Frank Kermode's classic assessment of young Milton as “his father's chief investment” was more prescient than historically accurate. Prescient, I mean, of the now common critical tenet that the scrivener's investment yielded a poet who still produces spiritual profit – by entrapping sinful readers and inculcating standard Protestant doctrine. The description of Milton senior as a “ruthless” businessman, however, simply does not bear scrutiny. Also problematic, as noted last chapter, is the common assumption that he ruled his family according to a Protestant ethic that allegedly prevailed on young Milton's native Bread Street. The notion of a Protestant ethic makes better sense when applied to the late seventeenth (post-1688) and eighteenth centuries, the period from which most of Weber's evidence derives. It was then that values like those for which Milton and his contemporaries risked their lives had become imbued with a certain complacency: less intensely spiritual, more secular, in short, constituent of the dominant ideology. Yet the dubious bit of Miltonic biography prospers.

This chapter ultimately will ask what the common representation of this father–son relationship says about us.