10 - Paradise Finding Aids

Summary

While today we might wonder what the purpose of an index or concordance to Paradise Lost could be, their eighteenth-century creators seem to have considered it too obvious to bother explaining. “It would be Time lost to speak of the Use of such Indexes as these,” claims the preface to one such document; and after exhaustively cataloguing every appearance of almost every word in the poem the compiler must not have had another moment to spare. Rather than identify the point of his labors, he simply points to it as if self-evident—indexically, as it were.

The point of supplementing Paradise Lost with finding aids must have been clear to the poem's most influential editors as well. The title page of Jacob Tonson's sixth edition of the poem in 1695 advertised a “Table to the POEM, never before Printed” in addition to Patrick Hume's “Notes.” The table's three lists of “Descriptions, Similes, and Speeches” and where to find them was expanded in the 1711 eighth edition to a full-scale subject index. It is hard to find an edition of the poem, even pirated, without this index over the following decades (including Bentley's 1732 “emended” version), and at no point did editors or publishers feel compelled to justify its inclusion. In 1741, a standalone “verbal index” or concordance (the terms were then interchangeable) appeared, with the short preface quoted above.

Thomas Newton's definitive edition of the poem in 1749 reprints both the 1711 and 1741 finding aids, but for reasons he, too, pointedly passes over. “The man, who is at the pains of making indexes, is really to be pitied; but of their great utility there is no need to say any thing,” he writes, “when several persons, who pass in the world for profound scholars, know little more of books than title-pages and indexes, but never catch the spirit of an author, which is sure always to evaporate or die in such hands.” Newton's condescension for index compilers and users alike makes “great utility” ring more or less sarcastic; far from telling us what these reference works are intended for, he leaves us wondering what would compel an editor to include documents that he so disdains. For Newton, explaining the function of an index seems not just pointless but tasteless, like extending an invitation to enter the book, in Swift’s double entendre, “by the Back-Door.”