In this interesting book, Timothy Jenks builds on his existing work on the Westminster parliamentary elections of 1796 and the funeral of Lord Nelson a decade later to produce an important and revisionist account of the role of the Royal Navy over the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars as a symbol of national community and constitutional identity. It has tended to be argued that the Navy and its heroes were hijacked in this period by patriotic forces to support the war effort and to provide a patriotic carrot to accompany the stick of governmental repression. Jenks argues that the situation was much more complicated, with the navy and its image being hotly contested between social and political forces.

Jenks is a master of a rich collection of contemporary sources ranging from the mass media through poetry and the theater to sermons and tracts. The author's only weakness is his lack of naval historical background. He appears, for example, not to realize that Admiral Parker's distribution of Nelson's Nile dispatch was not a political gesture but yet another indication of the former's long-standing patronage of the latter commander.

Right from the start, Jenks takes issue with conventional views. He shows how Sheridan's play The Glorious First of June was not performed in 1794 in the simplistically patriotic way other authors have thought. The texts previously used by historians were apparently those sent to the censor, not those used on the stage at Drury Lane. Sheridan's treatment of the Press Gang, Jenks argues, depicts studied ambivalence about the potential for alienation this form of conscription involved. It was thus a veiled attack on Pitt's running of the war as well as a demonstration of Whig patriotism. It was no coincidence that the Duke of Portland's Whigs joined the government that year.

In 1797 the mixed messages sent by the mutinies and victory at Camperdown were mediated and reconciled by a procession and thanksgiving service at St. Paul's Cathedral. The event was attended by naval personnel of all ranks to demonstrate the return to discipline of the fleet. Less happy was the reception given to Pitt, who was attacked and forced to return in another coach. The sermon preached reflected divided opinion on the war.

Nelson's great Nile triumph offered a beginning of the end to prowar opinion and an excuse for ending it to its opponents. Plans were laid to build a “Naval Pillar,” topped by Britannia, with statues of Howe, St. Vincent, Duncan, and Nelson around the base. Four smaller, surrounding pillars would be inscribed with the names of the other officers involved in the victories of the big four, and there would be space for further inscriptions. It had quite widespread support at first and was to be put up in a “Victory Place” near Bedford House, but the project was bedeviled by its funding sources being limited both socially and politically. It became too much identified with the Pitt faction and died with that government in 1801.

Nelson was the archetypal example of the contemporary naval hero. His elevation to the peerage after the Nile triumph was seen as a welcome contrast with the peerages given as a result of Pitt's political deals. Nelson's battered body is seen by the author as an important symbol in itself, with his wounds having particular relevance in the almost religious way they were used to symbolize the social cement of naval heroism.

Trafalgar presented a problem. The victory was soon “spun”—with almost Blairite mendacity—as saving Britain from invasion (an error that has stuck, even, apparently, with the author of this book). The dead hero, however, had to be mourned. Nelson's very grand funeral, which emphasized the egalitarian importance of the navy with the presence of the flagship's crew, was a liturgy of national unity. Because of the desire to counter news of both Admiralty scandal and allied defeat on land, the popular impulse to be involved received a response (shades of Princess Diana).

The author's discussion of the Cochrane affair is a good finale. Cochrane's genuine radicalism is emphasized as well as his willingness to criticize conditions in the fleet. Perhaps here we have an origin of the “Black Legend” of life on board the navy at this period that modern historians have only recently countered. The particular vehemence with which the government framed and hounded the controversial becomes very explicable if not defensible. Jenks points out that Cochrane personifies a particular integration of the navy and national culture, and the extent to which the meaning had a political dualism.

Although readers who are not card-carrying cultural historians might be put off by some of its authors' jargon (and the price), the book deserves wide attention. It certainly gives lie to rosy notions of the pre-Victorian British past, a period when celebratory “illuminations” were excuses for riots and when British sailors visiting the capital for their beloved admiral's funeral set themselves up in Whitehall to demand “prize money” with menaces from passersby! Modern British social disorder has its precedents. We must be grateful for historians like Timothy Jenks for elucidating so competently the contested nature of the realities of his period, a discourse quite beyond the conception of those modern successors of the Tory patriots of 1793–1815 who wish some “history” of national identity and order to be taught to today's young.