Hope and Heartbreak

RUSSELL DAVIES begins his new social history of nineteenth-century Wales by criticising previous accounts for their overly narrow outlook. Both ‘nationalist’ and ‘socialist’ approaches, he suggests, have left untold the stories of countless Welsh men and women whose lives did not fit the chosen paradigm: ‘People who worshipped in church, or nowhere, those who did not speak Welsh, soldiers, industrialists, landowners with their ‘claret and Havana Tory voices’, indeed many who were prosperous and successful in the nineteenth century, were excluded from the Welsh nation and their histories forgotten (p. 4). In setting out to remedy this deficiency, Davies declares his determination to get at ‘the history of the emotions and passions of the Welsh’ (p. 21), and his willingness to use sources hitherto under-used by historians of Wales, such as ballads, ceramics, diaries, folksongs, furniture, gravestones, hymns, letters, paintings, photographs, poems and songs. The book is organised in seven broad chapters. The titles are sometimes rather obscure guides to the contents. Broadly speaking, however, the book is constructed as follows: the first chapter deals with ‘everyday life’ and the infrastructure of the economy, with sections on themes such as agriculture, industry and transport; the second examines a range of issues relating to social hierarchies and includes Welsh attitudes to Empire and slavery; the third examines the various ways in which death came among the Welsh people, and discusses everything from factory accidents to cholera; the fourth, entitled ‘Fear and Anger’, explores a range of issues including crime; the fifth probes love and sexual perversity; the sixth, religion, both Christian and pagan; and the seventh, leisure, with sections on everything from sport to ‘Welsh wit and wisdom’

Archaeology · Art · Ballad · Convict · Literature · Nationalism · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Welsh · Gender Studies · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Scottish History and National Identity