BIOGRAPHY

R ICHARD B OSTON

A LIBERTINE & LIBERTY

J OHN W ILKES : T HE S CANDALOUS F ATHER OF C IVIL L IBERTY

★By Arthur H Cash (Yale University Press 448pp £20)

I N N EWCASTLEONE day in 1768 forty-five gentlemen sat down at forty-five minutes past one with forty-five gills of wine and forty-five new-laid eggs. At forty-five minutes past two they began a meal of five courses, each of which had nine dishes, making forty-five. The sirloin of beef weighed forty-five pounds… and so on. At the same time in markets throughout the country the number forty-five appeared on such objects for sale as buttons, buckles, brooches, snuff-boxes and mugs. The cause of all this excitement was No 45 of the North Briton, the editor and author of which, John Wilkes MP, had been sent to the Tower. As celebrated as the number forty-five was the figure of Wilkes himself. According to his son-in-law, ‘In china, in bronze, or in marble, he stood upon the chimney-piece of half the houses of the metropolis’. It was just as well that in those days there were no tee-shirts for his likeness to be printed on, for John Wilkes was not a pretty sight. He was dreadfully cross-eyed, and his lower jaw projected to the point of deformity. His teeth dropped out before he reached middle age, so that the tips of chin and nose almost met. His lisp became so pronounced (if that’s the word) that listeners found difficulty in following what he was saying. This made him a poor performer in the House of Commons in an era that included orators of the stature of Pitt, Burke and Sheridan. Wilkes got round this by having his speeches printed and distributed outside Parliament. He was almost proud of his ugliness. Boswell (a close friend) found that Italian newspapers called Wilkes Il Bruto Inglese, which he interpreted as the English Brutus. Wilkes corrected him: it meant ‘the ugly Englishman’. Wilkes boasted that he needed only twenty minutes ‘to talk away my face’ (sometimes he reduced the claim to ten minutes). What he lacked in looks he made up for abundantly with sheer charm. He was always cheerful, and he was witty and had impeccable manners –a powerful combination. Boswell engineered a meeting between Wilkes and Dr Johnson, who was a political antagonist. After a sticky start, Wilkes (in well under his self-allotted twenty minutes) had Johnson literally eating out of his hand. Boswell records that Mr Wilkes placed himself next to Dr Johnson, and behaved to him with so much attention and politeness,

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006