Welsh Journals

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cent in Aberystwyth district, had an index of attendance of 34.1 per cent in Aberystwyth borough. The explanation of these patterns must await the detailed local study which Professor Jones and the late Professor Williams have done so much to facilitate. ROBERT CURRIE Wadham College, Oxford THE WEALTHIEST COMMONER: C. R. M. TALBOT M.P., F.R.S., 1803-1890. By J. V. Hughes. Published by the author at Port Talbot, 1977. Pp. 36. £ 1.00. This biography of Christopher Talbot, nicely produced with many illustrations, is an opportune publication, because his home at Margam is now open to the public after many years of neglect. Sadly, the palatial Tudor-Gothic house designed for Talbot by Hopper has recently been severely damaged by fire, and the main attractions, the Abbey and the Orangery and the great Park, date from before Talbot's time. The village of Groes, which he designed, has been swept away by the M4, and the extraordinary 'Round Chapel' which he is said to have designed for the Methodists has been rebuilt close by. Even the vast additions to his birth- place, Penrice in Gower, have been demolished. His furniture and vast collections of works of art were dispersed from Margam during the last war. Many industrialists are commemorated in such names as Williams- town and Nixonville, yet none is so well known as Port Talbot. This biography brings out much of the paradox of his long life. He was one of the greatest developers and industrialists of south Wales, yet his estates were agrarian, of medieval origins in Gower, and, in the case of Margam, dating from the Reformation. Despite his vast wealth and gentry origins, he was a Liberal in politics. In his private daily life he was a strange mixture, frugal in habits, cheese-paring and economical, yet he spent a fortune on superb yachts, on building great houses and gardens, and he amassed a huge art collection. Most revealing is a quotation Mr. Hughes gives from H. W. Lucy's parliamentary diary of the late-1880s about Talbot making one of his rare appearances in the House, rather eccentrically dressed, virtually unknown to nearly all the M.P.s, and yet the Father of the House; he had been a Glamorgan M.P. for close on sixty years, the only member then surviving from the pre-Reform House. It is so dangerous to jump to conclusions about the modernity of the Victorian period. PRYS MORGAN Swansea THE ORIGINS OF THE POPULAR PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1855-1914. By Alan J. Lee. Croom Helm, 1976. Pp. 296. £ 9.50. Systematic work on the English press has until recently largely passed by what in retrospect is usually referred to as 'the golden age': the great expansion of the daily newspaper consequent upon the repeal in the mid- nineteenth century of the 'taxes on knowledge'. 'Taxes on knowledge' was