Paradise Finding Aids

Abstract

Discusses early verbal indices or concordances to Paradise Lost, especially the expanding series in the editions printed by Jacob Tonson from 1695 to 1711, frequently reprinted in later eighteenth-century editions, and Alexander Cruden’s concordance published in 1741. Examining these indexes not only illuminates “the habits of reading involved in making and using them” but also “can disclose structures in the poem that we have perhaps forgotten how to see, and even throw our contemporary critical practices into relief.” Tonson’s 1695 “Table” of generic ingredients, expanded into the subject “Index” of 1711, was composed mainly of descriptions (which disappear as a separate heading), “underscore[ing] how a finding aid can enlist the print codex to circumvent the epic’s basic ordering principle: the story”; instead, the index “processes epic into something like lyric.” Employing book and line numbers rather than page numbers, Alexander Cruden’s 1741 Verbal Index to Milton’s Paradise Lost assumes that Paradise Lost, “like the Bible, had achieved enormous market penetration: the verbal index was designed for readers already equipped with copies in scores of different editions.” Thus “the verbal index helped Paradise Lost not only enter the lexicon,” as it “allowed readers to make the poem’s language their own,” but also helped to “define the lexicon through its pivotal role in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.”