Welsh Journals

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SOUTH WALES AND MONMOUTHSHIRE NEWSPAPERS UNDER THE STAMP ACTS IN Wales, as in Britain as a whole, the growth of the newspaper press is a striking indication of the unprecedented political tensions of the early nineteenth century. In part reflecting, in part helping to create, a mood of radical reform, the press played a crucial role in undermining that political inertia that had characterized eighteenth- century Wales. Amid the social dislocation caused by the dramatic expansion of industry and the ideological ferment surrounding the outbreak of revolution in France, it helped to develop among an increasingly literate working population a new radical opinion on a nation-wide scale. More, it served to render articulate that emerging sense of national self-awareness that came to dominate the cultural and later the political life of Wales as the nineteenth century progressed. As the Baineses and the Mialls served as the prophets of the self-consciousness of provincial England, so the editors and publishers of nineteenth-century Wales, like their counterparts in Ireland, proved most effective instruments in the development of a national opinion, and figure prominently in the folk-lore of the Welsh radical tradition. In South Wales, in particular, where the impact of industrialization became increasingly marked after 1800, the influence of newspapers was especially significant: despite all legal impediments, they extended to a wider and wider reading public. Between 1804, when the Cambrian, Wales's first newspaper, appeared, and 1855, when the newspaper stamp duty was repealed, forty publications were issued in the counties of Brecon, Glamorgan, Carmarthen, Pembroke, Cardigan, and Monmouth. They are named here in chronological order of their first appearance. Title and place of Date of first Date of last publication. issue. Lang. issue if by 1855. Cambrian (Swansea) 28 Jan. 1804 E. Weekly. Carmarthen Journal 3 Mar. 1810 E. Weekly. (Carmarthen) Seren Gomer (Swansea) 1 Jan. 1814 W. 9 Aug. 1815 Weekly. Newport Review 19 Aug. 1822 E. 20 Nov. 1822 Unstamped. (Newport) Irregularly. Cardiff Reporter 9 Sept. 1822 E. 14 Oct. 1822 U. Irregularly. (Cardiff) Cardiff Recorder 1825, n.d. E. 1825, n.d. U. Irregularly. (Cardiff)