Rogue Intellectual

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.

"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