beauty spot, blind spot: romantic wales

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass 5/3 (2008): 577–590, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00546.x

Beauty Spot, Blind Spot: Romantic Wales

Mary-Ann Constantine*University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies

AbstractRomantic-period Wales was a fascinating place: part literary construct, part touristdestination, it appears in the work of many writers as a locus of alternativepossibilities, both political and personal. Welsh landscape, language and literatureattracted poets, artists, antiquarians and historians alike, and an energetic literarycultural revival within Wales produced a rich blend of texts, legends and fabrica-tions which would inspire makers of both fiction and history on either side ofthe border. The questions of national and cultural allegiance at the heart of thisrevival are of profound importance to current discussions of ‘British’ identity,particularly in the light of so-called ‘four nations’ criticism. This article arguesthat the Welsh contribution to British Romanticism has been seriously neglectedby Romantic studies in general. It suggests reasons for this neglect, surveys recentwork in the field, and points to future possible directions for research.

In 1968, I wrote: ‘French historians of these islands nearly always use Welshevidence, English historians hardly ever; I find this eccentric.’ I no longer findit eccentric; I find it intolerable.

– Gwyn A. Williams, Artisans and Sans-Culottes xi

What happened to Wales? It was busy enough during the Romanticperiod. Once the wars with France made Continental travel difficult,Welsh riverscapes, woodlands and mountains became a prime destinationfor thousands of Britons in urgent need of the picturesque and thesublime. Ordinary men and women set off from Norfolk, Bolton, North-ampton, in carriages or on foot, armed with maps and telescopes, sketch-books and watercolours, pocket compasses, specially designed rucksacks,a Gilpin or a Wyndham to point out the highlights, and sturdily boundnotebooks to record their impressions and adventures en route. Theiraccounts – vivid, banal, poignant and unintentionally amusing – survivein their hundreds, testimony to a seismic shift in aesthetics and themagnetic pull of a nascent tourist industry.1 And landscape is not the onlyattraction. Since Gray’s hugely popular poem The Bard (1757), the Welshlanguage, certain key-episodes from Welsh history and Welsh popularcustoms had fascinated antiquarians, artists and poets alike: WilliamMason’s Caractacus (1759) and William Cowper’s Bodicea (1780) both took

578 Beauty spot, blind spot

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/3 (2008): 577–590, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00546.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

up Ancient British themes; druids and bards, could, after all, be co-optedinto a usefully elastic range of political stances. Indeed, as was perhaps thecase with Walter Savage Landor, ‘the idea of Welsh poetry’ may have beena strong enough magnet in itself (Chandler 145). The Ossian debate playedits part too. As Richard Morris wrote to his brother Lewis in 1763,‘Macpherson with his Galic poetry has set all the English antiquariansagog after the Welsh, in hopes to find something equal to it’ ( J. H. Davies2:537); or, as William Morris put it to Richard, ‘they are all Briton mad’(2:511).2

Almost all the canonical Romantics make it over the border, most ofthem on foot. Wordsworth’s 1791 moonlit ascent of Snowdon, describedin the final book of The Prelude, is infused with bardic visions of liberty;Coleridge, travelling with Joseph Hucks in 1794, found himself caught in‘hailstorms of vociferation’ during a political brawl in a tavern in Bala(Collected Letters 1:92).3 The teenage De Quincey, escaping ManchesterGrammar School for a liberating spell of ‘vagabondage’, discovered con-genial company amongst a young family of Calvinistic Methodists on theLleyn Peninsula. In the years 1812–13 the Shelleys did more than merelytour, making two attempts to settle in Wales, first in the Elan Valley(where initial plans for a radical commune failed for lack of funds) andthen in the progressive new model town of Tremadog in Caernarfonshire(where local tensions, somewhat dramatically, forced them out after a fewmonths). Wales as a place of social possibility and a refuge for radicalismwas an early putative destination for the Pantisocratists, all of whom helda particular affection for the Wye valley. Robert Southey very nearlysettled with his family in Glamorgan. He had in any case long sincesuccumbed to ‘Madoc-fever’, working for many years on a historical epicof the great, if not, alas, entirely bona-fide, eleventh-century prince ofGwynedd whose discovery of America had apparently left a tribe ofWelsh-speaking Indians waiting to be rediscovered somewhere in thehigher reaches of the Missouri. (Literary bluestockings Hannah More andHarriet Bowdler were also keen followers of the Madoc story.) ThomasPeacock, whose wife Jane Gryffydh was a Welsh speaker, energeticallymined Welsh antiquarian sources for their potential as contemporary satire.4

Wales as a place, and as an idea, is thus hardly invisible in the variousliterary productions of English writers during the Romantic period. Andwithin Wales itself there are all the signs of a full-blown Romantic revival– itself partly a positive reaction to ‘outside’ interest, partly a moredefensive reaction to the scholarly scepticism that blighted research intothe Celtic-speaking cultures in the wake of the Ossian debate. As in therest of Britain, the decade 1790–1800 saw an explosion in print (moretexts were published in Wales during this period than in the previous ninedecades put together); there was a definite revival of interest in the earlypast, in medieval manuscripts, and in the notion of cultural, even national,history. Literary societies, such as the London-based Cymmrodorion and


Beauty spot, blind spot 579

Gwyneddigion, encouraged writers to reinvigorate old forms: the medievalliterary sessions, the eisteddfodau, were revived, with prizes for strict-metrepoems on set topics.

Extravagantly ‘Welsh’ characters made their presences felt in Bristol,Bath, London and beyond. The Glamorgan stonemason Iolo Morganwg(Edward Williams, 1747–1826) tested his own peculiar brand of druido-bardism in the polite salons of Bath and Bristol before taking it to theradical dissenting circles of London. He penned the celebratory poemdeclaimed at the Crown and Anchor on the acquittal of Hardy, Tooke andThelwall in the Treason Trials of 1794. The London-based lexicographerWilliam Owen Pughe acted as a hub of information on Welsh matters(much of it, passed on by Iolo, of dubious provenance) for the likes ofWalter Scott and William Godwin. He went on to become a member of theinner sanctum of the prophetess Joanna Southcott, and also commissionedWilliam Blake’s ambitious lost picture ‘The Ancient Britons’, which wasbased on an ancient Welsh triad (see Carr). The philosopher David Williamsfounded a (short-lived) Deist chapel in Margaret Street, London, acted asadvisor to the Girondist National Convention in revolutionary Franceand, in 1790, set up the Literary Fund for indigent authors – amongstwhose many beneficiaries, besides Iolo Morganwg, was the young andnewly married Coleridge (see D. W. Davies, Presences).

During the first decades of the nineteenth century the Welsh economymetamorphosed on an unprecedented scale. South Welsh coal and ironworks formed the largest furnace in Europe, bringing profound social andlinguistic upheaval in their wake: it is no accident that during the secondgeneration of the cultural revival the focus, and the resources, shifted fromthe London societies to a group of gentry closely bound up with theseburgeoning industries. Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover, who revived the‘traditional’ Welsh costume and, through the Cymreigyddion Society,worked tirelessly to promote Welsh language, music and crafts, wasmarried to the M.P. Benjamin Hall, whose father had taken over theRhymney iron works. Lady Charlotte Guest, translator of the medievalWelsh tales known as The Mabinogion and active member of the Cymrei-gyddion, was married to the progressive industrialist Josiah John Guest,who, by 1840, had made the iron works at Dowlais the largest in theworld. The second phase of the retrieval and revival of a distinctivelyWelsh past took place in the context of a deeply unsettling modernity:landscape and language were being rapidly, and irrevocably, altered (Herbertand Jones; Morgan, ‘From Death to a View’).

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are, for Wales, acrucial period of self-invention and self-definition. This process was partlya reaction to, but perhaps more often an ambiguous collusion with, externalperceptions of the country and its people. The results, inevitably, are notculturally monolithic and are frequently riddled with contradictions. Thisis a period when those who saw themselves as the last true remnants of



the Ancient Britons embraced a more modern Britishness; when, in mattersof politics, war and religion, different regions and different classes withinWales might pull either with or against the metropolitan English centre.And yet, while it cut less of a figure on the political stage than Scotland,and was less menacingly alien than Ireland, Wales as a distinct culturalentity created from a bundle of clichés, perceptions and experiences wasnevertheless thoroughly woven into the broader fabric of the BritishRomantic imagination (Constantine, ‘Viewing Most Things’).

It is curious, and disheartening, to discover how little of all this isremembered or even acknowledged in modern studies of so-called ‘British’Romanticism. The caustic comments of the Welsh historian Gwyn A.Williams cited at the start of this article remain pertinent, and this despitethe welcome advent of ‘four nations’ or ‘archipelagic’ criticism, with itsaim of devolving the study of historical and literary texts and sources tothe regions. Reflecting and responding to actual political changes on theground, critics have over many years now developed the tools to view thecomplexities of British history and culture from more nuanced culturalperspectives. The process, if recent work is anything to go by, is gainingin both subtlety and momentum (see, for example, L. Davies, Duncan andSorensen; Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism).5 Yet, as Damian WalfordDavies and Lynda Pratt have recently remarked, there has been anoverwhelming focus on exploring the clashes and alignments withinEnglish, Scottish and Irish Romanticisms: Wales has remained the poorrelation, overlooked and elided, all too often subsumed in the phrase‘England and Wales’ (Wales and the Romantic Imagination 3). Even post-colonial readings of England’s relations with her Celtic neighbours tendto assume that because the Acts of Union came early (1536–43), eighteenth-century Wales had been unproblematically absorbed into a greaterEnglish/British identity (for a range of views see Aaron and Williams).Literary studies show little awareness of the Welsh canon, while knowledgeof the Welsh language, which remained the first (and indeed the only)language for the majority of the population in Wales until the end of thenineteenth century,6 is appalling, with even sympathetic readings marredby simple errors and spelling mistakes: no one now expects academichistorians and literary critics to be gifted multilinguists, but translators arenot that hard to come by, and it is difficult to imagine a decent copyeditor letting such things slip through in Russian, Spanish or Arabic.7

As the study of Romanticism has unwoven its rainbow it is, of course,all too easy for those bathed in a single monochrome ray to complain thateveryone else is colour-blind, but the neglect of Welsh sources really doesamount to a collective problem of perception. A few recent examples willsuffice. The currently fashionable topic of literary forgery has pulled intoits orbit all manner of impositions, frauds and fakes, from dubiouslysourced ‘translations’, to imagined histories, mysterious alphabets andimprobable disguises (Groom, ‘Romanticism and Forgery’). This, one might



have thought, should be prime territory for Edward Williams, aka IoloMorganwg, ‘last’ of the Welsh bards, whose dozen forged poems in thevoice of the fourteenth-century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym went undetectedfor over a century, who painstakingly transcribed reams of preciousmedieval documents, interpolating as he saw fit to ensure that Wales, andhis native Glamorgan, had their glorious due, whose Alphabet of theBards (c. 1792) is placed reverently alongside the Etruscan in scholarlytomes of the period; whose bardic triads, coined in their dozens,delighted Continental philosophers and gave Karl Marx a brief glimpseof an early Celtic proto-Communist utopia.8 But apparently not. In fiverecent monograph studies of Romantic period literary forgery, only onegives him as much as a page, another has two separate sentences and onereference (in three different parts of the book) and two do not mentionhim at all. Nick Groom’s otherwise brilliant round-up of the field in arecent edition of Literature Compass (‘Romanticism and Forgery’) maintainsthis icy and inexplicable silence. ‘Our literature is not despicable’,wrote Iolo in 1800, ‘but . . . it never experienced the minutest degree ofencouragement, and we now put the question: in what and how have webeen unworthy of it?’9

Another current critical preoccupation is the development of nationaland cultural identities based on the rediscovery and reinterpretation ofvernacular medieval sources. Again, Wales has plenty to offer in this field,but critics have not always exploited it. Katie Trumpener’s genuinelystimulating study of ‘Bardic’ nationalism in the Romantic-period novelwavers uneasily from the outset, with the book’s first sentence announcinga study of ‘England, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain’s overseas coloniesduring the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’; Wales quietlytags along in the third paragraph, and is given some prominence in theopening pages, but is otherwise seriously neglected.10 Recent work byAndrew Davies shows that Wales and Welsh themes were present inRomantic-period novels from both sides of the border; many can beshown to reflect a preoccupation with ‘Britishness’, and hoary-hairedbards are, as one might expect, thick underfoot (‘Reputed Nation’;‘Redirecting the Attention’).11

Or one might consider the increasingly varied range of work on theimpact of the French Revolution, recently reviewed by M. O. Grenby forLiterature Compass. As critical attention has shifted from a handful of majorpoets to the non-canonical ‘edges’ we can now see how the works ofwomen writers, self-educated writers, radical pamphleteers, prophets,loyalist propagandists and writers of children’s literature, both shaped andwere shaped by the language and ideas of the period. But attention tospecifically regional responses remains sketchy. A quick trawl throughrelevant publications with the word ‘Britain’ in the title shows up theinevitable gaps. Clive Emsley’s lively and attractive book for students,Britain and the French Revolution does not mention Wales; Jennifer Mori’s



Britain in the Age of the French Revolution, 1785–1820 is brief on Welshradicalism and notes ‘almost nothing is known of Welsh loyalism duringthe 1790s and 1800s’ (84). Which rather begs the question, not knownby whom? Sources for the study of Welsh loyalism in this period mightinclude the Welsh-language printed ballads with their sentimentalaccounts of the treatment of Louis and Marie-Antoinette, the mob burningof Tom Paine in effigy in Cardiff in 1792 – or, more ambiguously, alengthy Welsh ode to Liberty culminating in effusive praise for Britain andKing George, which won the prize at the 1790 eisteddfod. StuartAndrews’s analysis of The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution1789–99 at least makes clear from the outset that its focus is on the largeand mostly metropolitan periodicals and ‘does not include the provincialpress, whose reporting of national events usually relied on the reprintingof accounts from the London newspapers’ (x). Yet it would surely beworth mentioning in passing that this is demonstrably not true of theWelsh-language periodicals, three of which were set up in the 1790s withthe explicit intention of informing and encouraging political debateamongst an emergent artisan and middling class readership.12 Their mixof religious and political exhortation, of strict-metre poetry and translationfrom a variety of sources, both English and French, makes them qualita-tively different from other ‘provincial’ publications of the time.

In general, then, many historical and literary studies of ‘Britishness’ forthe Romantic period are still marred by a poor knowledge of Welsharchives. The reasons for this are complicated. Any work of scholarshipwritten in Welsh automatically has a cloak of invisibility thrown over it;intellectual curiosity, it seems, is rarely piqued to the point of arrangingtranslations. There have, however, over the years been stimulating accountsin English which could have directed researchers to relevant primarymaterial. Early studies include W. J. Hughes, Wales and the Welsh inEnglish Literature (1924) and Edward. D. Snyder, The Celtic Revival inEnglish Literature 1760–1800 (1923); David Davies explored the FrenchRevolution question as early as 1926. Arthur Johnston’s Enchanted Ground:The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (1964) furtherdiscussed the impact of the ‘Celtic’ revival on leading eighteenth-centuryscholars, and Aneirin Lewis provided valuable primary material on thissubject in his edition of The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Evan Evans(1957). In the 1970s and 1980s two Welsh historians, Gwyn Alf Williamsand Prys Morgan, produced excellent survey chapters and book-lengthstudies of crucial aspects of the Welsh Romantic revival: Williams isperhaps best known for his work on British radicalism, but several of hisworks explore the Welsh-American dimension, including a lively accountof the uses and abuses of the Madoc myth over the centuries (Artisans andSans-Culottes; Madoc; ‘Druids and Democrats’; ‘Romanticism in Wales’).Morgan has written on cultural networks in London and Wales, and onthe subsequent development of Welsh nationalism into the nineteenth



century (Eighteenth Century Renaissance; ‘From Death to a View’). It is alsonot widely realized that, despite the overwhelming use of spoken Welshfor this period, many primary written sources are in fact in English: withno native higher education system in place until the early twentiethcentury, the Welsh intelligentsia, many of them educated at Oxford orCambridge or living in London, used English for the written word inscholarly notes, poems, private journals and personal correspondence.While there is always a danger that researchers using such material maynot understand its social and linguistic context – as in Roman Britainor ‘British’ India the use of an official language can mask a complexbi-cultural allegiance – it seems more of a pity to neglect it altogether.There is unquestionably a need for a wider awareness of what Welshsources are available to someone researching, say, religious controversy, orthe development of folk-lore, or gender, or nature poetry, or the poetryof social protest in Romantic-period Britain.

It may be helpful here to note that the vast bulk of materials (manuscriptsand printed texts, prints and pictures) are held at the National Library ofWales, Aberystwyth, whose catalogues are increasingly searchable elec-tronically.13 Another useful on-line resource is Archives Network Wales,which gives detailed information about collections held by Welsh libraries,universities and public record offices.14 Welsh, English and Historydepartments throughout Wales have specialists not only in the period, butmedievalists with knowledge of the texts and characters which inspired somuch Romantic production, from poet laureate William Whitehead’s TheBattle of Argoed Llwyfain (1784) to Thomas Chatterton’s Hirlas poems,Peacock’s drunken gatekeeper Seithennin or the ubiquitous figure of Taliesin.Long-term research projects have been publishing editions of Welsh textswith scholarly apparatus and studies of the changing social and linguisticcontext.15 Translation services for academic articles are available throughuniversities or with private companies. Much could still be done: assuggested by one of the gaps explored above, a current requirement isa series of edited texts and translations with critical introductions fromthe period 1790–1815 to enable a clearer mapping of Welsh responses tothe French Revolution crisis. One can only hope that if the raw materialof research is made to seem less esoteric – if, above all, it is made moreaccessible – the Welsh contribution to the culture of Romantic-periodBritain will cease to be a subject of ‘absolute indifference’, and come tobe included in discussions as a matter of course.16

The work has, of course, already begun. A growing body of criticismis now explicitly devoted to exploring the Welsh presence in BritishRomanticism. In Presences that Disturb (2002), Damian Walford Daviesargues that, far from being suppressed or erased, political allusion inhabitsmany classic Romantic texts; these allusions are not just intertextual, butlink people, events and conversations in literary and social networks,whose major nodes are the ‘virtual’ space of publications, like the Monthly



Magazine or the Lyrical Ballads, as well as real places, like Johnson’sbookshop in London. Many of these connections can be traced to Wales:the Wye Valley, most famously the setting for ‘Tintern Abbey’, is, Daviesclaims, much more than a Mecca for devotees of the picturesque; itshistory, both legendary and recent, is full of Wordsworthian ‘presencesthat disturb’. Exploring the often unnoticed influence of figures such asDavid Williams, Iolo Morganwg and John Thelwall, Davies developsthe notion of a ‘political picturesque’, by which Wales itself, through itslandscape and its troubled past, becomes a kind of second self to France.Published shortly after, Richard Gravil’s Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation (2003)also takes seriously the idea that Welsh culture and Welsh authors playeda part in the construction of the figure of the Romantic poet. Words-worth’s lifelong interest in bards and druids is seen as an integral, albeitchangeable, part of his understanding of the function and power of thepoet. Gravil’s depiction of the antiquarian context, and especially theinformation available to Wordsworth on the close links between earlyWelsh poetry and the ‘Old North’, which included Cumbria, is especiallyenlightening.

Gerard Carruthers’s and Alan Rawes’s jointly edited English Romanticismand the Celtic World (2003) sets out to ‘explore the way in which BritishRomantic writers responded to the national and cultural identities of the“four nations”: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales’. It has a relativelyhigh proportion of Welsh-themed contributions, taking in topics such asSir William Jones and the Celtic revival, Robert Southey’s Welsh connections,Wordsworth’s response to the landscape of North Wales and the use madeby Felicia Hemans of the figure of the Ancient British Bard. Considerableattention is paid in the introduction to the complex dialectic of Welshrelations with England, whereby, as with facing mirrors, images and clichésdefining Welsh cultural identity bounce back and forth in a rather Alice-in-Wonderland set of appropriations and reappropriations:

England reconstructs Wales as a colony, Wales responds by reconstructingEngland as a tyrant and defines itself against that reconstruction, only to findits self-definition reappropriated into England’s reconstruction of itself as thecentre of Britain and an expanding empire. (18)

In practice, Welsh writing of the period tends to be even more tangledin its affiliations, as is amply demonstrated by the protean Iolo Morganwg,who slips from indignant Welsh nationalist to defender of British interestsabroad as different moods and opportunities prevail. The recent completionof a five-year project on the vast archive of this ‘one-man romanticism’should open up a great deal of new material – letters, essays, poems, evenmarginalia – to more minutely focused cultural analyses of this type.17

Another new and highly significant contribution to the field is thevolume jointly edited by Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt onWales and the Romantic Imagination (2007), many of whose contributors



have been cited throughout this article. In their introduction the editorswrite of the ‘elision’ of Wales from general critical consciousness and ofthe need to promote a devolved and more ‘culturally nuanced’ Romanticism.The twelve essays in the volume present a stimulating mix of informationand theory: De Quincey’s carefully mapped itinerary of Wales is alsomapped, more provocatively, onto the narrative of the ongoing MethodistControversy; the publisher Joseph Johnson’s list of Welsh authors isexplored in the light of his sympathy for ‘marginalized, oppositionalvoices’ (D. W. Davies, ‘ “Sweet Sylvan Routes” ’; Braithwaite). Among manytantalizing juxtapositions and connections are a brief but enlighteningcomparison between the Fishguard Invasion of 1797 and French involve-ment in the Irish uprising the following year, and a portrait of RobertSouthey which plays his Lake-poet identity against a theoretical, butalmost realized, alternative Welsh life (Shanahan; Pratt, ‘Southey in Wales’).Subtle interactions of class and culture are teased out as Iolo Morganwgmeets Hannah More in Bath, and Robert Bloomfield, reverently ifsomewhat gingerly, negotiates the ascent of the Sugarloaf in the politecompany of a party which included a lady patron (Constantine, ‘ “Subjectof Conversation” ’; Goodridge).

All, it must be said, is not rapt enthusiasm: the book also confronts thenegative, from Walter Savage Landor’s disillusion with ‘the churlish nation’and the ‘reptile race’, to the Shelleys’ unsettling experience in Tremadog(Chandler; Duffy). There is even an exploration of a curious blank: JaneMoore’s account of the social reformer Robert Owen shows how Englishsatirists, who found plenty to keep them busy over the four decades thathe spent in the public eye, consistently ‘neutralized’ his Welshness simplyby ignoring it. For Moore,

the elision of Owen’s Welshness by English satirists can be interpreted as partof a broader cultural blindness in the Romantic period to the impact of theEnlightenment in Wales, and . . . this blindness in turn allows us to thinkthrough the problem of the invisibility as well as the visibility of certain kindsof Welshness in Romantic period writing. (244)

In other words, the contemporary reports from Romantic Wales werealready themselves full of holes: how much more is then erased from thepicture by our own neglect of what has survived?

Conclusion

It is easy to overestimate the importance of one’s own area of research; itis easy for indignation to sound shrill. I do, however, think that it ispossible to demonstrate a genuine blind-spot in Romantic-period studiesof ‘British’ literature. Wales, it seems, has suffered from a chronic in-betweenness, being either too exotic (an unfamiliar language and a literaturewhich rarely appears on any English syllabus) or not exotic enough (politically



subsumed, and – language apart – not as challengingly ‘other’ as theScottish Highlands or Ireland). The Romantic period itself risks dis-appearing into a gap between the medieval/early modern period whenvirtually all texts, print and manuscript, were produced in Welsh, andcontemporary literature, of which Welsh-language texts now form aminority. It is true that, unlike the medievalists, researchers in the Romanticperiod do not need to spend years mastering the art of cynghanedd and thepositioning of the infixed preverbal particle: many of their sources arewritten in the English of Oxford and Cambridge, or, with a sprinkling ofWelsh words, in the lively demotic of the London expatriates. Yet theymust continually keep in mind how overwhelmingly Welsh-speaking thetowns and villages of 1790s Wales still were, and how difficult of access,and of comprehension, such communities could be for the bolder of thosecurious travellers, phrasebooks and good intentions notwithstanding.The Welsh intelligentsia, often Anglicized on paper, carried a doubleinheritance, with parallel literary traditions, parallel points of reference:if we are to gain a real understanding of the nature of ‘British’ Romanticismwe need to keep hold of these dual identities. It would be good, too, toreach a point where Welsh sources are not only mined for use in volumesexplicitly devoted to studies of Welshness or regionalism, or co-opted astokens by those feeling guilty about ignoring the Celtic fringe. Theyshould be explored because they are genuinely interesting, because theirdifferences, or their similarities, shed light on broader questions. WhenWelsh-produced texts in either language – sermons, poems, ballads, novels,advertisements, private letters – begin to appear naturally in the course ofwider discussions, then the study of British Romanticism will have takenan important step forward.

Short Biography

Mary-Ann Constantine took her first degree in English Literature at ClareCollege, Cambridge, where she also completed a Ph.D. in Breton oralliterature. From 1995 she held a succession of Research Fellowships in theWelsh Department, University of Aberystwyth. During this period shetaught various topics in Welsh and Celtic Studies, and published BretonBallads (1996). She joined the University of Wales Centre for AdvancedWelsh and Celtic Studies as leader of a project on the Welsh radicalstonemason and literary forger Iolo Morganwg in March 2002. She wasmade Senior Research Fellow in 2007. Constantine’s main interest is inthe literature and the literary lives of the Romantic period, and especiallyin the interactions between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms, and betweenoral and written sources. Her work in the past has looked at the transfor-mation of folk material, such as the oral ballads of Brittany, by collectorsand editors for a literate (and Romantic) public. The vexed issues ofauthenticity and ownership, and the weight attached to such ‘national’



traditions, are also central to her work on Iolo Morganwg and Welshcultural identity. Her most recent book, The Truth against the World: IoloMorganwg and Romantic Forgery (2007) is a detailed comparison of Iolowith other supposed literary ‘forgers’ of the period, James Macpherson,Thomas Chatterton and the Breton Hersart de La Villemarqué.

Notes

* Correspondences address: Mary-Ann Constantine, University of Wales Centre for AdvancedWelsh and Celtic Studies, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth SY23 3HH, UK. Email:[email protected].

1 See Peter Howell Williams. The list of walkers’ gear comes from a ‘Sketch of a pedestrianTour thro’ parts of North and South Wales &c. begun Sepr 3rd 1798, by D.N., D.J. J., and R.P.’(National Library of Wales: NLW MS 4419B); the gentlemen in question hailed from Bolton.2 See Constantine, ‘Ossian in Wales’.3 For Wordsworth in North Wales see Watson; see also, more generally, Wright.4 Most of these cameos derive from chapters in D. W. Davies and Pratt, Wales and the RomanticImagination, discussed in detail below. 5 For earlier ‘four nations’ studies see, e.g., Kearney; Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain; CelticIdentity. Much of the historical criticism is a response to the thesis of Protestant unity presentedby Colley. Nicholas Roe’s forthcoming edited volume on Romantic Writers and the West Countryfurther extends the concept of distinctive regional identities.6 At the time of the 1801 census ‘nine of every ten of the population spoke Welsh and sevenof every ten were monoglot’, Jenkins, Language and Community 2; see also Welsh Language beforethe Industrial Revolution.7 Examples include Trumpener 295 n. 20; Groom, Making of Percy’s ‘Reliques’ 71–2; several‘grotesque’ misspellings of Iolo Morganwg’s name are noted by Jenkins, ‘On the Trail’ 4–5.8 Jenkins, Rattleskull Genius offers a wide collection of essays; the three-volume Correspondenceof Iolo Morganwg is another valuable resource. The most detailed biography is still G. J. Williams’sWelsh-language Iolo Morganwg, but Morgan’s Iolo Morganwg is an excellent short account inEnglish. For Iolo and Romantic forgery see Constantine, Truth Against the World; Phillips; G.Lewis.9 National Library of Wales MS 13104B, 120, from a draft of the introduction to the collectionof medieval texts known as The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (London, 1801–07).10 See Prescott’s response to Trumpener’s reading of the poet Evan Evans in ‘Gray’s Pale Spectre’.11 See also Shanahan; Prescott’s forthcoming Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales exploressimilar concerns in the poetry of the period.12 These were Y Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg (1793–94); The Miscellaneous Repository/Y DrysorfaGymmysgedig (1795–96) and Y Geirgrawn, neu, Drysorfa Gwybodaeth (1796).13 See <http://www.llgc.org.uk>, accessed December 21, 2007.14 See <http://www.archivesnetworkwales.info>, accessed December 21, 2007.15 See, for example, the ‘History of the Language Project’ and the ‘Iolo Morganwg Project’ atthe Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies <http://www.wales.ac.uk/cawcs>, accessedDecember 21, 2007.16 ‘We trust that, however hostile the politics of this country [i.e. England] were once towardsour language, they have so far ceased to be so, as to become absolutely indifferent about thematter’, Iolo Morganwg, Myvyrian Archaiology 1:x.17 A major aim of this project has been to make a great deal of previously unpublished materialavailable to non-Welsh speakers, and to provide a secure critical context for the interpretationof some of the more famously ‘dubious’ material. See Jenkins, Rattleskull Genius; Jenkins, Jonesand Jones, Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg; Constantine, Truth against the World; Charnell-White;Löffler. Details of further articles and pamphlets, and of two more forthcoming monographs,one on Iolo’s Unitarian hymns and one on his marginalia, can be found at <http://www.iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk>, accessed December 21, 2007.

http://www.llgc.org.uk

http://www.archivesnetworkwales.info

http://www.wales.ac.uk/cawcs

http://www.iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk



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