By virtue of his Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone continues to occupy an active place in the popular consciousness of the Anglo-American world. Imposing statues of him command the graceful interior of the Codrington Library at Oxford University and the exterior frontage of the United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C. Yet for such a giant in the history of the shared common law of England and the United States, the biographical record has been, until now, surprisingly spare. The 1938 biographies by D. A. Lockmiller and L. C. Warden were based almost entirely on printed sources. Ian Doolittle's slim biography, self-published in 2005, was in tribute to Dame Lucy Sutherland, who collected material on Blackstone that she passed on to Doolittle before her death. Doolittle did not, however, search elsewhere; as he stated, “Only by extensive research in other archives, principally institutional, can Blackstone's activities be traced.” Wilfred Prest has done that extensive research, as is ably shown in this welcome volume.

No collection of Blackstone's personal, family, or professional papers is known to exist. Prest explains that Blackstone's letters (published by Prest as The Letters of Sir William Blackstone 1744–1780, Selden Society, 2005) and other manuscript sources were collected from scattered archives throughout England and America over a period of many years. He points out that neither Lockmiller nor Warden “showed much interest in relating his subject to the cultural, intellectual, and social worlds of mid-eighteenth century England” (2), and this reveals the aim of Prest's book. He seeks to restore Blackstone to his own time, and he does so admirably, despite “gaps and silences” in the documentary record. Those gaps and silences do produce persistent speculation in Prest's narrative, as shown by recurrent phrases such as “it may have been,” “it seems likely,” “it remains possible,” but given the incomplete archival circumstances, this could hardly be avoided. Prest frankly acknowledges that his biography is “in the nature of a work in progress.”

The book is, nonetheless, quite a substantial work in progress. Prest plunges into the social and political milieu of the time, both within the tendentious academic ether of Oxford University and the competitive layers of legal London. We follow young Blackstone as he forsakes his literary aspirations, marking the moment by his famous poem “The Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse,” then during the 1740s shuttling between London and Oxford, making slow progress in the profession at Middle Temple and Westminster Hall while occupying increasingly responsible administrative posts in the University.

The 1750s were extremely productive for Blackstone. In 1752–53 at Oxford he prepared an ambitious course of sixty-five lectures on law. He became a Delegate to the University Press in 1755, after which he immersed himself in the printing and book trades, and by aggressive, tireless effort rescued the Press from almost certain financial ruin. He published in 1756 An Analysis of the Laws of England, which later served as a detailed outline for the Commentaries. He also successfully managed the badly needed modernization of the University's seventeenth-century constitution, and in October 1758, at age thirty-five, he outmaneuvered competing factions to become the first holder of the Vinerian Chair in English Law.

Blackstone resumed his law practice in London in the 1760s, and for this period surviving documentary sources were not accommodating for Prest. He says, in dispirited summary, that “Blackstone apparently managed to obtain a relatively steady flow of different kind of litigious work as a barrister, somewhat more than the occasional brief here and there” (176). The 1760s were, nevertheless, equally as busy for Blackstone as the prior decade. He married Sarah Clitherow, entered Parliament, took silk by virtue of a patent of precedence, and made known his ambition to become a judge. Most importantly, he published to great acclaim the four volumes of his famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, while still actively practicing law in London and traveling to Oxford to continue his law lectures. He also fathered seven of his nine children.

In concluding chapters, Prest sweeps through the last dozen years of Blackstone's life. In 1768, Blackstone was caught up in the outlawry controversy of John Wilkes. In good company with Lord Mansfield, he fell under the “consistently vituperative” pen of Junius; he was engaged by Joseph Priestly and Philip Furneaux on matters of religious toleration; and he was challenged by Granville Sharp about his depiction of slavery in the Commentaries. Prest also describes interesting extracurricular activities by Blackstone, such as the editorial notes he prepared on Shakespeare's plays.

In 1770, at the comparatively young age of forty-seven, Blackstone finally achieved “what he had always wished for,” an appointment to the bench, briefly on Mansfield's Court of King's Bench, then on the Court of Common Pleas. Prest does not examine Blackstone's published judicial opinions in depth, but he gives the highlights, such as Blackstone's famous reversal in the Exchequer Chamber of Mansfield's judgment in the case of Perrin v. Blake. The case involved the construction of a will, the intent of which seemed to Mansfield to be plain as day, prompting him to rule that a venerable precedent, Shelley's Case, did not apply. This was shocking to traditionalists, and Blackstone's opinion of reversal was widely admired. Indeed, the nineteenth-century Lord Chancellor and biographer, John Campbell, observed in a footnote to his work on Mansfield that “Mr. Justice Blackstone's argument on this occasion was so inimitably exquisite, that his reputation as a lawyer depends upon it still more than upon his Commentaries” (Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices (1858), II:433n).

Blackstone died in February 1780 at the age of fifty-six. His extraordinary achievements are now better known to us thanks to Wilfred Prest's painstaking research. In sum, Prest says that Blackstone “delighted in bringing order out of chaos,” he is “credited with founding the common law as an academic subject,” he was seen as a leading representative of the British Enlightenment, and the “momentous consequences” of his Commentaries live on. He achieved these things despite a lack of physical or social grace, an insensitivity to the feelings of others, and a preoccupation with preferment.

Prest reminds us in his conclusion that the aim of his book was “to tell the story of Blackstone's life and work in his own time, while recognizing the Commentaries as still his major claim to fame” (307). In spite of the gaps and silences in the sources, Wilfred Prest accomplished his objective, and did so very well indeed.