Digging Up Milton
London in the hot summer of 1790, and Elizabeth Grant has the unlikely occupation of being both wife to a rather put-upon and older legal clerical officer, Nathaniel, and a part-time gravedigger in her parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate. Elizabeth, aged 25, is an orphan but finds happiness with her gentle and refined husband. The story centres on the discovery of the remains of John Milton in St. Giles’s church. Elizabeth, or Lizzie, is involved in this exciting finding, but matters quickly get out of hand when there is a scramble to take parts of his body as “relics”. Elizabeth is involved in this nefarious activity and moves on to trying to sell parts of the corpse to interested collectors. When a Milton scholar, Philip Neve, hears about this desecration, he publishes pamphlets revealing this defilement, and Lizzie is in trouble with her pious husband, who also wrestles with his own guilt.
The essential plot is based upon actual events, and Neve did write his reports of the robbery of Milton’s grave. This is an engaging story that is narrated capably. It develops the character of Elizabeth well, focusing on the struggles and uncertainties of an impoverished married female, by no means a vulnerable ingénue. But, without giving too much of the plot away, there is a twist at the end of the tale which surprises the reader, but also makes retrospective and rather unsettling sense of some of the nagging inconsistencies of Lizzie’s explanation of the events.
