ABSTRACT
This chapter discuses the most influential song collections and the drawing-room settings of Finlay Dun, John Thomson, and George Farquhar Graham. It exemplifies a diminishing interest in actively collecting songs directly from singers, and an increasing intellectualization and commercialization of the genre. Despite the differences in scope between Harker's monograph and the chapter, he similarly identifies the 1830s as a 'climate change' in song-collecting terms. The chapter shows that the 1790s and the years around 1830 were not only political watersheds but were also, allowing for the complex relationships between economic, political and cultural change, decisive breaks in the mediation of worker's songs. Harker's primary interest is in the songs of the working class. It is perhaps for this reason that he makes no mention of G. F. Graham, Finlay Dun or John Thomson, whose song-accompaniments were more aligned with the classical, or art tradition.
