Welsh Journals

in one sense is tremblingly alive in another. Life flows on undetected all around the photograph.3 And just as we must be aware of the many abstractions from reality involved in the use of photographic material, so we should try to perform the paramount historical task of dealing with it chronologically. These two volumes are a running commentary on social change. They remind us that progress did not come so readily to all: the black-bonneted women on backless benches shelling peas in CoventVrarden, the women kneeling in sack-cloth aprons to hoe sugar beet were working in inter-war Britain, but they have the same wretched appearance as the women morax workers of Anglesey in the 1890s. Underpaid and underfed, the female poor continued to subsidise agricultural industries. Even this, though, was an improvement on what the most devastating photograph in either book reveals-one of women hauliers at Abergorky Colliery in the Rhondda in 1880. They stand in the shadow of wooden winding-gear, grouped around a coal-laden tram, looking blackened, squat, shod in hob-nailed boots, draped in heavy shawls and dresses, their mouths thin, chalk-white slashes across their faces, almost like a sub-species, a sullen line of inverted coal-scuttles. They inspire pity, dread and anger. The camera confirms that impartiality is not the cardinal historical virtue. DAVID SMITH Swansea. The primary theoretical statement of these views is still Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', reprinted in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (Jonathan Cape, 1970). A popularised latimer is John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972). However, since this review was written, a vitally important breakthrough has occurred with the publication of Michael Lesy's book, Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). It splices together photographs, fiction and newspaper stories from the 1890s, in order to delve into the psychic and social crises that swept small-town America as it reeled into the twentieth century. This radical, innovatory technique is exciting enough to send social historians scurrying to local photographic archives in pursuit of similar revelations. MEDIEVAL WELSH SOCIETY. Selected essays by T. Jones Pierce. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1972. Pp. 452. £ 4.00. Fate has been cruel to Welsh historians. In the space of two years there died two scholars, both at the height of their powers. Glyn Roberts was commemorated in 1969 by a collection of some of his most important papers and now the same tribute has been paid to Thomas Jones Pierce. This volume contains a number of the most significant contributions to the history of medieval Wales made this century; if it was Sir John Lloyd who provided the basic narrative history of the pre-conquest period, it was Jones Pierce who shed new light on the structure of medieval Welsh society and on the fundamental changes which took place in Wales both before and after the fall of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd and who, in doing so, provided a new basis for further investigations.