At once a caustic rake, libertarian reformer, and notorious Parliamentarian whose rallying cry “John Wilkes or Liberty!” was used to justify excessive disenfranchisement by British officials in the American colonies, the career of John Wilkes precedes in the annals of posterity as a radical response to England’s Enlightenment-age aristocratic elite. Among other important laws and protestations, Wilkes also holds the dubious honor of co-writing the pornographic parody poem An Essay on Woman, which in 1763 exposed the full and disparaging reaches of libel and obscenity.
London’s Obscene Literary Underground
In London, England, in the late 18th century it was not uncommon to find printed "obscenity" in the back galleries and hidden rooms of the streets’ and suburbs’ many bookshops. Sometimes crude, but more often refined, these often misogynistic "low-brow" publications usually held in contempt some political figure or civil authority, commonly equating their public persona with some unseemly sexual deviancy (buggery, auto-eroticism, sexual addiction) or scornfully prudish behavior or sexual impotence. John Wilkes’ place in this politically expedient and erotic subgenre, however, is distinct for the furor it brought against him by the British government.
John Wilkes and Thomas Potter’s An Essay on Woman
Sometime in 1755, John Wilkes, together with fellow rake and son of the Archbishop of Cantebury, Thomas Potter (c. 1718-1759), composed a bawdy set of parodied Alexander Pope poems entitled An Essay on Woman, a satirical imitation of Pope’s An Essay on Man. One of the targets of the overtly sexual poems was Dr. William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucestor, a well-known, if not pedantic, bishop and man-of-letters who in 1751 published a series of commentaries on Pope’s poems marked by sophomoric dissection and sententiousness. Wilkes’ long-term rival, fellow Parliamentarian John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, is also referenced unflatteringly. The original poems (which to this day copies are concealed in the Royal Library, uncatalogued) take liberties by altering every line of Pope’s poetic essay on art and philosophy with an incendiary sexual description. For example, where Alexander Pope writes
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world
Wilkes and Potter pen
The man just mounting, and the virgin's fall,
Pricks, ****s, and ballocks in convulsions hurled,
And now a hymen burst, and now a world
Wilkes and Potter invariably employ Pope’s metaphors for amusing effect, using Pope’s line
The Lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,
Had he thy Reason, would he skip and play?
and inverting it into
Thy lust the Virgin dooms to bleed today,
Had she thy reason would she skip and play?
Other scansions of indubitably coarse satire are directed personally at the Earl of Bute, charging “Then in the scale of various Pricks, ‘tis plain/ God-like erect, BUTE stands the foremost man.” The overall effect of the poems is a bawdy and mostly lewd poetic missive against the churlish and hypocritical behavior of the contending English elite. Alexander Pope does not seem to be the projection of the poem’s satire--it has been said that Wilkes enjoyed Pope’s work and had met him. As historians have noted, the poems were meant for a close circle of friends, most likely associates known as the “riotous Monks of Medmenham Abbey,” (Winton, 123) recognized synonymously as the Hellfire Club.
Wilkes’ Vindication in Parliament
In April 1763 Wilkes evoked the ire of King George III, and, more specifically, the Jacobite contention of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, with a publication criticizing George III’s speech concerning the Paris Peace Treaty of 1763. Upon his entrance to Parliament, he was charged with seditious libel for his anti-Jacobite smearing which appeared in his “radical” weekly publication, The North Briton. Wilkes was promptly arrested in held in the Tower of London, but upon an appeal of Parliamentary immunity, he was released one week later. Through an unlawful search through Wilkes’ home, however, (under the machinations of former Medmenham associate and Secretary of State, Lord Sandwich) authorities discovered the proofs of Wilkes’ Essay on Woman. A notable feature of the proofs was the cover title page of the poems which displayed an engraving of a large penis superimposed over a ten-inch scale. In November, 1763, the Earl of Sandwich, read portions of the poems during the opening Parliamentary session, notoriously reciting a vulgar passage, “Life can little more supply/ Than just a few good ****s and then we die” to an inflexibly askance Parliament. Deliberations in court proceeded until the following January, 1764, where Parliament, in a bid to charge oust Wilkes from his popular Parliament seat, charged an in absentia Wilkes with both seditious libel and obscene and impious libel. At the this time, Wilkes had fled to Paris and was declared an outlaw.
Wilkes “Radical” Influence
Wilkes returned to England in 1768, vying for a seat on Parliament, and eventually winning for Middlesex. He turned himself into authorities for his previous charges, but served no time, at once turning his popularity and celebrity to champion civil liberties and abuses of governmental authority, making him a sympathetic folk hero to the English people. His so-called “Radicalism” later became a fomenting device for American colonists, as Wilkes himself publicly denounced Britain’s role in the American Revolutionary War. His Essay on Woman continued to find partial reprintings , though expurgated, and has since become an early example of the reductive and often arbitrary nature of obscenity laws.
Selected Bibliography and Sources:
Anonymous, "An Essay on Woman", Everything2 Article.
Robertson, Geoffrey, "Liberty and the libertine: A repulsive, sexually voracious rake who became the champion of our freedom. John Wilkes, we need you now" March 11, 2006. Times Online. Nonfiction Book Reviews.
Winton, Calhoun, "John Wilkes and 'An Essay on Woman', from A Provision of Human Nature: Essays on Fielding and Others in Honor of Miriam Austin Locke. Kay, Donald, ed. University of Alabama Press: 1977. 121-133
 |
 |
