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 's brother, the whig candidate. Lamb beat Hobhouse in February 1819, but was beaten by him in the general election of 1820.

Joseph Hume was introduced to Place by Mill about 1812, and Place used afterwards to collect much of the materials on which Hume founded his laborious parliamentary activity. The library behind the shop at 16 Charing Cross (where Place had gathered a splendid collection of books, pamphlets, and parliamentary papers) was a regular resort of the reformers in and out of parliament. An informal publishing business was carried on there by means of occasional subscriptions. Mill's essays from the supplement to the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and many tracts by Place and others were thus issued. Place sometimes wrote forcibly and well, but the greater part of the tracts, newspaper articles, and unpublished letters and manuscripts which he left behind him are diffuse, and often almost unreadably dull. His only published book is ‘The Principles of Population’ (1822), a reply to Godwin's ‘Enquiry,’ which contains some of his best work. He wrote two articles in the ‘Westminster Review,’ which are both in his dullest manner.

Place was more successful as a practical politician. He was no speaker, and disliked publicity; but he was untiring in providing members of parliament and newspaper editors with materials, in drafting petitions, collecting subscriptions, organising agitations, and managing parliamentary committees.

From 1820 to 1830 he was continually gathering facts and arguments on such questions as the libel laws, the Newspaper Stamp Acts, the laws against the freedom of political meetings and associations, the laws of creditor and debtor, the wool laws, the duties on printed cotton, the cutting and flaying acts, &c. From 1816 to 1823 he carried on a campaign against the sinking fund. His greatest triumphs were seen in 1824, when after ten years of almost unaided work, he succeeded in getting the laws against combinations of workmen repealed, and in 1825, when he prevented an intended re-enactment of them (see, History of Trade Unionism, chap. ii.) By this time Place was beginning to be talked about, and an article in the ‘European Magazine’ of March 1826 states: ‘No one needs to be told that the whole popular liberties of this country, and, by connection and consequence, of the world, depend upon the electors of Westminster; and just as necessarily as the sinking of lead depends upon its weight, do these electors depend on Mr. Place, not only in the choice of the men whom they intrust as their representatives, but in the very subjects in which those men deal. When it is said that Sir Francis Burdett or John Cam Hobhouse made a proposition or a speech, thus or thus, there is a misnomer in the assertion; for the proposition or the speech belongs in justice to Mr. Place, and in all that demonstration of frantic freedom—that tumultuary tide of popularity which they propel—he is the influential luminary—the moon which stirs up the waters. … Look over the notices of motions, and see when Joseph [Hume] is to storm sixpence laid out in the decoration of a public work, or sack the salary of a clerk in a public office; and when you find that in a day or two it is to astonish St. Stephen's and delight the land, then go, if you can find admission, to the library of this indefatigable statesman, and you will discover him schooling the Nabob like a baby.’

In 1827 Place's first wife died, and he seems, at least for a time, to have estranged many of his friends by his second marriage in 1830. But after the introduction of the Reform Bill in 1831 his library again became the meeting-place of the more extreme reformers, and he and his friend, [q. v.], made active preparations during the crisis of May 1832 for the expected civil war. A placard drawn up by Place with the words ‘Go for Gold and stop the Duke,’ produced a partial run upon the Bank of England, and is said to have been one of the causes which prevented the Duke of Wellington from forming a government (see ‘The Story of Eleven Days,’ Contemporary Review, 1892).

After the passing of the Reform Bill Place's political influence rapidly declined. Westminster had been partially disfranchised by the 10l. clause, and no longer held the peculiar position which as a huge popular constituency it had occupied in the ‘borough-mongering’ days. Place himself lost the greater part of his fortune through the blunders of his solicitor in 1833, and was compelled to leave Charing Cross and take a house in Brompton Square. He helped, however, Joseph Parkes with the preparation of the municipal corporations report in 1835, and worked furiously, though vainly, to secure the complete abolition of the newspaper stamp at the time of its reduction to one penny in 1836. He and Roebuck published ‘Pamphlets for the People’ on these and other points in 1835. [q. v.] and several other working-class leaders of the early chartist movement in London (1837–8) were his personal friends and disciples, and Place drafted at Lovett's request the ‘People's Charter’ itself (1838). But when once the chartist movement had