Welsh Journals

On the whole it is a well-balanced addition to the series. The author draws his examples from various parts of the principality, from agri- cultural and industrial conditions of life, and from a variety of sources. Official and public reports are sufficiently represented and there are occasional private accounts. It is a little disappointing that there are so few references to the social activities of the religious bodies and to the role of the Welsh chapel in the life of so many working men in the last century. Document 77(b) outlines some of the cultural activities that were actually adopted by the working classes who supported Nonconformity in the period after the Religious Census of 1851. There are a few printing errors in the Welsh introductions to the docu- ments, but this will not detract from the reader's enjoyment of the material. It will certainly be welcomed in the schools and colleges of Wales. GARETH EVANS Pontardawe. PORTRAIT OF AN AGE. VICTORIAN ENGLAND. By G. M. Young. Annotated Edition by G. Kitson Clark. Oxford University Press, 1977. Pp. 423. £ 16.50. G. M. Young had a complex and rich personality. A hard-headed utilitarian, he was responsive to the humanitarianism of the period he describes. In this essay he pioneered the study of the Victorian founders of the Welfare State. He was also deeply interested in the changing role of women. An honest doubter and a believer in the value of the dis- interested reason, he was a firm admirer of family life and 'tried to hold fast to the historic forms of devotion and compel them to yield what they still promised and once had yielded'. An elitist Tory, as the son of a waterman who became the master of his own steamer, he looked back with a sense of loss to an England of villages and little towns of yeoman-craftsmen and small-scale industries. He deplored the de- population of the countryside and hated the growing power of financiers, together with the 'barbarism' of the New Imperialism at the close of Victoria's reign. An opinionated intellectual, he, nevertheless, had a chameleon-like power of reflecting the different and changing movements of the times, understanding the questions they raised and the answers they sought to give. At the same time, he had a strong visual sense, delighting in the concrete, and he could vividly describe (for example) in a few brief sentences the London of 1834 before the destruction of the old Houses of Parliament. Yet, concern with the tangible never becomes boring for he lived in an age when the recent discoveries connected with relativity caused him to be intensely aware of how differently a person or event appears according to the position occupied in time or place by the viewer. Also, like the impressionist painters, more interested in light and shadow, in mood and nuance, rather than in sharply defined outlines, he abandoned the more traditional, formal construction of his predecessors. This approach was saved from being nebulous by his deep concern for the