John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty - Hardcover

Cash, Arthur

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300108710 ISBN 13: 9780300108712

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2006

Synopsis

One of the most colorful figures in English political history, John Wilkes (1726–97) is remembered as the father of the British free press, defender of civil and political liberties, and hero to American colonists, who attended closely to his outspoken endorsements of liberty. Wilkes’s political career was rancorous, involving duels, imprisonments in the Tower of London, and the Massacre of St. George’s Fields in which seven of his supporters were shot to death by government troops. He was equally famous for his “private” life—a confessed libertine, a member of the notorious Hellfire Club, and the author of what has been called the dirtiest poem in the English language.

This lively biography draws a full portrait of John Wilkes from his childhood days through his heyday as a journalist and agitator, his defiance of government prosecutions for libel and obscenity, his fight against exclusion from Parliament, and his service as lord mayor of London on the eve of the American Revolution. Told here with the force and immediacy of a firsthand newspaper account, Wilkes’s own remarkable story is inseparable from the larger story of modern civil liberties and how they came to fruition.

About this title

About the Author

Arthur H. Cash is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of English, State University of New York at New Paltz, and biographer of Laurence Sterne.

Reviews

Wilkes is known to political historians as a radical bad boy of eighteenth-century Britain, and to literary historians for a cameo appearance in Boswell's life of Johnson. (Tricked into dining with the radical Wilkes, the arch-Tory Johnson found common ground in good food, Latin verse, and jokes about the Scots.) But Cash makes a persuasive case for Wilkes as central to Enlightenment England—and, indeed, to the American Revolution, whose ideas he helped inspire. Famous for his loose living, he turns out to be not the demagogic opportunist of the reactionary imagination but a philosophical democrat with articulate convictions about free speech and political equality. In the process of establishing Wilkes as genuinely heroic, Cash suggests new ways of thinking about the strange relationship between the practice of eighteenth-century libertinism and the birth of modern liberty.
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The toast of American revolutionaries, John Wilkes (1726-97) has been described by historian Gordon Wood as "one of the most colorful demagogues in English history." Author Cash is less backhanded in his admiration for a radical associated with a free press, universal manhood suffrage, and fair elections. His comprehensive biography is loaded with incident and quotation that Wilkes provoked over his lengthy presence on the British political stage. As Cash chronicles, Wilkes' notoriety developed slowly: he entered the House of Commons as a supporter of William Pitt, and when Pitt went into opposition in 1762, Wilkes backed him. King George III countered by prosecuting Wilkes for seditious libel, and the rest is quite colorful history. Not only are trials, prison, exile, and political comeback on offer; Cash also details Wilkes' reputation as a libertine who dumped his wife, kept courtesans, composed bawdy screeds, and stiffed his creditors. Cash almost converses with his reader while restoring interest and controversy to this relatively obscure but significant figure in the expansion of liberty. Gilbert Taylor
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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300108710
• ISBN 13: 9780300108712
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496