Making an exhibition of himself: John Wilkes through visual sources

Conlin, Jonathan (2020) Making an exhibition of himself: John Wilkes through visual sources. In, Grant, Florence and Jordanova, Ludmilla (eds.) Writing Visual Histories. (Writing History) 1st ed. Bloomsbury Academic.

Abstract

The spectacularly controversial career of the journalist and politician John Wilkes (1725-1797) is viewed by historians of Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century as marking the emergence of a "middling rank" in Georgian Britain, along with a concepts of "public opinion," "reform" and a "public sphere". Although certainly outspoken and self-aware, Wilkes was careful to address himself to a range of audiences, however, not simply the "middling." His claim to embody "the sense of the people" (which was not quite the same thing as "public opinion") in his struggle against "ministerial despotism" was hotly contested, in image as well as in word. The range of figures, body parts and literary/historical references exploited in this high-profile struggle ranged from the most basic to the most aesthetically elevated: from the number 45, which Wilkites chalked on everything in sight, including the soles of an Italian ambassador who refused to shout "Wilkes and Liberty!", through snuff-boxes, hankerchiefs and engravings, to Johann Zoffany's 1782 portrait of Wilkes and his daughter, exhibited to the far more select company of a Royal Academy exhibition.
Today's students are surrounded by images and are encouraged by social media to manipulate continuously the constituent elements of a "curated self". When it comes to the technology that makes it possible for an image captured on a cell-phone to appear on a website or be printed onto a t-shirt, however, we are profoundly ignorant. As historians, therefore, it is unsurprising that we tend to lump all historical images together. We thus attribute the same value and authority to, say, Zoffany's portrait painting in oils as we do to William Hogarth's portrait engraving (or, to give a third example, a reproduction of either portrait on a porcelain snuff-box). Even their dimensions are lost, as all are silently adjusted to fit whichever screen we happen to be looking at.
This essay identifies the different techniques employed in producing these representations of Wilkes, describing their attributes, associations and reach. It argues that unless we first perform this task, we risk misinterpreting or simply overlooking all that visual sources have to teach us about very historical issues relating to concepts of civil liberty, public opinion, party politics and ministerial responsibility, as well as notions of masculinity and celebrity.

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Author: Jonathan Conlin

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