23 NOVEMBER 1644

Milton fights for free speech

The writer publishes Areopagitica - a blistering attack on government censorship

In the autumn of 1644, civil war was raging in England. More than a year earlier, parliament had passed a Licensing Order insisting that all publications must be registered with the government, and giving itself the power to destroy offensive books and imprison their authors.

But on 23 November, one of parliament’s greatest champions published a blistering attack on the principle of censorship. Not yet the author of John Milton was a half-blind private schoolmaster. But the idea of licensing books, he wrote, was “a dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning”. For “if we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectifie manners”, he wrote sternly, “we