Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
L’Allegro, 31-2.As a stray’d Ewe, or to pursue the stealth
Of pilfering Woolf, not all the fleecy wealth
That doth enrich these Downs, is worth a thought
To this my errand, and the care it brought.
Comus, 503-6Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade.
Lycidas, 64-5.A little onward lend thy guiding hand,
To these dark steps, a little furder on.
Samson Agonistes, 1-2.
A Dear John Letter
Reading the opening gambit of the obituary by D J Taylor (The Observer, 14 December 2025) I was reminded of Samuel Johnson’s backhanded treatment of Milton. According to Taylor: “Carey’s take-no-prisoners approach to the business of literary journalism was the distinguishing mark of his early descents on Grub Street. He was anti-elitist, anti-Bloomsbury, anti-anything that, as he saw it, patronised the tastes of ordinary readers or hindered their enjoyment of literature, and capable of wielding his pen like a scythe.” Even Carey’s posthumous Wikipedia page speaks of his “anti-elitist views on high culture.” In the same corseted style, Johnson opened his account of Milton with a serious of negatives:
Milton’s republicanism was, I am afraid, founded on an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful of superiority. He hated monarchs in the State, and prelates in the Church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establish, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to authority.
What did John Carey stand for? What did John Milton love? Merit and liberty would answer the needs of both.
John Carey was a brilliant critic. I learned more reading his reviews than studying the essays or books of other scholars. When Ed Simon asked me to say something about his passing I was on a prescription corticosteroid medication called dexamethasone prior to targeted radiotherapy in order to block the tumour at the base of my skull that was impinging on my hypoglossal nerve, the twelfth cranial nerve, and threatening to enter my brain. On Thursday the 20th of November I was hospitalised with acute brain pain and nausea. A scan showed that the cancer had metastasised to the base of my skull. From then on, I had zero hours sleep on most nights but was pain-free, worry-free, wakeful, creative, feverish, and tripping the light fantastic, thanks to this wolfish, Mr Hyde-bound steroid coiled with amitriptyline and co-codamol. From December 8-12, using deltas and vertices set to one hundredth of a millimetre, a powerful scanner reduced the tumour trying to take over the telephone exchange of my brain sufficiently for me to embark on a second course of chemotherapy, this time palliative cabazitaxel rather than controlling docetaxel. Prior to my chemo commencing on the Monday 29th of December I had a consultation with my oncologist. He showed a scan of my back, black from sacrum to skull. The cancer had gone into my lungs. The chemo would be palliative at best and would run through to the 8th of July if I was lucky. I felt lucky. I would like to be around in June and July to see the 2026 World Cup Finals (ASIDE: I hate the fact that Trump is destroying it as he hates Seattle, Mexico and Canada!) and as well as Scotland, my country of birth, I would like to see the Republic of Ireland if they were to qualify in March (by beating Denmark probably in the playoffs, the team Scotland put out in the qualifiers).My paternal Irish grandfather died in 1929. We have not one solitary photograph of him. He is the reason I now have Irish citizenship and can hopefully support two teams this summer. That would make me happy.
One side effect of dexamethasone, this powerful steroid, was that I could no longer type, because instead of one error per paragraph I had a paragraph with no words capable of being corrected, even by a spellchecker, and I could not dictate to my wife without upsetting her and myself such was my stream of consciousness. I was, as I told her, “awry.” A good Miltonic word. I filled three notebooks with handwritten scrawls that were barely legible even with my considerable palaeographical skills. I was in my head at least having a sunburst finish, an end of life efflorescence, hurtling across the cosmos like a comet, florid at the violet hour. Notes for this piece got mixed up with poems and stories and odd clips of things, some that I deciphered and one that was illegible. It came in the middle of a rant about Walter Enos, whose two tracts of 1646 I had read through after my terminal diagnosis, because I knew they were relevant for Milton’s Observations. After reading Enos – the only early modern scholar I know to have done so – I was worried for him. He didn’t know what was coming with Cromwell. I searched deeper and found he had surfaced in the Hague in the 1650s. I slept easy after that.
When John Carey was eighty-three years old he published a book on Milton’s language and for the first time I was able to engage with his work directly in printed form. I was commissioned to write a review for the Times Higher. I had no idea at the time what Carey’s age was, which reminds me of a Cary Grant story. He received a telegram with four words: “How old Cary Grant?” He wrote back “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?” At that time, the time I reviewed Carey’s book, what impressed me was his distillation of decades of reading into such a short book. My own work-in-progress, provisionally entitled Mapping Milton: Colonialism and Cartography in the Seventeenth Century, did not have a contract, nor did I expect to get one before I completed the manuscript. I spent fifteen years on that book and when I got my diagnosis I began to wonder if it would ever be completed.
You carried me through a difficult period at Cambridge, especially when I realised I had made a mistake in choosing Renaissance Studies, because most of my peers were privately educated and I had no Latin or Greek. What kept me going was actually John Milton, and Milton’s Spenser. Years later I spoke to Bert Hamilton the great Spenser editor and he admitted that for him Milton was primary.
You’re gone now John Carey, but you leave behind a body of work that may not be unsurpassed but which is as vital as it was when you walked upon England’s green and unpleasant land. This “lad o’pairts,” this poor Glasgow boy, follows in your footnotes. A little furder on John, you made me fall in love with reading. Not for you the tug on the sleeve or tap on the shoulder, but a gentle push in the small of the back or the back of the neck. Whenever I saw John Carey on books or arts or culture shows he seemed so media-friendly, not exhibiting that combination of languid and livid that other academics, uncomfortable in front of the camera lens or radio microphone, often assume.
“By merit more than birthright son of God.” This line from Paradise Lost reframes Christ’s rule as service rather than dominance, and this is key to John Milton’s vision as it is to John Carey’s, that other JC. You showed that the so-called higher navvying – a phrase deployed by F. R. Leavis to deride those who pursued an empirical line of inquiry – was a deep digging, an undermining in the spirit of Nietzsche. You gave me the strength to carry on. Yours was an uncloistered virtue and you admired this virtue in others. Yours like Milton’s was a lifetime of commitment to the good old cause. You were a leveller levelling up, courteous, careful, caring. No careerist, you loved to caress words, to close read, not to be cloistered but to carry a world of meaning on your shoulders. Carious, curious, extracting meaning with a corer, Old Nick Caraway’s seed, The Great Gatsby, not through a single window but prismatically, kaleidoscopically, reviewing the situation from above your station. This marvellous man, this Miltonic for the senses. But yet the end is not.
Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th’ Okes and rills,
While the still morn went out with Sandals gray,
He touch’d the tender stops of various Quills,
With eager thought warbling his Dorick lay:
And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew:
Tomorrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.
Lycidas, 86-93
A Whiff of the Negative
In Eikonoklastes (1649) Milton declares, speaking of the royal prerogative, the right of the king to overrule parliament, decries the fact that an elected assembly – however limited – can be silenced by:
the single whiff of a negative, from the mouth of one wilfull man; nay to be blasted, to be struck as mute and motionless as a Parlament of Tapstrie in the Hangings; or else after all thir paines and travell to be dissolv’d, and cast away like so many Naughts in Arithmetick, unless it be to turne the o of thir insignificance into a lamentation with the people, who had so vainly sent them.
I did not always agree with John Carey. The best critics are those we can admire while at the same time disagreeing with them profoundly. His idea that Samson Agonistes is a work in praise of terrorism is not something I could subscribe to, and I would not beg to differ, cap in hand. In an essay published in the Times Literary Supplement on Friday the 6th of September 2002 entitled “A Work in Praise of Terrorism?,” Carey concluded an uncharacteristically shallow engagement with language with these words: “September 11 has changed Samson Agonistes, because it has changed the readings we can derive from it while still celebrating it as an achievement of the human imagination.” I had and have no idea what this means. The word “terrorism” is a trigger term for me. I recalled the lyrics of Joe McDonnell by The Wolfe Tones, a song written by Brian Warfield, released in 1983, dedicated to the eponymous hunger striker:
And you dared to call me a terrorist while you looked down your gun
When I think of all the deeds that you had done
You had plundered many nations, divided many lands
You had terrorized their peoples, you ruled with an iron hand
And you brought this reign of terror to my land.
In 1985 my father spent two nights in a cell after being arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) for selling a paper called Ireland’s War. On Monday August 26th he appeared at Hamilton Sheriff Court accused of committing a breach of the peace in Carfin, Lanarkshire the previous Saturday by repeatedly thrusting documents entitled Ireland’s War at the public and attempting to sell them to their alarm and annoyance, or alternatively a contravention of section 21B of the Prevention of Terrorism Act alleging he carried or displayed such documents to arouse reasonable suspicion that he was a member or supporter of the IRA. Charged under the PTA, this 77-year-old pensioner from a housing scheme in the north of Glasgow was released on bail pending trial, which was set for the 17th of February, 1986. Remember that this happened not in Franco’s Spain, where censorship was rife, but in a country where the title of a Linda and Paul McCartney song – “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” (1972) – couldn’t even be read out on the BBC, yet managed to reach No.1 in Ireland and, ironically, in Spain. A few weeks after his arrest, on Saturday October 5th, 1985, James Maley stood to attention at the unveiling of the memorial to the International Brigades, who fought on the side of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, at the Jubilee Gardens in London, arm-in-arm with his closest comrade-in-arms, his wife Anne.
The absurdity of the accusation and the intervention of several Members of the UK Parliament, across parties, including Labour’s Joan Maynard, led to the specious charges being dropped on the 14th of November 1985. I was in Cambridge adjusting, or failing to adjust, to life at Jesus College, when I heard the news. I cried with anger. My father had been in prison only once before, in 1937, after being captured during the battle of Jarama as part of Machine Gun Company No. 2 of the British Battalion of the International Brigades. He stayed awake all night with eight comrades, half-starved and weary, in one of Franco’s filthy prisons awaiting the Death Wagon. If it tolled for them, they would rush the guards. He came home. I was born thirty-three years later. My father was fifty-two by then. I am my father’s son.
When I was in Cambridge I was never at home. I had never been at home anywhere, with the possible exception of in the library, or in books. I was living like a terrorist in Cambridge, out of a suitcase with no personal effects, and in three years there my pensioner parents never visited once, not even to see me graduate. Only my elder brother, The Manitou, came to see me process, and we never went to lunch with Edward Windsor as requested. Instead, we ate in a fancy French restaurant and shared a bottle of wine with my supervisor Lisa Jardine. We were such republican rebels. At the actual graduation I was tipsy and flustered and scowled at by the senior tutor who had thought it a wonderful wheeze to have the prince and the pauper sit at the same table.
If Carey’s assertion that Samson Agonistes was a terroristic text grated with me, so too did his caustic comments about Margaret Cavendish, a writer whose corpus and critical reception I know well. Royalist, imperialist, feminist, fashionista, scientist, poet, philosopher, novelist, playwright – Margaret Cavendish was certainly a remarkable individual. In 1666 she published one of the earliest sci-fi novels, The Blazing World, basically a counter-revolutionary royalist imperialist revenge fantasy. Virginia Woolf had set the tone for criticism of Cavendish in the twentieth century, insisting that hers was “a vision of loneliness and riot … as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.” Marina Leslie likewise found fault with her pioneering fantasy novel: “Although The Blazing World has been revived and read principally as a feminist utopia, it has not always been legible as either ‘feminist’ or as ‘utopian’”. Only Janet Todd appeared to understand the significance of Cavendish as a female author who engaged with the scientific community and was the first woman to address the Royal Society: “She was not the first woman to publish fictional material, and she was certainly not the first to publish. But she was the first to use published fictions to create a fantastic, wish-fulfilling, compensatory world.”
Unfortunately, John Carey took a line closer to Milton’s than Todd’s, seeing in the novel of “Mad Madge” only a bizarre revenge fantasy. In an entry entitled “The Empress’s New Clothes” in The Faber Book of Utopias, Carey writes:
The Blazing World (1666) by Margaret Cavendish (1623-76) is the first known English utopia written by a woman. It would be encouraging to be able to report that it takes new strides towards humanity and social justice. Alas, the contrary is true. Not only is it tedious and rambling. It also strongly endorses tyranny, aristocratic privilege, opulence, and self-aggrandizement. Cavendish was a noted and flamboyant eccentric. One woman contemporary [Dorothy Osborne] remarked that there were “’many soberer people in Bedlam.’ Though almost wholly uneducated, she was a prolific author, her works encompassing a bizarre medley of philosophy, scientific speculation, oratory, poetry and unactable plays.
John had evidently not read Cavendish’s utopian play about women soldiers and war widows, Bell In Campo (1662), which is very far from unactable and has more meaning today than ever. I felt he was falling back on sexist stereotypes and recycling ad feminem and ad hominem criticisms.
Carey vigorously defended culture and community in a series of works, including The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992), and What Good Are the Arts? (2005). Indeed, the last book of John’s I read prior to the Milton one, what I thought would be his swansong at eighty years around the sun, was The Unexpected Professor (2014). Nobody felt more unexpected, premature, or misbegotten as a professor than I did, so I wondered how this grammar schoolboy who had spent most of his life in Oxford would frame his life. I had thought for some time of writing an essay based on Foucault’s “What is an Author” entitled “What is a Professor?” that would set out the history of that title and its literary and historical representations. In fact, The Unexpected Professor was quite predictable. It reminded me of a book I’d reviewed years earlier, Terry Eagleton’s The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (2001). The Gatekeeper was the story of a successful Oxford Professor of English whose father’s death upon his winning a scholarship cast a shadow over his life and work and gave him the chip on his shoulder that allowed Salford to peer through the gauze of Wadham. Likewise, The Unexpected Professor is a license to regale us with tales of an impoverished childhood never actually lived. It left me cold.
Fortunately, it transpired that The Unexpected Professor was not Carey’s last stand. In 2017 at the age of eighty-three – an age I now know that I’ll never see – he published The Essential Paradise Lost, a slender volume, capacious as a Tardis, that confirmed Carey as one of our craftiest critics and consummate close readers. In my review for the Times Higher I signed off thus: “A teaching text in both senses – pedagogically engaging, steeped in the labour of seminars – The Essential Paradise Lost makes for essential reading: jubilant, sensuous, terrific.” The trio of terms I used were of course Miltonic neologisms. Carey’s last curtain call was, to use another Milton coinage, earthshaking.
My next chemo is scheduled for Wednesday January 21st. I have leukopenia, but my name is not lesion. That particular scan was clear. The tumour has grown, but a flare-up is normal after radiotherapy and chemo, and the MRI was earlier than usual for reasons beyond anyone’s control. I’m on a watch and wait list. I hope I recover sufficiently for this next round of cabazitaxel to go ahead. I expect the unexpected. That is essential.
