Book Review – William Blackstone

I started studying law in 1972. I suspect that I was a generation too late to learn anything about William Blackstone as part of my university studies. At the very least, I was a year too late to study Legal History as a compulsory unit of my law degree. As a result, for the bulk of my life, William Blackstone has been an incredibly famous exponent of the law about whom I knew nothing at all. His Commentaries on the Laws of England remained equally famous but untouched by my reading eye. The one shred of information that I had picked up was that the Commentaries was the text book that many judges of the young United States of America carried in their saddle bags as they travelled to far flung outposts to dispense justice.

Wilfrid Prest is Professor Emeritus at Adelaide University. He has been a historian of the law for much of his working life, having published books such as The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts 1590-1640 in 1972 and The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar 1590-1640 in 1986. Having obtained his doctorate as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Professor Prest was well placed to write a biography of Blackstone who was, for much of his life, much more comfortable at that institution than he was as a barrister at the Inns.

William Blackstone was born on 10 July 1723 into the England of George I, the first of the Hanover monarchs of Great Britain.3 Most of his life was lived under George II as king and he saw the first two decades of the reign of George III. Blackstone died on 14 February 1780, a little under four years after the Declaration of Independence but before it was clear in England that the American colonies had been lost. He had been a strong supporter of the British efforts to suppress the rebellion.

Blackstone was the son of a London silk merchant who died five months before William was born. William was a true cockney, being born within earshot of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside. Blackstone’s mother died when William was twelve. Though an orphan, William was assisted by his maternal uncles in particular and he attended the London Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to Pembroke College, one of the smaller of the colleges which made up Oxford University. At first, William was enrolled to study for his Bachelor of Arts degree but after eighteen months, in July 1740, he switched to the degree of Bachelor of Civil (or Roman) Law.4 In 1743, he was elected a fellow of All Soul’s College. Although he was admitted a student of the Middle Temple in November 1741, a curious aspect of William Blackstone’s life and achievements is that his progress at the Bar was always relatively slow and such advancement as he did achieve was very much a product of the name he had made for himself in the world of letters and the University.

Blackstone’s capacity to reduce arcane and chaotic knowledge to a coherent system was illustrated in a number of ways before he turned such abilities to the particular chaos constituted by the English common law and multitude of pedantic distinctions found among its case law. While an undergraduate, he wrote a volume setting out the principles of architecture. While carrying out various roles for All Souls College, including that of bursar, he turned his attention to various aspects of the business affairs of the college reducing scattered and ill kept records to carefully analysed and recorded and accessible studies of the College’s property and accounts. He did this with the financial records of the college, generally, tactlessly pointing out the mistakes of his immediate predecessors; with the vast and scattered real property holdings of the College; and even providing the same service for the College’s wine holdings.

Later, Blackstone engaged in great political battles with the entrenched powers of the Vice Chancellor and Heads of School of the University as a whole to bring similar order and reform to the way in which the University’s printing works were run. While he made many enemies in this and other ventures into the politics of the university, the reforms that he did achieve and the principles that he laid down paved the way for the development of what we know as Oxford University Press (or OUP), the publisher not only of Professor Prest’s biography of Blackstone but also of that great opus, among many, the Oxford English Dictionary (or OED).

Ironically, Blackstone, the cautious reformer was the subject of much scathing criticism by Jeremy Bentham,5  among others, accusing him of being a great conservative in respect of the Commentaries, for failing to concede many of the deficiencies which Bentham himself perceived in the common law.

Although he became the first Vinerian Professor of English Law, Blackstone began the lectures which ultimately gave rise to the Commentaries as a set of private lectures to which students subscribed. Although never confident in his abilities in a courtroom, Blackstone felt very differently delivering the prepared lecture and even spiced his delivery with the occasional mild witticism. The lecture series was hugely popular and financially successful and gave rise to a number of successful publishing ventures before the Commentaries as Dr. Blackstone published course outlines and other abridgements of the lectures. The lectures continued for more than a decade and remained popular and financially successful during the whole period.

The first of the four volumes of the first edition of the Commentaries appeared in mid-November 1765.6  (Blackstone was forty-two years old). The response was favourable from reviewers and readers from the beginning.  

Blackstone became a Member of Parliament, courtesy of patronage from the Prince of Wales, the future George III and his tutor, Lord Bute. His ability to make enemies and displease people was as present in Blackstone’s Parliamentary life as it had been at Oxford. Especially when Blackstone supported the denial of the radical, John Wilkes, his right to sit in Parliament despite Wilkes’ repeatedly topping the poll in his constituency, many compared Blackstone, the politician, unfavourably with his own words in the famous Commentaries.

Blackstone went on to achieve a degree of success at the bar built on his fame as a man of letters and he achieved his ambition of being appointed a judge. He had obtained a reputation as an adequate and hard working judge when he died in his 56th year on 14 February 1780.7       

As Professor Prest points out in his introduction, while the Commentaries have been praised and studied for over three hundred years and Blackstone, as a result, is a household name, the author has received little biographical attention. In particular, prior to the work the subject of this review, little critical effort had gone into placing Blackstone’s life and work against the social history of his time.

One suspects that William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century is a project whose genesis goes back several decades. However, it became possible when Professor Prest took up an Australian Research Council Professorial Scholarship in 2002.8 From that point, it took a mere six years to see the light of day.

The biography is meticulously written. Blackstone’s days in college at Pembroke are meticulously mapped from the records showing what students spent on their daily food and drink. His book purchases across his life and the interests they display are carefully set out. Letters tell us of conversations and stays at the country houses of powerful friends. Professor Prest has, I am sure, accessed every available primary source. But, as he points out and laments, many key documents have been lost or have disappeared into private collections which is nearly as bad.9 Much remains unknown about the man who produced the Commentaries on the Laws of England.

However, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century is a tremendously successful first step in filling the knowledge gap concerning William Blackstone. All future scholarship in the field will start with and attempt to build upon the work of Wilfrid Prest.

Stephen Keim

Footnotes

1. http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/wilfrid.prest
2. The website for the Australian and New Zealand division of OUP is http://www.oup.com.au/.
3. The Hanovers came to the throne as a result of the ban in the Act of Settlement of 1701 and its ban on any Catholic becoming the monarch of Great Britain. When Queen Anne died in 1714, more than 50 Catholics bore closer blood relationships to Anne than the Prince-elector of Hanover who became George I. The supporters of Queen Anne’s half brother, James Francis Edward Stuart, were known as Jacobites, from the Latin word for James. 
4. It is ironic that the great chronicler of the common law was firstly a “Civilian”.
5. Particularly in A Fragment of Government.
6. It was an era of epochal publications. Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary had appeared a decade earlier in 1755.
7. 186 years to the day prior to the introduction of decimal currency in Australia.
8. See http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/wilfrid.prest.
9. William Blackstone is not the only author overshadowed by his literary progeny. In 1965, the Queensland Department of Harbours and Marine published Guide to Fishes by EM Grant. This book illustrated with black and white pictures has begun a bible for anyone interested in fishing and fish in Queensland and far beyond. However, as Dr. Grant pointed out in a very rare interview, he is not famous but his book is. See http://www.booksandcollectibles.com.au/bsearch.php3?bsearch_submit=Search&auth=E.M.+Grant&title=Guide+To+Fishes  and http://www.grantsguidetofishes.com/book.htm. For those who contribute to Wikipedia, shame on you that there is no entry for Grant’s Guide to Fishes. Get to it.