William Makepeace Thackeray first came to the general public’s attention with a series of humorous articles in Punch magazine, entitled “The Snobs of England, by one of themselves.” In these articles, Thackeray sought to satirize the behavior of the upper classes and those flunkeys who fawned over them.

At a time when English society was changing and when wealth was becoming more important in some quarters than class, Thackeray sought to mock what he saw as the unhealthy obsession among too many of his fellow Englishmen with rank and position. Such “flunkeyism” as he called it was positively degrading and had no place in a society where the deferential principle was no longer as strong as it had been only a quarter of a century earlier. Thackeray’s Punch essays can, therefore, be seen as a reflection of a marked societal trend in the early years of Victorian Britain.

Miltonic inversions, as displayed throughout Paradise Lost, involves inverting natural word order for effect. The most obvious example would be Milton’s description of Hell as “darkness visible”. The normal word order would be “visible darkness,” but Milton inverts this order because he wants to emphasize the darkness of hell rather than its visibility.

Another example of Miltonic inversion in Paradise Lost comes in book 3, when God greets Jesus as “Son beloved,” not “Beloved Son,” as one might expect. Again, this alerts us to which particular quality is being emphasized. In this case, it’s Christ’s being a son that matters here rather than his being beloved.