So Idle a Rogue: The Life And Death of Lord Rochester

by Jeremy Lamb

The name of John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, is synonymous with excess. In this biography, Jeremy Lamb examines time the nature of Rochester's alcoholism and its implications for the man and his poetry.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History

294 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Robert]

This is a biography of John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester: a 17th Century nobleman who is remembered for his scandals and for the obscenity of his amorous poems. He was an alcoholic and drank himself to death by the age of 33.

Lamb’s biography portrays him as a man who was raised with a strong set of moral values, but who subsequently fell victim to genetic alcoholism and peer pressure and grew to despise himself and the society he lived in. It is written in an amicable tone and Lamb intersperses the text with extracts from Rochester’s plays, poems and private letters. Of particular interest are the poems that Rochester penned to slate his enemies at court, and the poems they in turn wrote about him.

[Manuel]

The outrageous life of John Wilmot, Lord Rochester-subject of last year's film, The Libertine, with Johnny Depp and Samantha Morton. Wilmot was an underrated poet, as we'll as a rake. In enjoyed reading this book; it caught and maintained my interest throughout. The only quibble is that it tended to be distracting, when the author would repeatedly introduce clinical evidence to remind us that Wilmot was an alcoholic and, largely, couldn't help himself. No shit.

[Carakins]

Fascinating, but my edition was so badly proofed I took my editorial pen to it.

[William Perrett]

Truly the worst book I've ever read. AA encourages its adherents to take on projects & Lamb seems to have decided to write this as a 'project' while on AA. His comments on the philosophy of Hobbes & Locke are startlingly ill-informed & ignorant & it is frankly disappointing that he was allowed to publish them.
It is remarkable that Lamb's biography hardly mentions Rochester's poetry at all. Instead it bleats on & on & on about all this 'addictive personality' B/S.The man can't write & a kind editor would have drowned this book at birth. Brutally, one might think the same of Mr Lamb.

[D.F. Williams]

Dropped after 50 pages. Talks more about other people instead of Rochester, and the 'interpretation' of Hobbes is laughable.

[Patrick]

Basically this acts as a treatise on the dangers of acute alcoholism, exemplified by one of its most famous victims, the notorious John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. Fortunately, there is ample space to recount the exploits of the good Earl in the English Restoration court of King Charles II. A goodly amount of snippets of his biting poetry is scattered throughout, but is bogged down somewhat by side trips to the medical side recounting the Earl's many maladies, physical and mental, which led to his death at the age of 33. Recommended for libertines and prohibitionists alike.

[V.J.]

Offered quite an interesting insight to the behavioural traits of alcoholism which ultimately led to Lord Rochester's death at 33. However, I did find the copious extracts from his writings a bit wearing. Their relevance was not always explained sufficiently, which for a popular biography was a mistake, in my opinion.
Quite apart from this there were dozens of typos, that I thought a proofreader should have caught by the paperback edition.
Was quite intrigued by his puritanical upbringing and his relationship with Elizabeth Barry, but overall I felt dissatisfied with this book.

[Jo]

Being interested in the Restoration period and in particular, John Wilmot, I was most pleased with this book. It was well written with compassion and understanding. It is a shame that some of it had to be padded out with quotations from so much of his literary work, but I guess that's to be expected when you're writing a biography about someone who is relatively unheard of, with little in the way of record or evidence.