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  • William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century
  • Jason Taliadoros
Prest, Wilfrid, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008; hardback; pp. xvii, 355; 4 b/w illustrations, 18 colour plates; R.R.P. AU$61.95, £29.99; ISBN 9780199550296.

The Commentaries on the Laws of England that first appeared in four volumes between 1765 and 1768 (and never out of print since) arguably represents one of the greatest textbooks on the English common law. Despite this, their author Sir William Blackstone, has been relatively neglected by historians and biographers: the man himself remains largely a mystery. Professor Wilfrid Prest’s scholarship has rectified this in a series of articles, a 2006 edition [End Page 263] of Blackstone’s letters, and now this definitive biography. Prest’s principal achievements have been both to contextualize Blackstone’s life and works in the social, intellectual, and political milieu of eighteenth-century England and to bring to bear from the disparate archives almost every relevant primary source material. In a work of exacting scholarship and refined prose, Prest provides a chronological survey and assessment of the life and activities of Blackstone. In doing so, he has laid the foundations for all further study of matters Blackstonian.

‘A Young Man of Brilliant Parts’ (Chapter 2), Blackstone excelled in the literary arts, as well as Greek and Latin, at London’s Charterhouse School. And ‘notwithstanding the diminished educational and moral reputation of Oxford’ (p. 26) at the time, in 1738 at fifteen he entered Pembroke College to prepare for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. But once ‘[r]emoved to the University’ (Chapter 3) he abandoned this for the study of civil (or Roman) law eighteen months later. A further eighteen months later in late 1741, he was admitted as a student of the Middle Temple, then a means of progression to legal practice on the completion of five years’ standing there. In 1743, he was elected as a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, graduating with the BCL in 1745.

On Prest’s account, it is from this time that Blackstone divided his residency ‘[b]etween the University and the Temple’ (Chapter 4). Although he initially took up chambers at the Inns of Court in London until he was admitted to practise as a barrister in late 1746, he thereafter resided principally at All Souls. This no doubt explains why, in the period 1744 to 1753, Blackstone saw few legal briefs come his way in the London courts. Further, Prest notes that this period coincided with him ‘[a]dvancing the Interests of the College’ (Chapter 5) in a zealous pursuit of administrative matters. His reformist tendencies, rewarding merit at the expense of privilege, is a chapter hitherto little known in Blackstone’s life and remarkable in the eighteenth-century context. On taking his Doctorate in Laws in 1750, Blackstone’s activities now involved the ‘General Benefit of the University at Large’ (Chapter 6). This took the form of his continuing engagement in university administrative and legal matters and, for the first time, a course of lectures at Oxford on the common law. At this stage, he quit the London Bar to focus on the possibility of academic employment at Oxford.

Blackstone and his Commentaries have perhaps never fully recovered from Jeremy Bentham’s famous attack in 1776: ‘Bentham’s Blackstone replaced the conscientious and upright scholar, judge, and public man with an even more two-dimensional caricature; that of failed barrister turned stodgy Tory academic and confused textbook apologist for the British constitution [End Page 264] and unreformed common law’ (p. 9). Prest’s account provides a careful and nuanced corrective to this view.

Jason Taliadoros
School of Law
Deakin University
...

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