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- Herausgeber: Honno Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Welsh Women's Classsics
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Cambrian Tales appeared in serialised form in Ainsworth's Magazine from March 1849 to March 1850 and has not previously been published as a novel.Like the political pamphlet Artegall, also included in this volume, it constitutes part of Jane Williams' attempts to defend Wales against the notorious 'Blue Books', the 1847 government report which damned the Welsh as ignorant, immoral, and barbaric.A comedy of manners, set in and around a Welsh country house, it features characters clearly modelled on Ysgafell's patron, Lady Llanover, and her social circle.Also included are two representative poems, one from Celtic Fables (1862), a feminist reworking of ancient legend, and the previously unpublished 'A Petition' in which a night-cap maker protests against her dire exploitation.Ysgafell's social conscience, her patriotism, and her sardonic humour are evident throughout the volume.
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CAMBRIAN TALES
AND OTHER SELECTED WRITINGS
Jane Williams, Ysgafell
Edited and introduced by Gwyneth Tyson Roberts
HONNO PRESS
Contents
Foreword Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, 1943-2022
Jane Aaron
After a long, brave struggle with cancer, the editor and introducer of this volume passed away soon after she had delivered the typescript of Cambrian Tales to the Press. Gwyneth Tyson Roberts is much missed within those organisations to which she voluntarily gave so much of her time during the last three decades of her life, the Celtic Congress, Ceredigion Talking Newspapers, the Welsh Women’s Archive, which she served as Administrative Secretary from 2018 to 2019, and Honno Press. For over a quarter of a century she worked as editor, copy-editor and proof reader for Honno, and in this foreword the Press would like to recognize the great value of freely-given contribution and support. She will be more widely remembered, however, as the author of a number of strikingly original articles and monographs on nineteenth-century Wales, its language, its relations with imperial England, and its women writers.
Gwyneth’s life journey began in the early 1930s in Blaenau Ffestiniog, where her father, Llewelyn Iorwerth Roberts from Bethesda, on his daily rounds as a postman, met Winifred King from Copthorne, Surrey, then employed as a parlour maid at a local landed estate. They married in 1934 and moved to live near Winifred’s parents in Copthorne, Surrey, where Llewelyn pursued a profession as clock- and watch-maker. On the 23rd of May, 1943, Gwyneth was born, their long-awaited and much cherished only child. From the family home, Bryn Hyfryd in Copthorne, she went on to take a degree in English, and a post as lecturer in English at the University of Baghdad. In the 1960s she started publishing books and editions in Longman Press’s Textbooks for Foreign Speakers series; her co-authored An Outline of English Literature first appeared in 1968.
By the early 1970s she was working as a teacher of English with the British Institute in Lisbon. There, in April 1974, she witnessed at first hand Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, in which both the people and the military turned against the authoritarian Estado Novo regime. As she later wrote in the volume she edited for Honno in 2005, Even the Rain is Different: Women Writing on the Highsand Lows of Living Abroad, for her, ‘the revolution was a revelation’: it showed how ‘the political structure of a society – including the one I grew up in – was not an unchangeable “given” but could be rethought and remade’.
She returned to Britain and took a post as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of East London, a strongly political left-wing department established under the influence of Raymond Williams. There she began to research the history of the relationship between England and Wales, and to learn Welsh at the City Literary Institute (today’s City Lit). Her first publication on Welsh matters focussed on a key event in the history of nineteenth-century Wales, the 1847 Report on the State of Education in Wales, the so-called ‘Blue Books’: ‘“Under the Hatches”: English Parliamentary Commissioners’ views of the people and language of mid-nineteenth-century Wales’, appeared in the volume The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and CulturalHistory edited by her colleague from the Department of Cultural Studies, Bill Schwarz, in 1996. By then, however, Gwyneth had taken early retirement from her university post and moved to Wales, to Aberystwyth, to perfect her grasp of the Welsh language and continue with her research.
In 1998 she published, with the University of Wales Press, a monograph analysing in close detail the language of the Blue Books, and illustrating how its apparently bureaucratic phraseology sought to demean the Welsh and promote an imperialist ideology. Initially entitled The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument ofEmpire, but changed to The Language of the Blue Books: Wales andColonial Prejudice in the second edition, it effectively illustrated how colonisation operates through administrative language as much as military power, subjugating those who persist in adhering to their native tongue by categorizing them as uncivilised barbarians. The book was much praised for the originality and convincingness of its arguments, and it now features in the new Welsh schools’ curriculum. Her second monograph focussed on the life and work of one of the most effective contemporary opponents of the ‘Blue Books’, Jane Williams, Ysgafell (1806-1885), the subject of the doctoral thesis which won Gwyneth her PhD from Aberystwyth University in 2015.
In Jane Williams, Ysgafell (University of Wales Press, 2020), and in the following introduction to Cambrian Tales, she portrays a career interestingly similar to her own. Jane Williams was also reared in England, the offspring of a Welsh father and English mother, but she too chose to make her spiritual home in Wales. During the Victorian era, she devoted herself to researching and writing in defence of Wales, its history and its language, and also published biographical accounts of Welsh women. During the second Elizabethan era, Gwyneth Tyson Roberts undertook a similar journey, dedicating herself to the long struggle towards equal rights and respect for Wales and its women. Hers was a singular character, possessed of much dry wit, tenacity and courage. She will long be warmly remembered by all her co-workers and friends.
Introduction
Gwyneth Tyson Roberts
History has not been kind to Jane Williams (Ysgafell), which is ironic considering how important history was to her, both as a writer and reader. Her name is little known and much of the information in entries about her in reference books is misleading. Some reference books confuse her with two contemporaries with the same or similar name, Maria Jane Williams, the musician and collector of Gwent folk-songs who, like Ysgafell, was a member of the so-called ‘Llanover circle’, and Jane Williams, the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s friend Edward Williams. Peter Bell in his VictorianWomen: An Index to Biographies and Memoirs (1989), for instance, lists ‘Jane Williams (1806-1885)’ as ‘a friend of Shelley’s’, and Deborah C. Fisher in her Who’s Who in Welsh History (1997) describes her as a ‘musician’.
For more than a century after Ysgafell’s death her writings were out of print and, when one of her books was re-issued in 1987 in the Honno Classics series it was the least typical of all her work: the ‘autobiography’ of someone else (The Autobiography of ElizabethDavis a Balaclava Nurse, 1857). She published in a wide range of genres: poetry (Miscellaneous Poems, 1824, and Celtic Fables: FairyTales and Legends, chiefly from Ancient Welsh Originals, 1862); essays on religious subjects (Twenty Essays on the PracticalImprovement of God’s Providential Dispensations as Means to theMoral Discipline to the Christian, 1838, and Brief Remarks on a Tractentitled ‘A Call to the Converted’, 1839); political prose (Artegall; orRemarks on the Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Stateof Education in Wales, 1848); fiction (‘Cambrian Tales’, 1849-1850); biography (The Literary Remains of the Rev. Thomas Price,Carnhuanawc, 1854-55); personal memoirs (The Origin, Rise, andProgress of the Paper People, 1856), literary criticism (The LiteraryWomen of England, 1861) and history (A History of Wales derivedfrom Authentic Sources, 1869). But during her lifetime she was not a member of the literary networks which would have ensured that her books got favourable publicity, and most of her writing related to Wales, which English critics (and many readers) regarded as too insignificant to be of interest. After her death, this lack of interest in her work continued and in many ways her wide range of genres worked to her disadvantage, since her writing overall did not fit into a single category. Descriptions of her as ‘a miscellaneous writer’ or – even less helpfully – as an ‘authoress’ trivialise her work and are so uninviting that few readers are likely to want to track down the books for themselves. Her image as a writer is both indistinct and uninteresting. That image, however, is seriously misleading, and the range of genres in which she worked, as well as her longevity as a writer and her decision to write about Wales, mark her out as unique among women authors of the nineteenth century – as does her possession of a distinctive and sardonic sense of humour. She deserves more attention than she has previously been given.
In an attempt to make amends for past neglect, this volume includes representative examples of her writings in three different genres: political prose, fiction and poetry. But before introducing the texts, the author herself needs placing in context, particularly in a Welsh context. Williams’s own most explicit description of her relation to Wales appears almost at the end of her writing career and after the publication of her last book in 1869. In 1871 she applied to the Royal Literary Fund for a grant on the grounds of financial hardship; the third question on the application form asked ‘Where born?’. Williams’s reply to the question was ‘Welsh by descent and long residence, but born in Chelsea.’
On 1 February 1806 Jane Williams was indeed born in Chelsea, at 35 Sloane Square where her family was living from 1803-9, before moving to 12 Riley Street, Chelsea. She was the second child and eldest daughter of Eleanor and David Williams, who had eight children in all. Eleanor Williams was English, the daughter and heiress of a successful City of London banker. David Williams was a Welshman from a family which had owned a large estate, Ysgafell, near Newtown, Montgomeryshire, but who had himself been brought up in a village in Radnorshire, Evenjobb, near the boundary between Wales and England. His father had sold the Ysgafell estate and spent the proceeds. At the age of seventeen David Williams started work in the Navy Office in London, his post gained through the recommendation of a relative. He later worked at the naval bases in Portsmouth and Sheerness before returning to the headquarters in London, never rising above the position of Clerk Third Class and consequently receiving a very low salary.
The Williams family, however, maintained an affluent lifestyle on the investments which his wife had inherited. Jane Williams later told a friend that ‘from birth, she had been accustomed to comfort, even luxury’. She must also, from the evidence of her later publications, have received an excellent education which allowed her to develop her intellectual interests. But when Williams was in her teens the investment income inherited from her maternal grandfather was lost in a financial crash, and in 1820 the family left their rented house in Chelsea in some haste. It seems that in the aftermath of the crash the Williams family followed the usual behaviour of the period by prioritising the futures of sons over daughters. A large portion of the remaining money was devoted to establishing Williams’s eldest two brothers in their chosen professions (one became an infantry officer, the other a solicitor). The two eldest daughters, Jane and her sister Eleanor, had to become self-supporting.
Very few details have survived of Williams’s life in the next few years, but in the preface to her first book, Miscellaneous Poems, published in April 1824, she gives her address as Pipton Cottage, Glasbury, a Welsh village straddling the boundary between Radnorshire and Breconshire. As the occupants of Pipton Cottage, a couple called Morgan with small children, were apparently neither friends nor relatives of hers, and given that Williams’s family circumstances made it necessary for her to be self-supporting, it seems most likely that her role was to look after the children. Since she had five younger siblings, she could plausibly be presented as experienced at dealing with small children. By taking such a post she had crossed – downward – a crucial social line in nineteenth-century British society: from being a member of a family which had employed several servants, she was now herself an employee (however genteel) in domestic service, and likely to remain in that position for the rest of her life.
In those circumstances, to publish a collection of poems was a clear declaration of autonomy, a way of recovering through her writing some of the personal status she had lost. It was an assertion that she was not a child-minder (or whatever was her precise role in the Morgan household): she was a writer. It is revealing that she published Miscellaneous Poems not merely under her own name rather than anonymously or pseudonymously but that she also used her full name rather than an asexual initial for her first name: allowing herself to be identified as a published author was clearly very important to her. Miscellaneous Poems was self-published by subscription; for many women authors in the eighteenth century and later, that was the only practical way of seeing their first book in print. The book lists 200 subscribers, including not only members of Williams’s extended family, but also members of the local ‘great and good’ – something of a coup for an unknown eighteen-year-old with no social status.
The length of Williams’s residence at Pipton Cottage is unknown; the next reference to her whereabouts appears in a Will made in 1841 by Isabella Hughes of Aberllunvey House, Glasbury. Hughes had inherited estates and substantial holdings of government stock from her father, an affluent parson-squire with antiquarian interests. In her Will she refers to Williams in terms which indicate that Williams was working in her service as a lady’s companion. An appropriate legacy for a long-serving paid companion would have been her employer’s clothes and the equivalent of a year’s wages. Hughes, however, left Williams not only her clothes but all her silver plate, all her books and – most life-changing of all for Williams – £100 per annum for life. In the early 1840s, £100 a year was enough for a single middle-class woman to live on as long as she avoided great extravagance. On Hughes’s death in 1845, therefore, Williams did not need to look for a new position; she re-joined her family, who were now living in Talgarth, Breconshire, in a house in the centre of the village, Neuadd Felen.
During her time at Aberllunvey House, with the financial support and encouragement of her employer, Williams published her two religious tracts. By the time her mistress died, therefore, her authorial career had moved into a different genre; she had also learned more Welsh and developed an abiding interest in Welsh literature and Celtic history. At the same time, she had experienced a second stroke of life-transforming good fortune: she had met, and been taken up by Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover.
Augusta Hall was already by 1845 a major figure in social, cultural and political circles in south Wales and London. Her husband, Sir Benjamin Hall, was an M.P. and they spent part of each year at their London house where Hall used their political and social connections with the metropolitan elite to raise the profile of Wales and Welsh culture, especially its music. She was a major patron of eisteddfodau, and also played an important role in codifying ‘traditional’ Welsh costume. After inheriting the Llanover estate from her father she had had a new house built to accommodate large house-parties for the cultural, social and intellectual elite. Jane Williams became a frequent visitor, not only making long stays at Llanover Court but also accompanying Hall on visits to London where she met leading members of the metropolitan elite. A major additional advantage of Hall’s friendship was that it gave Williams access to the large and impressive library at Llanover Court, a vital resource in a period before the public library lending system had been established and when access to other major libraries was difficult or impossible for a woman. The influence of Hall and the rest of the Llanover circle played a major part in the position Williams assumed in relation to Wales in her next book, Artegall, her response to the 1846-7 Reports on the State of Education in Wales.
The title page of the Reports, often known in Wales as ‘Y Llyfrau Gleision’ (the Blue Books), states clearly their focus and scope: ‘an Inquiry [was] to be made into the State of Education in the Principality of Wales, and especially into the means afforded to the Labouring Classes of acquiring a Knowledge of the English Language’. Under the supervision of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, secretary to the government Committee of Council on Education, three Commissioners were appointed: R. R. W. Lingen to report on Carmarthenshire, Glamorganshire and Pembrokeshire in Part I; J. C. Symons on Breconshire, Cardiganshire, Radnorshire and Monmouthshire in Part II; and H. V. Johnson on ‘North Wales’, i.e. the remaining counties, in Part III. The fact that none of these Commissioners knew anything of Wales, its education system, its society, history, language, or literature was considered to be an advantage since it was regarded as a guarantee of their objectivity. This impression of impartiality gave the Reports’ conclusions – that with a few shining exceptions, Welsh schools and teachers were inadequate, and that the Welsh people were characteristically superstitious liars, cheats, drunkards and thieves who neglected their personal hygiene and were sexually promiscuous – a particular force, especially since the Commissioners frequently related these negative attributes to the prevalence of Nonconformity and the Welsh language.
The Reports provoked outrage and a bitter sense of betrayal in Wales, and both Jane Williams and her patron were aroused to immediate activity: Williams penned a detailed response and Hall paid and arranged for its publication. It was published anonymously, as Hall was aware that hints that she was involved with the book’s publication would give rise to rumours that she was its author: a publication thought to be by the celebrated Lady Hall would create more of a stir than the same book written by a largely unknown author. Hall greatly admired Artegall, declaring in a letter to its publisher, William Rees of Llandovery, that ‘the more you read this work, the more you will see to admire in it – if ever a book was sold for its merits this must go like wild fire.’ In particular she praised its readability, saying that ‘I would not have believed that so dry as well as odious a subject could have been treated in a manner which renders the perusal of these pages intensely interesting to the most indifferent observer.’
Jane Williams’s authorship of the pamphlet soon became widely known, however, and it drew favourable attention to her in Wales; to the 99% of Welsh readers who had been unaware of her earlier published work, she burst onto the Welsh literary scene as a new writer who defended the Welsh people and Welsh society from the unfair slurs of the remote English establishment. Her attack on the Blue Books was framed in explicitly moral terms; the epigraph to the pamphlet explains her choice of title:
Now take the right likewise, said Artegall,
And counterpoise the same with so much wrong.
These lines are taken from Book V of Edmund Spenser’s FaerieQueene (1596) in which the character Artegall features as a fearless knight in pursuit of justice. In Williams’s pamphlet the Commissioners are attacked not only for the injustice of their sweeping condemnations of the Welsh people but also for the illogicality of their arguments and the deplorable inadequacy of their own command of English. Mockery is one of her sharpest weapons; she turns their words against them, ridiculing, for example, the grounds on which they found fault with Welsh schools: ‘Every thing is wrong in their eyes: even the Infant Schools are “too exclusivelyinfantine”’ (p. 55). In recognition of its significance, both in relation to the Welsh response to the Blue Books and to Williams’s reputation, Artegall is reproduced in full as the first of Ysgafell’s writing to be included in this volume.
Her next publication, ‘Cambrian Tales’, a work of fiction serialised in the London periodical Ainsworth’s Magazine between March 1849 and February 1850, was also published anonymously but is known to be hers both from internal evidence and because she listed it with her other works in her 1871 application to the Royal Literary Fund. In it, as in Artegall, she defends the Welsh and their culture from unfair criticism, in this case through her use of a Welsh country house setting in which visitors to Wales are introduced to the country. Setting her fiction in a social milieu with which she was familiar, she created characters whose preoccupations and foibles mirrored those of people she had met in Llanover Court. Nantmawr, her fictional country house, resembles Llanover Court in its location, its architecture and its mistress, Lady Jefferys. Similarly, one of her guests, the Welsh parson, Mr. Evans, is described in terms which suggest that his character is modelled on that of the antiquarian and historian the Reverend Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), a highly esteemed member of the Llanover circle.
Generically speaking, ‘Cambrian Tales’ is a comedy of manners, in which Williams makes abundant use of her gift for satire, particularly in her depiction of Nantmawr’s English visitors. Initially its plotline would appear to centre on the romance developing between two of its characters, Lady Edith Mortimer and Arthur Tudor, but the need to present Wales favourably to English readers, and correct their misapprehensions, outweighs all other considerations, and the romance element is left unresolved. The fifth chapter, in particular, in which the artist Markwell, a first-time visitor to Wales, writes a letter home to his wife telling her what he has learned, makes clear Williams’s purposes. His depictions of Wales directly contradict those of the Commissioners and present an entirely positive picture of its people. ‘Cambrian Tales’ was never published in volume form, but it is worthy of attention for its convincing and historically valuable delineation of what life was like in the mid-nineteenth century for Llanover Hall’s inmates and visitors, as well as for its wit and Welsh interest, and it is therefore reproduced in full in this edition.
A factual, rather than fictional, record of the life and work of Carnhuanawc, who died in 1848, became Williams’s next project. The Literary Remains of the Rev. Thomas Price Carnhuanawc, an edited anthology of Carnhuanawc’s writings to which Williams added a substantial memoir, consolidated her reputation as a serious and respected writer on Welsh subjects, though her name did not appear on its title page. But she did append her name to the book’s ‘Preface’, signing herself, for the first time in print, as ‘Jane Williams, Ysgafell’. In all her subsequent publications, the title page gives the author as ‘Jane Williams (Ysgafell)’.
Her adoption of ‘Ysgafell’ as her bardic name – an apparently obscure reference, when ‘Artegall’ would have been a much more obvious choice – indicates not only an attempt to reclaim by her pen the literary (and perhaps moral) ownership of the estate sold by her paternal grandfather, but also a clear and conscious assertion of her connection with not only a portion of the land of Wales but with her seventeenth-century ancestor, Henry Williams of Ysgafell. A Baptist minister persecuted by the civil authorities after the Restoration, he was imprisoned during the reign of Charles II for preaching without the licence available only to those who accepted the 1662 revisions to the Book of Common Prayer and took the Oath of Supremacy. Williams’s bardic name, therefore, denoted not only her historical connection with a particular piece of the land of Wales, even though no member of her family had owned it for nearly a century and she herself had never been to Ysgafell; it also identified her with a significant historical figure, famed for his resistance to authority on ethical grounds. Her pride in the ‘Welsh descent’ she asserted in her application to the Royal Literary Fund, and its importance to her construction of her own identity, was made manifest in her choice of a bardic name.
By the time the Literary Remains of Carnhuanawc was published, however, Williams was no longer living permanently in Wales. In 1855, after her mother had died and her brother Edward and his wife had moved into Neuadd Felen, she left for London; she visited Wales from time to time afterwards, making long stays at Llanover, but never returned to live there. Nevertheless, she still turned to Wales for her literary source-materials. Celtic Fables: FairyTales and Legends, chiefly from Ancient Welsh Originals was published in 1862, with its author’s name, ‘Jane Williams (Ysgafell)’, on its title page. In it she took advantage of the nineteenth-century vogue for the reimagined medieval world with a Celtic flavour, but treated her source materials very differently from other writers of the period. The Fables collectively create the impression that Williams composed them because something in her sources amused her, piqued her interest, or gave her the opportunity to explore (consciously or unconsciously) themes which had personal significance for her. This is particularly the case with the two poems published in this collection, ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ and ‘The Ancients of the World’. Both are versifications of Welsh prose originals found in the Iolo Manuscripts, the papers of the poet and antiquarian Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams, 1747-1826), which were bought by Hall and her husband from Iolo’s son Taliesin Williams in 1848 and subsequently held at the Llanover library.
In Williams’s versions, however, both tales deviate significantly from their source. The conventional moral of ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, that prudence and forethought are preferable to irresponsibility and living for the moment, is subverted before the close of Williams’s poem. In her version, but not in the original, the prudent Ant has himself been cheered by the Grasshopper’s carefree art in summertime. He too ‘[f]orgot anxious care, while in marching along / He heard the glad sound of the Grasshopper’s song’ (p. 250). But for all his personal debt to him, he shows only ‘contempt’ for the ‘desolate’ Grasshopper caught without provision in wintry weather. The poem emphasises his callousness as he turns the Grasshopper away from his door, showing little remorse even after he finds its corpse on his threshold the following morning. The Ant is unsympathetic (in all senses); the Grasshopper, given the generosity with which he spreads joy out to all in fair weather, is a far more attractive character. Written as it was, by one who had herself suffered the consequence of her forefathers’ lack of financial prudence, the poem is strikingly forgiving in its appreciation of the joy of living for the moment, whatever may befall.
‘The Ancients of the World’ is a variant on an episode in the tale of ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ from the Mabinogion. In Williams’s source, an elderly Scottish king eagle, looking for a new mate, considers the Owl of Cwmcawlwyd as a possible candidate but needs to know her age in order to be certain that she is past breeding age, since any offspring he might have with her would be so low-class as to pollute his blood. He therefore consults various Ancient Creatures until finally assured by the Toad of Cors Fochno that the Owl already had great-grand-daughters when he himself was young. The Eagle, reassured as to the Owl’s advanced years, decides that she meets his specifications. At this point, Iolo’s version ends, but Williams continues the story. When the Eagle visits the Owl to inform her that he has decided that she is worthy to be his mate, she fixes her ‘deep-set’ eyes with their lurid light on him, points out that he should know that ‘the aged never like their home to change’ and delivers a stinging rebuff:
‘Return, proud Eagle, to thy lonely state—
Cwmcawlwyd’s Owl rejects thee as her mate!’ (p. 257)
The poem subverts the patriarchal assumption underlying Williams’s source that it was for the Eagle rather than the Owl to decide whether she would be his mate; his quest was pointless from the outset, and his unthinking confidence in the Owl’s acquiescence completely misplaced.
Williams’s critical attitude towards a social system which had no sympathy for the impoverished and which subordinated women is evident in these rewritten Fables, as it is also in one of her previously unpublished poems, ‘The Night-cap Maker’, found, undated, in manuscripts deposited in the National Library of Wales, and reproduced here as another example of her work. In it an impoverished seamstress tirades against the avarice of her customers, who, in saving their pennies, destroy her existence. ‘Molly Workwell’ denounces her clients with spirit and wit, both attributes which Williams herself sustained during a lifetime in which she also endured poverty and the concomitant loss of social status, at that time a condition from which women, in particular, found it virtually impossible to escape. She owed her reprieve and her subsequent authorial career to the generosity and support of two women, Isabella Hughes and Lady Llanover, and this poem asks other women too to recognize the value of all female lives, and share what they can.
Williams’s life involved crossing and re-crossing borders, boundaries and lines of demarcation – some national, geographical and linguistic, others of social class and position. These movements marked not only change but loss or lack of clarity about the corresponding aspects of her personal, social, literary and national identities. But by the time of her death in London in March 1885, she had created a body of work still of significance in its spirited defence of the Welsh as a people, of their language and history, and also of women during the Victorian era. She was able to use the liminality of her position to forge for herself a distinctive authorial personality, and to meld and modulate the variety of genres in which she worked into a strong individual literary voice, which speaks to us today as directly as it did to her first readers over one and a half centuries ago.
Notes on the Texts
This edition of Jane Williams’s writings is set from their first publications, lightly amended to reflect modern conventions of punctuation, spelling and text layout. Williams’s original spellings of personal and place names are retained, however, and only corrected in cases of obvious inconsistencies or misprints.
All the footnotes throughout the volume are the author’s own, as they appear in the original publications. Where necessary, auxiliary explanatory matter has been introduced in square brackets within the texts.
In ‘Artegall’, the fifth footnote of the sixth chapter is included as an ‘Appendix to Chapter VI’ as it proved too lengthy to be otherwise accommodated.
‘A Petition from the Old Women’s Night Cap Maker’, previously unpublished, is reproduced by kind permission of the National Library of Wales.
ARTEGALL:
or Remarks on the Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in WALES
“Now take the right likewise,” said Artegall,
“And counterpoise the same with so much wrong.”
Fairy Queen, Book V, Stanza xlvi.
I
Introduction
The Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales have done the people of that country a double wrong. They have traduced their national character; and in so doing, they have threatened an infringement upon their manifest social rights, their dearest existing interests, comprised in their ordinary modes of worship and instruction, their local customs, and their mother tongue.
The British public appear too generally to have received the Commissioners’ personal Reports as a judicial summing-up of the Evidence they have adduced. Those Reports are, on the contrary, the partial inferences of advocates, the special pleadings of Counsel for the prosecution, in the cause Shuttleworth versus Wales.
The Commissioners were sent forth with instructions to make out a case, and they have diligently and faithfully laboured to accomplish it. But ere, on the strength of such allegations, the Principality is allowed to be made the subject and the victim of a new educational experiment, the attention of British Legislators is earnestly requested to an examination of the Evidence on which they rest.
The statements of the Commissioners are altogether absolute and not, as they ought to be, balanced by comparison. The Commissioners evidently wanted that enlarged and comprehensive view of society as it is in various countries and as it has been in different ages, which alone could have prepared and enabled them to receive and to communicate correct pictures of the moral, physical, and educational condition of any several and separate nation. They wanted, too, a knowledge of the Welsh language, and of many other things.
The ideal of perfection may be rightly applied as an incentive to excellence, but it ought never to be used by the frail and the fallible for the condemnation of their brother sinners. They have brought an abstract principle, a transcendental notion of what education and condition ought to be, mercilessly and directly to bear upon the people of the Principality. They have condemned their customs, habits and conduct by it, without the slightest reference to comparative merit as regards those of England and other countries.
With cursory and superficial observers, first impressions too often become permanent and indelible. That very “salient nature of the facts” spoken of by Commissioner Symons should have warned him and his confederates of the truth: that defects naturally stand out upon the surface of society, while all that is good lies close within. They laid hold of those salient points and refused to search deeper for the real state of things. They have precipitately generalised upon isolated instances. They have judged of a large and healthy family by its invalid members. They have mistaken particular cases for indicative and representative facts. They have given undue prominence to the evil; they have depreciated or suppressed the good; and this with the apparently charitable intention of having the evil remedied. They have garbled and perverted the evidence afforded by their own returns whenever it tended to contradict their preconceived opinions. They procured a conflicting host of valuable, neutral and worthless depositions, and often gave more credit to deponents whose ill will, inexperience, ignorance or prejudice rendered them incompetent, than to those of real weight and thorough knowledge. Their production gives the chaff without the wheat, the occasional sin without the predominant virtue, the single deviation apart from the prevalent tenor of Cambrian life. By a sort of Platonic process of worldmaking, they fictitiously theorize a national character out of the refuse dregs that have filtered through from its higher and better state. Every beautiful picture that intrudes is unfavourably hung in the sub-gallery of an Appendix; clouds, fogs and storms envelop all their scenery. Nothing bad is omitted. The most trivial and offensive details are dwelt upon. The very countenance of a poor silent school-boy is satirized as “a look of entire vacancy”. They have used the very shreds of truth to plume the poisoned arrows of calumny.
The Government and the public were for a time misled by the delusive statements in the Report of ‘The Children’s Employment Commission’. Thorough examination and better testimony have since exposed those fallacies. Time, that great revealer of truth, will surely subject the Reports of the Education Commission to the same stern censors, and prove that they have borne unfaithful testimony to Wales.
II
Evidence
Commissioner Lingen, under the head of ‘Evidence respecting the Mining and Manufacturing Populations’, gives a quotation from the deposition of the Rev. John Griffith, Vicar of Aberdâr (I. 22). That paragraph describes some of the practical abominations which belong to the Socialist Creed and, thus placed, conveys the impression that such heinous doings are among their predominant characteristics. On turning, however, to pages 478 and 485, it appears that in answer to the questions “Are you acquainted with the condition of the Mining and Manufacturing Population in any part of Wales?” the Rev. John Griffith says: “Yes, but I beg to be responsible only for my own parish of Aberdâr.”
The offensive passage above alluded to occurs at page 489, and is part of his answer to a question as to the ‘Position, character and influence of females among them, and how far the duties of mothers and wives are adequately understood and fulfilled’ (I. 468). In the next preceding column that same question is answered by T.W. Booker, Esq. as follows: “Position: kindly, tenderly and respectfully regarded. Character: chaste but confiding, honest and industrious. Influence: great, and on great emergencies powerfully exerted. The duties of wife and mother: naturally and well understood and fulfilled.” (I. 489) This evidence is not limited to a single parish. Mr Booker, in reply to question 1, said: “A residence of 30 years in Glamorganshire has made me acquainted with the condition of the mining and manufacturing population of a great part of the country.”
On the question of “Providence and Economy”, Mr Griffith says: “Nothing can be more improvident than the Welsh miners and colliers.” Mr Booker says: “Habits of Providence and Economy are, in my opinion, as well observed by the population of Glamorganshire as by that of any part of the United Kingdom” (I. 485-6).
Again, in answer to the question of ‘Religious Feeling and Observance’, Mr Griffith states: “Properly speaking, there is no religion whatsoever in my parish; at least I have not yet found it.”
The tabular lists show that the Sunday Scholars in that very parish amount to 1,767. The reply of Mr Booker begins: “Very marked in this Welsh county” (I. 174).
There are 17 columns of collateral depositions concerning this district; there is not one individual who makes equivalent charges to those of the Vicar of Aberdâr who, at the period when he gave this evidence, had resided only a few weeks in the parish! Let these facts speak.
“I accordingly took written Evidence”, says Commissioner Symons, “from various persons in widely different classes in life, in whose knowledge, intelligence and integrity I had reason to confide” (II. 5).
Great importance is attached in this Report to the evidence of the Rev. R. H. Harrison of Builth, and it is quoted six or seven times to substantiate various charges made against the inhabitants of Builth and of the Principality, and in support of the Commissioner’s opinions.
“The state of this neighbourhood, and perhaps of the Principality, appears to be this,” says Mr Harrison, and then indulges in suppositions as to how things are, and how they came to be so. The closing sentence of his deposition is the following: “The above remarks on the intemperance of the people, and the number of the injurious effects of the public houses, apply to the Principality also” (II. 88).
Mr Harrison is an Englishman; he was presented to the Perpetual Curacy of Builth in September 1844, and consequently had resided there about two years at the period of his giving evidence (II. 87). He had no previous acquaintance with Wales, and his subsequent experience has been closely limited to his own locality. His whole deposition, therefore, is impeachable on the grounds of his personal want of “knowledge and intelligence”, and all consequences deduced from it by the Commissioner are nought.
Undue prominence is given in this same Report to a long and disgusting extract from the evidence of David Griffith, a mason of Builth. This man’s whole deposition is impeachable on the ground of his want of “integrity”. He bears a very bad character in his own neighbourhood. The statements and opinions of these and of other incompetent persons are continually obtruded upon the reader in Mr Symons’s Report. They ought never to have obtained a place even in its Appendix.
It is probable that the “intelligence” of the Rev. Augustus Morgan, Rector of Machen and Rural Dean, may be considered by those who take the trouble of reading his depositions as very questionable and consequently, according to the Commissioner’s own test, of little worth. Take the following specimens:
1. In my opinion a tram-road for the conveyance of coal from the hills to the sea-port for exportation tends to demoralise the district through which it passes to an inconceivable degree. The results are theft, drunkenness and prostitution!
2. From what I have seen within the last few days as regards the different works and collieries in my immediate neighbourhood, the sad, almost total, ignorance on religious matters of children ripening into manhood (!), the total indifference of their masters and, I regret to add, almost equally so of their parents (beyond the obtaining the day’s work on the part of the former, and the daily earnings on that of the latter) all convince me of the imperious necessity of even a compulsory system for the education of the working classes! (II. 302-3)
It is much to be deplored that this gentleman’s discoveries in his own “immediate neighbourhood” being only a “few days” old, he necessarily wanted time for attempting their compulsive remedy, and for the formation of those “matured opinions” to which Commissioners of Inquiry justly attach such high importance.
Concerning a particular portion of the Evidence, Mr Symons states in a prefixed memorandum:
The answers were numbered to correspond with the following questions, which were addressed only to such persons as were deemed likely to have a correct knowledge of facts, and matured opinions on the general topics of the inquiry and who, from their station or position were likely to know and represent the feelings as well as circumstances of different classes of the people. (II. 91)
The Rev. James Denning, Curate of St Mary’s Brecknock, is one of the standard-bearers in this chosen band. As regards his “matured opinions on the general topics of inquiry”, let it be remembered that at the date of his deposition Mr Denning had been less than two years a resident in the town of Brecknock, and to that place all his small knowledge and short experience of Wales was confined. The three-fold Rev. James Hughes, Rector of Llanhilleth via Newport, may afford him a wholesome lesson of reproof for his presumptuous assertions, in the following words addressed to Commissioner Symons: “I have only lived five years in Monmouthshire, and I have carefully abstained from adverting to any points which I have not perfect knowledge of lest I might mislead you.” (II. 300)
But no such conscientious scruples had Mr Denning. Take a specimen of his “correct knowledge of facts”. He represents Wales as “sunk in comparative heathenism” (II. 98-9), evidently labouring under the delusion that his parish in the town of Brecknock is Wales. The Rev. Rees Price, Curate of St John’s in the same town, says:
If it be safe to judge of people’s religious character by their regular attendance at places of worship, I think I may pronounce of a great portion of the people at this place that they are a religious people. It is pleasing to witness so many on the Lord’s Day on their way to and from their several places of worship. (II. 100)
Mr Denning in the same general manner says: “The poor seem ignorant on most subjects except how to cheat and speak evil of each other.”
Mr Davies, Theological Professor of Brecknock College, a man who has had thirty years’ experience as a Dissenting Minister in Wales, gives the following counter-testimony:
On certain subjects there is much ignorance, such as history, etc. But on the subject of religion there is considerable information. They are generally ignorant of the English language, but it would be a sad mistake to judge of their knowledge by their ignorance of the English [language]. (II. 101)
