Milton and the Literary Workhouse

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Milton's relation to seventeenth-century disciplinary institutions such as William Petty's proposed “literary worke-houses” and England's houses of correction. Milton's Of Education and Areopagitica are compared with Petty's ideas in the context of educational subcommittees in the Hartlib Circle to illustrate a shared emphasis on projects such as vocational language learning. The article then turns to Samson Agonistes and the “common workhouse” whose representation the poem repudiates. While arguing that Samson Agonistes might be understood partly as a personal response to the punishment of Milton's student and reader Thomas Ellwood in London's original house of correction, Bridewell prison, the article also detects a more abstract, Miltonic indictment of the abuses made possible by institutionalized power. A final consideration of the Errata and Omissa of the 1671 Poems helps to reveal Samson Agonistes's ingenious commentary on both the corrupted uses of institutional discipline and the possibilities for resistance imagined by a literary correction.