ABSTRACT
Concurrently with his political career, Wilkes pursued an active sexual one that he balanced, often precariously, with his domestic existence. Wilkes himself would characterise his sexual libertinism as a refined response to erotic, or benignly ‘natural’, imperatives, but sexual attitudes and conduct, given the intricacy of everything that moulds them, are rarely that simple, and Wilkes’s case was no exception. Of matching complexity were the responses to Wilkes’s sexual activity and persona as reports of these – both factual and fictitious – leaked from the private realm to fuel the hectic debate over his qualities as a public man. The demands of public life would in turn modify his sexual conduct, or at least the way that he and his allies sought to represent it.
