Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-Invention of America, 1760–1800 , and: John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (review)

Abstract

Ireland, Philadelphia and Re-Invention of America, 1760-1800. By Maurice J. Brie. (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2008. Pp. xix, 363. Cloth, $65.00.)John Wilkes: Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. By Arthur H. Cash. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 482. Illustrations. Cloth, $37.50.)Reviewed by Andrew ShankmanSome momentous developments occurred during last third of eighteenth century, and John Wilkes was certainly part of them. Arthur Cash has written an enjoyable biography of libertine, civil libertarian, and popular symbol of protest. Cash's treatment seeks to remind those who might have forgotten that Wilkes was eighteenth century's principal champion of free speech and a free press and primary reason for end of general warrants, warrants for arrest that did not need to name parties charged. Cash's book, in part, seeks to explain how a Whig functionary became May 1763 . . . what in English history is called a (118).Cash re-creates bizarre, self-indulgent, and usually scatological circles in which Wilkes was happiest. These circles included leading lords, gentlemen, and cultural luminaries such as Diderot, Dr. Johnson and Boswell, Smollett, Garrick, and Hogarth. One of pleasures of book is to keep track of household and near-household names Wilkes knew. Assuming that readers of J ER know why Wilkes matters - and probably give a lecture about every other year in which liberty-loving colonists eat 45 dishes at public dinners and drink 45 toasts from bowls weighing 45 ounces - let me suggest some thoughts that will also lead to Maurice Bric's treatment of Irish immigrants and radical politics in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia.A bit too often, Cash presents Wilkes as agent of Whiggish progress: Since time of Charles II, he writes, the whole of political activity had been contest for control of state between king and his ministers on one side and privileged gentlemen of Parliament on other. Now common folk had entered into play (162). And Cash quotes with full approval from a 1963 study: The transference of political authority from government and law to people and law may be dated from cases revolving about North (133). In fact, it's more interesting to see Wilkes's escapades hearkening simultaneously forward and backward. To be sure, Wilkes became a symbol for radicals and reformers because subjects of Britain's limited constitutional monarchy expected a great deal more than pre- 1688 subjects did. In addition, eighteenth-century print culture and its robust public sphere provided Wilkes with opportunity to act as something of an independent agent stirring waters to better his position and challenge authority. Wilkes could be Wilkes in large part because of modern opportunities available to private men to speak directly to public and to chase popularity.But Wilkes was also a minor Whig and creature of Pitt/Chatham. Pitt and Wilkes's more immediate patrons, such as Earl Temple, could use him to say things in North Briton that they wanted said, but that were inconvenient for them to say about king and His Majesty's intimates. In starting North Briton, Wilkes operated in a venerable tradition occupied by royal critics such as Elizabethan pamphleteer John Stubbs, who protested Anjou Match on behalf of leading privy councilors. How unique was Wilkes when as far back as 1580s members of Parliament and Lords Mayor of London (a position Wilkes eventually occupied) led, at secret behest of crown advisors, violent protests against embassies of Catholic monarchies? Even Protector Somerset knew advantages of popularity and appeals to angry crowds and tried to deploy some of riots often called Kett's Rebellion to awe rivals at court. Pamphleteers and rowdy crowds were, in complex and not unambiguously edifying ways, part of nobles' and gentlemen's high politics for far longer than Cash allows. …