Welsh Journals

between the teaching of the works school and a career ladder within the works in most areas, this could be a reasonable order of priorities. Keeping the child at school much after the age of ten only meant sending him into the works or down the mine later rather than sooner, and a loss of earnings which could never be made up. At the same time, fluency in reading and speaking could be maintained and cultivated in the Sunday school; while status in the chapel community need have little to do with the works hierarchy. In his brief and scattered comments on the attitudes of parents-and children-Dr. Wynne Evans does not consider the possibility of such a calculation, let alone its rationality; thus again he has been unable to take his analysis very far. GILLIAN SUTHERLAND Newnham College, Cambridge. RADICAL ADVENTURER. THE DIARIES OF ROBERT MORRIS, 1772-74. Edited, with an introduction, by J. E. Ross. Pp. 213. Adams and Dart, Somerset, 1971. £ 3.75. Robert Morris is not a familiar figure on the eighteenth-century scene. Even in Swansea, his birthplace, he is probably less well-known than his industrialist brother, Sir John Morris of Clasemont, or his brother-in-law, Edward King, who built Marino. Morris was educated for the legal profession, and from 1767 pleaded in the south Wales great sessions. But it was in London that he really made his mark-first by successfully defending Lord Baltimore on a charge of rape (as a consequence of which he was made a trustee of Baltimore's will and guardian of his illegitimate daughter, Fanny Harford), next by his involvement in Wilkite politics, and then, a year after Baltimore's death in 1771, by eloping to the continent with his ward, just twelve years old and a considerable heiress. For the next two years Morris kept a journal. And it is this manuscript (now in the library of the University College of Swansea) that Miss J. E. Ross has edited, prefacing it with an account of Morris's life. The book will be of interest to many students of the period. Not only does it let in the light on one of the more shadowy of Wilkes's supporters; but it also provides something much harder to come by-a series of vivid and widely varied glimpses of late-eighteenth-century life, particularly at its lower levels, from the pen of an observer who was anything but a con- ventional tourist. The first third of the journal covers the period of Morris's short-lived marriage with Fanny. But the later parts are the more interesting-a tour from Geneva, taking in Turin, Genoa and Provence, then a journey via Paris (where he and his 'fickle ingrate' parted company) to north-eastern France and the Netherlands, and finally through London to the north of England and lowland Scotland. His reactions throughout are lively, terse and observant, written down while impressions were still fresh, and conveying as vigorous a picture of Morris himself as of the men and places he encountered. Defiant and quarrelsome, restlessly energetic, he was interested in almost everything: the scenery of the countryside as much as town buildings, conditions of work, prices, social customs, even