Milton

At twelve, John Milton was so absorbed in study that he scarcely went to bed before midnight. His father, Mark Pattison reports, had the maid stay up for him.

In seventeenth-century London, the future poet grew up above his father’s shop, the Spread Eagle in Cheapside, in a household shaped by music, books and fierce ambition. Writing in the nineteenth century, Pattison follows Milton from St. Paul’s School to Christ’s College, where a young scholar hungry for wisdom chafes against a tutor’s prescribed exercises. The boy’s early verses hint at a calling; his restless appetite for learning reveals a mind already determined to choose its own path. What would happen when Milton’s independence met the authority of college?

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