The Life of Thomas Ellwood, Volume 1

Thomas Ellwood’s autobiography is one of the great personal narratives of the seventeenth century — disarmingly honest, often funny, and quietly profound. Ellwood was the son of a country gentleman, educated for a respectable life, who encountered the Quaker movement in his early twenties and found his world turned upside down. His father, appalled, threw him out of the house. His social circle abandoned him. His own inner life was convulsed. What followed was a series of imprisonments, conflicts, and eventually a settled life of Quaker service that brought him into contact with some of the most remarkable figures of his age.

The most famous episode in Ellwood’s life is his service as reader and amanuensis to John Milton after the great poet lost his sight. It was Ellwood who, having read the manuscript of Paradise Lost, asked Milton: “Thou hast said much of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?” Milton’s answer was Paradise Regained. But Ellwood’s relationship with Milton is only one strand of an autobiography that ranges widely across Quaker history: his close friendship with Isaac Penington and his wife Mary, his role in editing George Fox’s Journal after Fox’s death, and his own sustained writing career. This edition of the autobiography presents Ellwood’s complete text in clear modern English, with notes to help readers follow the dense web of historical reference.