Abstract

In 1830, a man named George Cudmore was executed for poisoning his wife; he was hung and dissected. His skin was tanned and used to bind an 1852 edition of The Poetical Works of John Milton. This article examines Milton’s reception in the mid-nineteenth century through this strange edition of his poetry and asks what such a binding of Milton’s text might reveal about Victorian responses to Milton. I examine accounts of the practice of 'anthropodermic bibliopegy' to show that binding books in tanned human skin is rarely an arbitrary act and explore the interpretative possibilities that the Cudmore Milton makes available when analysed within the context of this practice. How does this material intervention complicate ideas of authorship and ownership? How far does George Cudmore’s name come to overwrite John Milton’s? I build on Lucy Newlyn and Erik Gray’s readings of the nineteenth-century Milton as inherently dual to suggest that the Cudmore Milton shows us both a Victorian Milton of indisputably high cultural value, and one open to disruption and re-interpretation. I argue that it is partly because of Milton’s cultural significance and perceived potency in the nineteenth century that his works are subject to visual and material interventions that in turn unsettle the authority associated with that potency.