Cash is a literary scholar of eminence, and the attention he brought to his editorial treatment of Wilkes's Essay on Woman is here usefully directed to Wilkes's life. Too often, however, Cash's respect for his subject is as much hindrance as help. In an afterword, the author denies that his biographical effort is definitive, but the text suggests otherwise, so closely does it follow its man. Chronology dominates narrative histories; in Wilkes, nearly every grain in the hourglass is distinguishable. Such minute care can be self-defeating, and several times Cash loses his footing in the quicksand of detail. Aristocratic genealogy and protocol are especially troublesome: the earl of Sandwich is suddenly and counterfactually elevated to a dukedom (33); the common practice by which heirs to the peerage took courtesy titles is regarded as pretentious (146), when of course it was no more pretentious than claiming any noble title; Lord North, prime minister during the American Revolution, is misidentified (146 and in the index)—his Christian name was "Frederick," not "George." Given the pattern, one is not so surprised to find Cash referring to one of the outstanding authorities on the eighteenth-century upper classes and their politics as "Louis" Namier (275). These mistakes would matter less if Cash's analytical framework were more robust, but he makes no attempt to do what the uncited Linda Colley (another Yale University Press author as well as a Namier biographer) has done with Wilkes and his contemporaries in Britons: turn particular stories inside out until they reveal something about the national and imperial culture.

     Subscribers to this journal will want some discussion of the relationship between personality and law; something of the sort is promised by the subtitle. Cash is sensitive to the power of the Wilkes myth, but one must still read John Brewer's Party Ideology and Popular Politics to learn how thoroughly that myth and its ideological contents were commodified by the ambitious (yet frustrated) middling sort in Britain and British-America. Cash provides rich descriptions of the major cases and causes to which Wilkes was party, but dedicated students of the history of civil liberties will know that Zenger's acquittal could not set a precedent in Westminster if it failed to do so in New York. The standard interpretation of libel law persisted on both sides of the Atlantic for decades. And students of jurisprudence will once again be saddened by Lord Mansfield's historical infirmity: his papers having been destroyed in the Gordon Riots, he cannot now speak for himself. In Cash's work, he plays a familiar role, that of the cunning foil, but Cash nevertheless deserves credit for bringing us closer to Mansfield's devilish adversary, who could, upon measuring the main chance, rouse a mob or face it down.

     Wilkes did the latter during the Gordon episode, and, if he could not save everything (and the fate of the Bank of England worried him much more than the disposition of Mansfield's library), his actions in 1780 enriched a legend that was and is more lustrous for being tarnished. Liberal and conservative, gentleman and rogue, idealist and hustler: John Wilkes is important exactly because his impulses were ambivalent and impure. He was, among other things, a better representative: of the people, of history, and of the Anglo-American constitutional process, wherein principles are distilled from a mash of accidents and originally idiosyncratic litigations. Readers of Cash's devoted biography cannot help but have a deeper appreciation for this marvelous fellow and his legacy.