ABSTRACT
Libertinism of whatever kind offered a challenge to eighteenth-century reformers of male manners. Suffused with the new culture of sensibility, and usually animated by religious zeal, they saw in the home itself, when properly constituted, a compelling alternative to the disreputable resorts of libertine men, and one in which a proper notion of manhood might be redefined.1 As a well-known rake, Wilkes was an obvious target for such a campaign, yet at the same time he posed something of a conundrum for it, because, borrowing the language of sensibility, he insisted that he loved the domestic life. Confounding the assumptions of the reformers, he offered the curious spectacle of the domestic libertine. His admission to James Boswell that he ‘was not too fond of whole families’ qualified his avowed attachment to hearth and home, but far from erased it.2
