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The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty
Yale University Press
February 2006
Featuring: John Wilkes
496 pages
ISBN: 0300108710
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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