Hardy and Milton

Hardy was well read in Milton: this is clear from his frequent quotation from and allusion to him, as well as from the markings and annotations in his own copy of Milton, preserved in the Dorset County Museum. His allusions to him start early, and interestingly, in his first published novel, Desperate Remedies — interestingly, because they are allusions to ‘Lycidas’ (the ‘Fame is the spur’ passage, and the earlier one in which the ambitious young shepherd-poet scorning delights and living laborious days wonders whether he would not after all be better off sporting with Amaryllis in the shade along with his fellows) which, although applied to the novel’s hero Edward Springrove, seem equally relevant to the novel’s author, making his first bid for fame but worried also by problems of love and finance. Thereafter there are the apt quotations from time to time within the novels. But it is in Hardy’s later works — in Tess of the d’Urbevilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Dynasts — that the presence of Milton is felt most strongly. If one speculates as to why this should be — why Hardy should become so markedly Miltonic at this particular stage of his career — I think the answer may be that as his plans for writing his epic-drama The Dynasts took definite shape (from the late 1880s onwards), he came to see himself as challenging the succession from Milton, and thus to make a careful re-reading of him.