Welsh Journals

likeable character. He attacked fox-hunting and supported vote by ballot, and was even fond of his children, a rare attribute amongst the Iron Kings. His keen business sense also made him fearful of the coming crisis in the iron industry. Robert Thompson, the second occupant of the castle, was prepared to ignore his father's warnings and carry on the Cyfarthfa works, a fact which possibly accounted for the stubborn lock-out of trade unionists there between 1875 and 1879. Deaf and prematurely old, this ironmaster sought solace in his photography and his concubines. After his death, his eldest son, William, reopened the ironworks and converted them to steel, but this experiment was not successful. In 1889 he and his wife Flora moved to Caversham Park, near Reading, and their castle was sold to Merthyr Tydfil Corporation twenty years later for JE 18,000. The mock-Gothic castle with its 365 windows and seventy-two draughty rooms is the setting for Miss Taylor's romantic story. Rose Mary Crawshay, the wife of Robert and a woman of surprising independence, entertained at Cyfarthfa such famous people as Darwin, Emerson and Robert Browning. Flora, the wife of William II, was more mundane; her choice of guests depended on their skill with cards. For some members of the Crawshay household the castle resembled a prison. Harriette ('Trotty'), the elder daughter of Robert, who was controlled by her father's whistle, found life 'hard — cruelly hard'. Miss Taylor makes extensive use of Trotty's diary to illustrate her battle against this tyranny. Unfortunately, we are given only brief glimpses of the black sheep of the family, such as Richard Crawshay II, who went up in a balloon, or Francis, who preferred his pleasures on the ground. The latter spoke the language of the workmen, the only Crawshay ever to do so. The others left Wales whenever possible, and for years showed little interest in local affairs. Many of them were victims of the family motto, PERSEVERENCE: it produced a line of 'kings' but deprived them of humanity. In that sense, J. P. Addis's book, The Crawshay Dynasty (1957), is a more fitting tribute than this latest work. D. J. V. JONES Swansea DISRAELI. By Robert Blake. Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966. Pp. xxiv, 819. 90s. The Victorians liked their political biographies in several volumes and solemn in tone. The inevitable reaction was the 'debunking' biography of the Lytton Strachey school. Now, eighty-five years after Benjamin Disraeli's death, it is possible for an historian of the calibre of Robert