church, J. J. Baddeley, An Account of the Church and Parish of St. Giles, without Cripplegate, in the City of London, 1888, 220 pp.; nor in W. Denton, Records of St. Giles' Cripplegate, 1883, 205 pp.
37 Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, London, 1847, I, 102, 103. (In the 3rd ed., 1857, p. 67.)
38 Shakespeare's bones. The proposal to disinter them, considered in relation to their possible bearing on his portraiture: illustrated by instances of visits of the living to the dead, London, 1883, 48 pp. With regard to the remains of Shakespeare he says (p. 31): “in the year 1796, the supposed grave was actually broken into, in the course of digging a vault in its immediate proximity,” and “it would never astonish me to learn that Shakespeare's skull had been abstracted!” The fullest account of the 1796 episode is to be found in J. O. Halliwell-Phillips, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (Brighton, ptv. pr., 1881, pp. 88, 89); and the reader will recall the story in Washington Irving's Sketch Book, “Stratford-on-Avon.” George Steevens said (St. James's Chronicle, Sept. 2 to 4, 1790): “Shakespeare most fortunately reposes at a secure distance from the paws of Messieurs Laming and Fountain [perpetrators of the Milton outrage], who, otherwise, might have provoked the vengeance imprecated by our great dramatick Poet on the removers of his bones.”
39 Eighteenth Century Waifs, London, 1887, pp. 55–82, with other material, but almost no comment.
40 Notes and Queries, Ser. 1, V, 369 (April 17, 1852).