Epiloguesurrogate. In Great Expectations Dickens presents Pip’s fall as a bourgeois parody of
Adam’s, both of them “fondly overcome with Female charm”; the novel ends with
Pip and Estella reprising Adam and Eve as they leave a wrecked garden with hands
joined.
Nineteenth-century Americans related readily to Milton’s theology and politics
as well as to his poetry, sensing, as R. W. Griswold declared in 1846, that “Milton
is more emphatically American than any other author who has lived in the United
States.”^5 New England Unitarians were pleased to find Arianism and Arminianism
in Milton’s newly recovered De Doctrina Christiana, William Ellery Channing pro-
claiming him a great saint and an inspired master spirit. New England Transcen-
dentalists encountered him through Coleridge and other English Romantics, but
also directly. Emerson cited and paraphrased Milton’s comments on poetic inspira-
tion in The Reason of Church-government, and proclaimed Milton “the sublimest bard
of all,”^6 a judgment based on his belief that all of Milton’s poetry is a version of his
own heroic life of bravery, purity, temperance, toil, self-reliance, and devotion.
Honoring especially his defense of the individual conscience in Areopagitica, Emerson
termed him an “apostle of freedom” in the house, in the state, in the church, and in
the press, asserting categorically that “no man can be named whose mind still acts
on the cultivated intellect of England and America with an energy comparable to
that of Milton.”^7 Emerson identified with Milton the prophet, and took the title of
his poem Uriel from Milton’s angel of the sun, conjoining in that figure Satan’s
rebelliousness and Uriel’s devotion to truth. Margaret Fuller, who read Milton at
fourteen and identified her own ambition with his, thought Milton’s prose works
deserve to be studied beyond any other English prose for the exemplar figure they
reveal: “If Milton be not absolutely the greatest of human beings, it is hard to name
one who combines so many features of God’s own image, ideal goodness, a life of
spotless nature, heroic endeavor and constancy, with such richness of gifts.” Like
Griswold she thought him a peculiarly American spirit, who “understood the na-
ture of liberty, of justice – what is required for the unimpeded action of conscience,
what constitutes true marriage, and the scope of manly education.”^8 During the
buildup to the American Civil War Paradise Lost supplied rhetorical force to denun-
ciations of the Southern revolt, which Edward Everett in an oration at Gettysburg
likened to “that first foul revolt of ‘the Infernal Serpent.’ ”^9 And Lincoln, reading
the first books of Paradise Lost, was reportedly struck “by the coincidences between
the utterances of Satan and those of Jefferson Davis.”^10
In his short story Rappacini’s Daughter Hawthorne presents a dark version of
Milton’s Eden, in which a father creates a beautiful garden whose fruit poisons his
daughter and her poisoned body infects her lover. In his epic novel Moby Dick
Melville invests in Captain Ahab the indomitable will and obsession with revenge
of Milton’s Satan, and embodies in his white whale Satan’s (or God’s) titanic strength
and seeming cosmic malevolence. Throughout the novel the issues foregrounded
are those at the core of Milton’s epic, debated fruitlessly by his fallen angels, and