John Wilkes—the flawed Crusader for liberty

Contemporary Review, Winter, 2006 by Richard A. Gaunt

John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. Arthur H. Cash. Yale University Press. [pounds sterling]20.00. xiii 482pp. ISBN 0-300-10871-0.

John Wilkes (1726-97) occupies a prominent place in the history of English political radicalism. His defence of the freedom of the press, of the right of electors to return the candidate of their choice and of the ability to publish parliamentary debates, earned him the reputation of being 'a friend of liberty'. With his prognathous jaw, poor teeth and squinting right eye, Wilkes had un-heroic, not to say repulsive, physical characteristics which gave caricaturists such as Hogarth a ready-made object of ridicule. However, the inventive range of commemorative commodities which were adorned with Wilkes's image provided invaluable publicity for his campaigns and made him one of the most eminently recognisable personalities of his age. Wilkes's correspondents and social circle included, at one time or another, most of the leading luminaries of the English and European Enlightenment. His prominent support for the American colonists garnered him admiring friends on both sides of the Atlantic. Modern America remembers him, amongst other things, through Wilkes County, North Carolina and (with less pleasurable connotations) as the collateral ancestor of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.

The importance of Wilkes's personality and campaigns is explored in loving detail in this scholarly and subtle new biography. Though written with an eye to the amorphous 'general audience of well-read, intelligent people' rather than the university academic, it is a book which no fair-minded historian of the period will find cause to regret reading. Cash writes with authority, insight and an admirable sense of clarity. An American scholar, writing for an American University Press, Mr Cash takes the admirable line of explaining, for the benefit of his readers, those terms, expressions, conventions and geographical venues which British writers sometimes take for granted in their audiences (a rare and surprising confusion is to mistake Tom Paine's Rights of Man for his clarion-call to America, Common Sense). However, it is regrettable that the book is marketed on the somewhat tabloid-like basis justified by Wilkes's private life.

Whilst Professor Cash is keener than most to stress those facets of Wilkes's biography, the book's sub-title actually does a disservice to his generally judicious treatment of it. Wilkes's belief in 'liberty' in every sense of the word is, in any case, hardly news. Many of Wilkes's supporters could happily dissociate themselves from his personal standards of morality whilst valuing his benefit in political terms. Much of what Wilkes fought had a personal resonance--driven by the need for money, social respectability or political service--but also conformed to principles which he was unwilling to compromise. The personal and the political combined in ways which actually redounded to Wilkes's credit and he ended his days with 'profit, patronage, and extensive usefulness' as the City Chamberlain of London, having gained the guarded respect and esteem of no less a personage than George III.