Pointing to Wordsworth’s comment more than 200 years ago that “Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. / England hath need of thee”, a charity has launched an “urgent” appeal to the public to help it preserve the 16th-century Buckinghamshire cottage where John Milton completed Paradise Lost, 350 years ago.
The radical poet lived in the Chalfont St Giles cottage after he fled London during the 1665 plague. Although he remained there for less than two years, it was where he completed his masterpiece, Paradise Lost. The cottage is the only surviving residence of the poet and is open to the public as a museum. It holds a leading collection of first editions, as well as a lock of the poet’s hair, and an original proclamation from King Charles II, banning his books. According to the charity, it is the second-oldest writer’s home museum in the world after Shakespeare’s birthplace. Without a much-needed injection of cash, however, the museum risks closure.
As the 350th anniversary of the publication of Paradise Lost approaches (Milton’s publisher, Samuel Simmons, registered the copyright for the epic poem about Satan’s war with heaven with Stationers’ Hall on 20 August 1667), the independent charity the Milton Cottage Trust has just been awarded a Heritage Endowments grant of £250,000. That means the Heritage Lottery Fund will match every donation from the public up to that figure. In total, the charity is looking to raise a total of £3.5m to protect the museum’s future in perpetuity.
“We are thrilled the Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting our Paradise Maintain’d Endowment Fund. However, to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime match-funding offer, we need public donations in the first place,” said trust chair Simon Avery. “The trust is able to cover running costs until December 2018 but, to ensure we remain open to the public after that, new sources of funding must be found.”
Avery said that recent years had already seen fundraising for essential repairs to the roof and fabric of the building. “It is only a matter of time, however, before this 16th-century timber-framed cottage will need further work and it is essential for us to build funds for future repairs. Our historically important, Grade I-listed outbuildings are in urgent need of repair,” he said. “We have greatly increased our collection of important first editions of Milton’s work in recent years – but this now increases our responsibility to ensure they can be properly preserved within a Grade I farmworker’s building not designed with document preservation in mind.”
The cottage was originally purchased on behalf of the nation in the 19th century, following a public appeal to prevent it being dismantled and moved to America. Its first subscriber was Queen Victoria, who gave £20 in 1887.
Avery called Milton “one of the most radical and influential thinkers Britain has ever seen”, saying that he “wrote at a time when Britain was in the midst of an identity crisis; concerns about the state of the nation; institutions out of touch with the general public ... Sound familiar?” asked Avery.
“His vast range of written work continues to be as relevant, from Areopagitica – his iconic defence of the freedom of the press – to his radical divorce tracts. Wordsworth’s famous 1802 quote, ‘Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. / England hath need of thee’, is as true now as it was then.”
The 350th anniversary of Paradise Lost is also being marked on Sunday with a marathon reading of the poem in the cottage. In total, 350 people will perform the 10,000-odd line poem, over 11 hours, from local residents to fans from around the UK. Those wishing to take part can turn up on the day, or register online.
Paradise Lost counts among its fans, names from Martin Freeman to Malcolm X, and Andrew Marvell to Philip Pullman. In Pullman’s introduction to a 2005 edition of the poem, the author called it “the central story of our lives, the story that more than any other tells us what it means to be human. But however many times it is told in the future, and however many different interpretations are made of it, I don’t think that the version created by Milton, blind and ageing, out of political favour, dictating it day by day to his daughter, will ever be surpassed.”
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