English Research Seminar Talk: Dr Laura Gill (University of Lincoln) "Another flood, Of tears and sorrow": Milton's Deluge in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Laura Fox Gill is Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln, specialising in Romantic and Victorian literature with a focus on image-text relations and the intermedial influence of John Milton.
Milton's twentieth-century critical reception might be characterised as contentious. This reputational shift can be illustrated by two very different responses to the last two books of Paradise Lost, in which the archangel Michael reveals a vision of the future history of humanity to the newly fallen Adam. In her research, Laura considers what two nineteenth-century writers do with a key moment in Book XI: Adam's vision of the Biblical Deluge.
Mary Shelley's apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) takes its epigraph from Adam's proclamation after he has witnessed the Great Flood: ‘Let no man seek, Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall, Him or his children' (XI.770-72). In perhaps the most famous flood novel of the Victorian period, The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot's engagement with Milton is less overt: Eliot's Mrs Tulliver, in her anxious prophecies of the watery ends of her children, seems not to have learnt from Adam's warning.
Reading Shelley and Eliot together helps us see how both novelists draw on Milton to navigate experiences of familial grief through apocalyptic narratives, and reveals more clearly the cultural impact of the final books of Paradise Lost in the nineteenth century.