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have lost their appeal: the language of class seems to have less resonance than that of gender or of race. A generation bored to tears by being told that the Chartists were the spearhead of the working class is now asking why they were not more vocal on votes for women. Students familiar with the doctrine that Peter-loo was more important than Waterloo are now wondering if the emancipation of the slaves was not after all more important than either. Even political economy, so long thought synonymous with bourgeois callousness, is being treated more sympathetically.
The removal of the old signposts seems to have affected the two biographies under review. Their authors seeifi quite uncertain how best to make their subjects plausible. Both Joseph Hume and Francis Place rose from fairly humble origins to positions of prominence in the radical movement of the early nineteenth century, remaining hostile to Church and aristocracy, but adopting quite dogmatically the doctrines of political economy and the laissez-faire politics of the Victorian middle class. It was the sort of radi-calism which seemed very dangerous to the contemporary defenders of privilege, but to posterity it looks timid and hypocritical, and the only way to portray it fairly is to reconstruct it, as it were, from the inside, and disregard the interpretations of subsequent historians. Unfortunately neither biographer can resist the temptation to anticipate the verdict of posterity, and both books therefore contain a good deal of fudge.
Valerie Chancellor?s was the more daunting task. No one will deny Place?s historical importance, but Joseph Hume was one of the Great Bores ofhisciay, and many a historian will have been secretly relieved to learn that his papers were lost in a fire and that no full biography of him would be easy. This has not deterred Dr Chancellor, who has found letters scattered through many archives, and made a particular study of the parliamentary debates to which Hume was such an unremitting contributor.
It was a long life, of which the two themes apipear to have been public economy and private gain. Hume was the son of a ship?s master, prosperous enough to send him: to' study medicineatAberdeen.HewentouttoIndiaas a a doctor, returned (as so many did) with a fortune; made not in medicine but the com-
?	- missariat, boughthimselfaseatinParliament, andbecaine a byword for. tedious speeches and verbalpaffesr-By-sheerperseverance andim-perviousness to slight he gain& an accepted
iH>uuicy ivmcs nas prouucea tne nrst lire ot Plate since Graham Wallas?s of 1898. Place?s father kept a sponging house, or private prison, and though he was a drunken bully, he did ensjire that his son had some formal education. Francis, however, acquired his toughness and self-reliance on the streets of London. He also learned the commercial value of straight dealing, so that it is odd to find Miles attributing Place?s ideas about honesty as well as his intolerance to his reading rather than his upbringing. He made his political debut with the London Corresponding Society as an outspoken republican and Jacobin. But the collapse of the LCS in the 1790s made him realize that without money nothing could be don|e to achieve the reforms he wanted, and by the turn of the century he was concentrating on building up his business. It was as a prosperous tailor that he came to mix with Bentham, James Mill and Ricardo, and acquire the doctrines of UtiMtarianisnrand political economy which he later tried so hard to drum into the Chartists. This has always smacked of apostasy to socialist historians, moderate or extreme. -Graham Wallas had a Fabian?s admiration fo^,Place?s skills as a wire-puller, for his organizing capacity ,_iand for hisjnsistence that popular education must qualify for and even precede political enfranchisement. In many ways the Utilitarian outlook resembled the Fabian. But even Wallas called his chapter on political economy ?The-Dismal Science?. It happens that Place left us the largest collection of records of the popular movements of his time and there is a question for the orthodox whether trusting him as a source might not involve the danger of adopting his later views. E. P. Thompson used Place?s records of the LCS and the English Jacobins, but with the warning that when Place wrote his recollections he w,?s ?sitting to James Mill for his own portrait, as the White Man?s Trusty Nigger?. In the Penguin edition this tasteless phrase was changed 'to ?the White Man's Uncle Tom?.
Miles wants to defend Place from this charge; but he also wants to show that in his political activities'he was consistently loyal to the working classes. In other words he is more worried about his own orthodoxy as a historian of the working classes than about Place?s consistency. Jt would not Jje difficult Jp.show.that the lessons Place learned from his LCS days shaped his reading of Utilitarianism and political -economy; -that what he learned from Brabham aid James Mill confirmed rather than =?eakenedhis zealforpopularpolitics, aniflthat he never accepted the aristocratic embrace as
cai views in tne period to oner any striking	biographical notes, sets a very high standard
novelty in interpretation. At most he offers a	indeed.
For our Richtfu? King
Bruce Lenman
WILLIAM DONALDSON
The Jacobite Song: Political myth and national
identity
165pp. Aberdeen University Press, f 12.95 (paperback, ?7.95).
0080365760
In The Jacobite Song: Political myth and national identity William Donaldson admirably examines the origins of the Jacobite song tradition in Lowland Scotland, starting with the emotion-laden issue of the Act of Union, with its deliberate threat to the -survival of Scottish identity in what was, after 1707, officially North Britain. In the face of the new Whig ascendancy after 1714 it was natural enough for Jacobite song to be cast in the form of denunciatory satire, often of a distinctly rough and ready kind, though given musical vitality by a shameless plundering of popular tunes.-From satiric parody, it advanced to plunder the central canon of Scots love song, developing thereby into a lyric of sentiment and ending as an independent format. A mythogenic world-picture was of course common to both Jacobites and their Whig Presbyterian opponents. When Jacobitism was still a real threat, ?Charles and his Hellish Band? could be seen as the forces of Darkness in a Protestant Armageddon. As early as 1750, however, Jacobite song had developed all the characteristics necessary to its future flourishing as an independent type: association with a romanticized Highland tradition; exploitation of the elegiac
?	themes of exile and loss; and association with the canon of Scots love songs. .
The bulk of the best-known Jacobite songs were written in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries by Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Lady Naime and James Hogg. Of these, Lady Naime came from the most genuine Jacobite familjr- the Oliphants of Gask- but by the end of the cytfucy thajfpntijf&yacobite pos^rmgs were Jimply ^Pfo^^^r batty ultra-rightist exhibitionism. Tfiemen couldnot join the Hanoverian forces fast , enough when the perceived threat to the social order became one from leftist Jacobins. ?Wi?_ a Hundred Pipers and a^anda^snlLno doubt livefor ever, but the rest of LadyNaime?s oeuvre has worn
less well since her brand of arch-gentility went out of fashion. She and all the others produced versions of the song Bums did best with of them all - ?Charlie he?s my Darling". Burns was much the most important figure in the creation of this particular genre, raising it to its supreme heights.
Walter Scott, an extreme reactionary in politics, could use Jacobite song to propagate a (deeply misleading) view of Jacobitism as being all about unconditional obedience to God-given social superiors, and he could do this with all the more zest because he knew that the Cause was as dead as a dodo, and represented no threat to the Dundas machine and the rampant speculative capitalism on which his own bogus feudal life was built. Burns, however, is different. Some of his songs such as ?Ye Jacobites by Name?, though not crudely anti-Jacobite, are to put it mildly ambiguous. Nevertheless, it still remains a mystery how a man who, like all genuine moderates in British politics, was clearly a mildly republican ?Country? Whig attached to democratic principles could churn out quite so much in the ?It was a? for our Richtfu? King? vein. One of the answers given by Donaldson is, I am sure, helpful: Jacobite song was a vehicle for thepreservation of Scottish cultural identity, a vehicle which rose above party division.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to swallow whole his argument that Scottish identity in the early nineteenth century was developing alongu. Continental lines on the impetus provided by writers like Bums, with an implicit assumption of the primacy of culture over mere politics. Dryden used the vocabulary of ?Moderation? to cloak the advocacy of arbitrary tyranny and extremist policies. Bums is one of the rare examples of a critic of the Establishment playing a similar game in reverse. He used the vocabulary of radical reactionaries to subtly undermine the integrationist absolutism of ?Court? Whigs like Scott. Perhaps ?Awa Whigs awa? sums it all up. A genuine heir of the Glorious-Revolutipn-like_Bums_or-liis-friend LordXauderdale couId say this of Dundas as easily as a Jacobite could of George I. Whichever way one cares to look at it;- this book raises some fascinating questions in the cultural