John Wilkes dominated politics in Britain during an especially contentious part of George III's reign. A scandalous private life and a face seemingly designed for the delight of caricaturists joined with Wilkes's gift for self-promotion to keep him in the public eye. Arthur H. Cash, a retired literature professor and specialist on Laurence Sterne, argues that Wilkes played a central part in establishing civil liberties in eighteenth-century Britain, especially freedom of the press and debate. A series of confrontations with the government of the day sparked legal cases that ended with precedents that both limited executive authority and secured the right of expression.

Wilkes came from an upwardly mobile family of Dissenters with a socially ambitious father who gave his son an education that made him a man of letters. An unfortunate early marriage that ended with estrangement gave Wilkes the consolation of a devoted daughter and a position among the Buckinghamshire gentry. Cash declines to speculate whether a reaction to his Presbyterian upbringing made Wilkes into a gentleman libertine, but he distinguishes Wilkes's behavior as a gentleman libertine from the wilder actions of a rake as the term was then understood. Wilkes's education, public service, and status identified him as a gentleman rather than a merchant or tradesman. He entered Parliament as an ally of William Pitt and the Grenvilles in July 1757 after serving as a justice of the peace and a militia officer. Although bad teeth and the deformity of his jaw limited Wilkes's capacity for oratory, he acquired a reputation as a wit that reached beyond his fellow libertines.

Writing for the North Briton with the aim of driving Lord Bute from office and returning Pitt in his place brought Wilkes to prominence. Attacks on Bute's ministry first brought replies in print followed by efforts to bribe him into desisting with the lure of office. Prosecution was a last resort when No. 45 of the North Briton offended George III deeply, and the government issued a general warrant against the authors, printers, and publishers of that “seditious and treasonable paper” (101). General warrants named the offense without specifying those charged, leaving authorities free to decide whom they would address. Forty-nine people were arrested under the warrant, and the case brought countersuits that established rights to privacy and to sue the government for false arrest. Lord Mansfield, who detested Wilkes and opposed him politically, ruled general warrants illegal in a 1764 case from the arrest. Earlier that year Wilkes had fled into exile to avoid prosecutions for libel following from his Essay on Woman, and his failure to appear for sentencing led him to be declared an outlaw.

Rather than hide in foreign exile, Wilkes capitalized on his fame by standing for election as MP for Middlesex. As an outlaw, the government ruled him ineligible for election despite the large majority he had polled. Exclusion started a struggle between the Middlesex freeholders and the ministry over freedom of election. Wilkes accepted the Commons's right to eject a member where it rules for itself alone but rejected the idea that it could deny freeholders the right to choose a representative through incapacitation. Cash cites the views of Josef Redlich and Francis Hirst that Wilkes's election and rejection between 1768 and 1790 marked “the beginning of the democratic movement” (213). Wilkes's election as a London alderman and brief exclusion from the office repeated the Middlesex controversy in a minor key and gave him another platform. Others in England and America embraced Wilkes as a symbol of popular resistance to executive power. Lord North allowed Wilkes to take his seat for Middlesex, effectively conceding a point confirmed when the Commons expunged Wilkes's exclusion from its proceedings. Wilkes's position as a London alderman enabled him to challenge the prohibition of reporting parliamentary debates in 1771 by protecting the men who had published them from arrest for breaching the privilege of the House of Commons. His intervention brought delay rather than a clear ruling on the point. But when the order for their arrest for breach of privilege lapsed, Parliament realized that the prohibition could not be sustained and conceded the point.

These confrontations set important precedents, but Cash may give Wilkes more credit than he merits. Public opinion had already become a major and accepted force before Wilkes's career began, and eighteenth-century political culture accepted robust debate. Government attempts to limit debate in Sir Robert Walpole's day only went so far, and the growing influence of the London and provincial press created its own dynamic that made restrictions increasingly difficult to enforce. Censorship might have found justification in the face of an external threat, but no such challenge existed between Jacobitism's collapse and the revolutionary challenge of the 1790s. Wilkes's efforts thus pushed at an open door.

Cash states that he wrote Wilkes's biography for “a general audience of well-read, intelligent people” (395) and that, while hoping that scholars will approve it, he did not keep them in mind while writing it. His well-written and engaging book makes little claim to originality but tells its story well with lively anecdotes that capture the sense of the age. Cash recovers the past and sets Wilkes's life in the context of eighteenth-century culture. These merits highlight other limitations. Cash does link his story with the recent debates about the nature and meaning of radicalism, and it draws on older views of political culture during George III's reign that historians have qualified. Although Wilkes's later career turned away from radicalism as a consequence of the Gordon Riots and French Revolution, Cash hints at a fundamental continuity in his views that might be explored in more depth. How could a radical turn loyalist? Since that question arises with several late eighteenth-century figures besides Wilkes and also touches on the meaning of radicalism before the early nineteenth century, it deserves more attention than it receives. Nonetheless, Cash provides a good starting point for understanding “that devil Wilkes” and his place in eighteenth-century political culture.