"We are never far from courtship, money, and the law in this narrative, whose central protagonist might have come out of a novel from the period, a brilliant scoundrel who both rises and falls in the social hierarchy."—Charles Baxter, author of Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature
"Sephardic Jew, husband of an aristocrat, militant radical, charismatic broker and blackmailer, prolific intellectual, John King had a colorful life. Scriverner frankly confronts his occasionally unethical pursuits—fraud apostasy, blackmail—but highlights his courage, astute judgement, intellectual range, resilience and resistance to social injustice."—Judith Thompson, Dalhousie University
"Its scope is comprehensive, its research prodigious, and its discoveries startling. Scrivener fully engages with all of the diverse dimensions of King’s life—as money broker, radical pamphleteer, sexual profligate, grifter, parvenu, and defender of Judaism.”"—Todd M. Endelman, professor emeritus of history and Judaic studies, University of Michigan
"John King’s remarkable biography not only recounts the winding, fascinating tale of an eighteenth-century Jewish self-made man and adventurer, but also offers a unique, groundbreaking perspective on British Jewry. Reads like a page-turning novel, it is the story of a North African immigrant’s son who journeyed from an orphanage to become a gentleman and intellectual."—Shmuel Feiner, chairman of the Historical Society of Israel
"Michael Scrivener’s impressive archival mastery of the history and literature of these complex concerns has yielded a work of both massive erudition and refined subtlety. This is the first monograph about King, and it will substantially change the way we think about late Georgian Britain."—Karen Weisman, author of Singing in a Foreign Land: Anglo-Jewish Poetry, 1812–1847
Description
The son of a Sephardic North African peddler, John “Jew” King did not have the background commonly associated with an English gentleman. A political radical who married into Irish aristocracy, King found himself close to some of Georgian England’s historically notable figures, such as Mary “Perdita” Robinson, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and leaders of the London Corresponding Society and the Irish independence movement. His love of aristocratic display jostled with his fierce anti-aristocratic republicanism and was further complicated by his well-known criminal enterprises, libertinism, and unethical relationships with women.
Rogue Intellectual examines the plentiful contradictions of John King to tell the story of the first Anglo-Jewish public intellectual who wrote on topics not exclusively Jewish but from a Jewish point of view. King’s radical writings synthesized ideas from European enlightenment as well as political and cultural revolutions in America, France, Ireland, and London. Scrivener’s engaging biography traces the impact of King’s writing, even as he was forced into prison and exile, only to return as the epitome of someone who defies labels.
About the Author
Michael Scrivener is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780–1840: After Shylock, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832, Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing, and Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
6 x 9, 322 pages, 7 black and white illustrations
March 2027