“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–16456
“Domestic or Personal Liberty”
1642–1645
In the Second Defense Milton claims that his treatises on domestic liberty were part
of an overarching, preconceived plan. But that account, written a decade later,
elides the stimulus of occasion, though it retains some hint of Milton’s intensely
personal investment in the issues of divorce and censorship:
I observed that there are, in all, three varieties of liberty without which civilized life is
scarcely possible, namely ecclesiastical liberty, domestic or personal liberty, and civil lib-
erty, and since I had already written about the first, while I saw that the magistrates were
vigorously attending to the third, I took as my province the remaining one, the second or
domestic kind. This too seemed to be concerned with three problems: the nature of
marriage itself, the education of the children, and finally the existence of freedom to
express oneself. Hence I set forth my views of marriage, not only its proper contraction,
but also, if need be, its dissolution.... Concerning this matter then I published several
books, at the very time when man and wife were often bitter foes, he dwelling at home
with their children, she, the mother of the family, in the camp of the enemy, threatening
her husband with death and disaster. Next, in one small volume, I discussed the education
of children, a brief treatment to be sure, but sufficient, as I thought, for those who devote
to the subject the attention it deserves. For nothing can be more efficacious than educa-
tion in moulding the minds of men to virtue (whence arises true and internal liberty), in
governing the state effectively, and preserving it for the longest possible space of time.
Lastly I wrote, on the model of a genuine speech, the Areopagitica, concerning
freedom of the press, that the judgment of truth and falsehood, what should be printed
and what suppressed, ought not to be in the hands of a few men (and these mostly
ignorant and of vulgar discernment) charged with the inspection of books, at whose
will or whim virtually everyone is prevented from publishing aught that surpasses the
understanding of the mob. (CPW IV.1, 624–6)In 1643–5 Milton faced a new polemic challenge: how to make effective use of
painful personal experience. The divorce tracts register something of how he per-